Money Makes The Player Go

"Well, it will cost you $100. Understand?"

Sandy put on that wide grin of his. He always grinned at the sound of money. "One hundred dollars," he said. "Good."

"No, it's not good. It means you are fined $100. Do you know what fined means?"

"Fine!" he says. "Hundred dollars! Fine!"

He thought I was going to give him $100. He got an awful shock when the first payday came around.

The toughest part of salary negotiations, at least for me, is guarding the treasury against fringe ballplayers who have been hanging on through sheer hustle or personality. These guys can put you to sleep. They're players you like to see around, players of limited ability who wind up every day wearing the dirtiest uniforms. Guys like Rocky Bridges . I always figured Rocky extended his own career by five years on sheer hustle, and when he came in at salary time I had to keep telling myself what his batting average was. When Rocky played for me at Montreal we had to have his uniform cleaned every day because he worked so hard. Don Zimmer was the same, and Gino Cimoli was another. When those guys came in to talk money I always had to pinch myself to keep from being swept off my feet by the way they rolled their eyes. The thing a general manager always has to remember is that those guys are also full of hustle in the money department, and if you let emotion overcome you the end result is you have to take money away from more talented ballplayers later on just to keep the budget in line.

I have become so accustomed to certain little negotiating tricks the players use that I take them in stride and even turn them to my own advantage. Like the way ballplayers are always playing themselves off on each other. They'll come in and tell me that they happen to know that so-and-so is making such-and-such, and if that so-and-so is worth all that such-and-such, why, then I'm worth such-and-such more. To begin with, they almost always have the figure wrong. I don't know how they manage to come up with the wrong information so often. Don Newcombe comes in one year, off a real good season, and he says he doesn't care to negotiate at all, he simply wants what Sal Maglie is getting for the Giants. I push a contract at him, and he looks at it and he laughs. "Just give me what Sal is getting," Newk says. "You know I'm as good as Sal or better."

Well, it so happened that I knew what Sal was getting—I used to have a drink with him now and then—and it was a lot less than Newcombe thought. So I said, "O.K., Newk, I guess you're right. You call up Sal right now, and whatever he says he's getting you can have, too. All right?"

Newk hemmed and hawed around, and finally he said, "Gimme that contract!" He didn't know it, but he signed for more than Maglie made that year.

We had one stubborn ballplayer who came in after a fair year and, just as though he was in his right mind, he demanded $25,000. I told him to rest up for a day, stay out of the hot sun and come back and see me when he felt a little more rational.