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I have been a fan of the national pastime ever since my late father took me to my first baseball game in 1967, when I was seven years old. Since then, I’ve listened to scores of games on the radio, seen countless games on television and been lucky enough to actually attend hundreds more at fields and stadiums across the country. The sport has been a constant in my life for most of the last four decades.
Growing up, I once read that baseball writers, and sports reporters, in general, are usually fans of the games they cover. That’s in marked contrast to other beat reporters. Obituary writers don’t typically hang around funeral parlors, you know. Therefore, because I am, first and foremost, a fan of the game itself, this project was a labor of love for me.
Admittedly, I never really paid much attention to the business side of baseball. These days, of course, it’s pretty hard to ignore that aspect of the sport. So, last June, when I was interviewing the former Chicago Cub, Jimmy Qualls, for a Baseball Digest story that was ultimately published in September 2009, and he casually mentioned that he wasn’t receiving a pension, being the inquisitive type, I asked him why. When he explained the reasons why he wasn’t, I knew I had the makings of a story that had to be told.
With a foreword written by the Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist, Dave Marash, the former ABC News Nightline correspondent who anchored the opening season of Baseball Tonight on ESPN, A Bitter Cup of Coffee tells the story of a group of former big-league ballplayers denied pensions as a result of the failure of both the league and the union to retroactively amend the vesting requirement change that granted instant pension eligibility to ballplayers in 1980. Prior to that year, ballplayers had to have four years service credit to earn an annuity and medical benefits. Since 1980, however, all they have needed is one day of service credit for health insurance and 43 days of service credit for a pension. Talk about a sweetheart deal!
As Dave notes, "Fixing this inadvertent injustice can be done, if both the owners and the players decide to do it. It will cost them marginal money to do so. They say they’ll look at it in their next 2011 (collective bargaining ) negotiation, but they should stop looking and start acting now. A simple side agreement could be executed anytime.
"Turn the replay machine on for this one, boys," continues Dave, "and you’ll see, a mistake has been made, and the fix is obvious: change the call. Do the right thing."
Let me be the first to second Dave's emotion.
