Word: seavers
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...keeping score. To Rose, it is just another stat. He is competitive in all things. "How come I'm not in the lineup?" he asks at Manhattan's Stage Delicatessen, looking up from a menu in despair that no sandwich is named for him. "Reggie Jackson ... Tom Seaver... Susan Anton. What kind of year has Susan Anton had?" It has never been the money. "I led the league in hits in 1965," Rose says, "and made $12,500." When Rose became a free agent after the 1978 season and accepted $810,000 from the Phillies, he says...
...second is that of Tom Seaver. Ten years a New York Met, he had been with the team through thick and thin, through two World Series and countless miserable finishes. In 1977, he was traded in mid-season to the Cincinnati Reds. The team unloaded their one superstar for a handful of unknowns because Seaver was demanding a fattened contract. Institutional loyalty was becoming increasingly old-fashioned. The ugly truth was out: Baseball's labor and management were perfectly willing to have money play the major determining factor in the once-pristine sport...
...Seaver is gone--no longer a Met, no longer a sunlit prominence in this flattened city of New York... The feelings we are left with seem much deeper than disappointment or aggrieved sporting loyalty." Roger Angell '42 wrote at the time Angell's is the third bellweather career...
Particularly telling is Angell's explanation of why these executives acted with such vengeance--why personal values, even when jeopardizing long-term economic self-interest were allowed to prevail. M. Donald Grant, general manager of the Mets, when the team lost Seaver, told the 33-year-old ace pitcher that too much money at this age was bad for him. George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees, said when firing manager Gene Michaels, that he felt like "a father scorned." During the strike, Angell explains that "what is going on here...is the same old psychodrama about American fathers...
...season is over, and the net man can go back to studying. After garnering its second straight division title and intimidating the most destructive tennis force in the country. Harvard can only look forward to better things next year as the net men lose only Seaver to graduation. Maybe, in one year people won't be surprised to see a team from Harvard battle a team like UCLA...