The Moment Everything Changed For Baseball And The Orioles

On April 2, 1976, in the third inning of a spring training game in Florida, manager Earl Weaver pulled leftfielder Don Baylor from the Orioles’ lineup and motioned for him to come sit beside Weaver on the bench.

“I knew something was wrong,” Baylor said later.

Unable even to look at Baylor, who was one of his favorite players, Weaver stared out at the field as he spoke.

“I hate to tell you this,” Weaver said quietly, “but we just traded you to Oakland for Reggie Jackson.”

Tears welled in Baylor’s eyes.

“I looked at Earl, but he wouldn’t look at me,” he said later. “I was stunned. I started to cry right there on the bench. ‘Earl,’ I sobbed, ‘I don’t want to go anywhere.’”

Ken Singleton had begun the game with Baylor in the Orioles’ outfield — he was in right field, as usual, across the green expanse from Baylor in left. After Baylor suddenly disappeared in the early innings, Singleton went and found him in the clubhouse.

“He was sitting in the trainer’s room, crying,” Singleton recalled years later in an interview for my book on Orioles history. “Donnie wasn’t liable to cry about anything, so I asked him what was up and he told me. I felt so bad for him. He’d been with the team for six years.”

Actually, Baylor had been with the organization for nearly a decade. The Orioles had drafted him with a second-round pick in 1967, a testament to his combination of strength and speed, and they’d nurtured him through his development — a painstaking process that, to no one’s surprise, had ended up producing a premier major leaguer. At age 26 in 1975, the year before he was traded, Baylor had batted .282 with 25 home runs, an .849 OPS and 32 stolen bases.

Just entering his prime, he fully expected to be an Oriole for life, or very nearly. And in the baseball world he’d been drafted into nearly a decade earlier, he almost surely would have stayed in Baltimore for most if not all of his career. He was a cornerstone of an Oriole generation that also included Bobby Grich, Al Bumbry, Mark Belanger and Doug DeCinces— players signed and developed by the club. Teams didn’t trade cornerstones.

But baseball was changing.

Months before Baylor was traded, Peter Seitz, an independent arbitrator, had issued a ruling striking down the reserve clause, a provision in individual contracts that effectively bound a player to his team by giving the team the right to renew an expiring contract for another year. That provision effectively prevented players from changing teams — unless the team wanted it. Now, though, after the Seitz ruling, players could let their contracts expire, enter free agency and sign with other teams.

It was still early days in this new world in early 1976, with teams trying to figure out what it all meant and how things would work. The players had agreed to begin the season without a collective bargaining agreement, which would establish new rules and procedures. (The owners and players agreed on a CBA later that year.)

But Charlie Finley, mercurial owner of the Oakland A’s, could see that salaries would skyrocket and wanted no part of it. He set out to dismantle his historic team, which had won back-to-back-to-back World Series from 1972-74 and another division title in 1975.

Jackson, 30, was his best everyday player, a cleanup hitter who’d won a league MVP award and made six All-Star appearances. He was refusing to sign a contract with the A’s for 1976, infuriating Finley. Jackson wanted to become a free agent and cash in. One way or another, he clearly was going to cost a lot.

Hank Peters, who’d just replaced Frank Cashen as the Orioles’ GM and roster architect, was willing to trade for Jackson because he thought — erroneously, it turned out — he could sign Jackson to a longterm contract once Jackson was in Baltimore. That tempting possibility convinced him to give up Baylor.

Several other players were included in the deal — the Orioles gave up pitchers Mike Torrez and Paul Mitchell and received pitcher Ken Holtzman and a pitching prospect named Bill VanBommel — but fundamentally, it was Jackson for Baylor.

The sports world was shocked. The Orioles were getting a star. But Baltimore’s baseball population wasn’t so happy about it. Baylor’s teammates loved him, as did many Oriole fans. Friendly and generous, Baylor had made many friends in Baltimore, in and out of baseball.

Plus, he had Oriole blood in his veins in that fundamental way that premier players were attached to their teams in those days. That’s why he cried when Weaver told him about the trade. He’d never imagined leaving.

Weaver was no less upset.

“Donnie … is going to be a Most Valuable Player,” the manager sputtered when reporters asked for his reaction to the deal.

Reggie Jackson was already an MVP, but he didn’t have Oriole blood in his veins.

The Orioles had traded away dozens of players over the years, but few with Baylor’s profile — homegrown, popular and just emerging as hugely important. Keeping those players was how the Orioles had become one of baseball’s elites. Before the Seitz ruling, a team’s ability to sign and develop talent was the key to winning because the team could hold onto such players forever. After the Seitz ruling, though, a team’s ability to pay for high-end talent became just as important as its ability to develop talent. That wasn’t going to help the Orioles, who performed in a mid-major market with mediocre attendance and average-at-best revenues.

“They just didn’t have the budget,” said Grich, who played alongside Baylor for nearly a decade in the minors and majors starting in 1967, but played out his contract with the Orioles in 1976, entered free agency and departed.

The Jackson-for-Baylor deal didn’t work out especially well for either side.

Jackson delayed reporting to the Orioles, hoping to leverage them into giving him a lucrative, multiyear contract. After that didn’t happen and he finally reported, having missed the first weeks of the season, he performed well, delivering 27 home runs and 91 RBIs while leading the league in slugging percentage. But he became a free agent after the season and signed with the Yankees.

Baylor also only lasted just one year with his new team. Curiously, the A’s wanted him to run more than hit for power, and he finished with a career-high 52 stolen bases. But Finley wasn’t about to pay him, so he became a free agent after the season and signed a multiyear deal with the California Angels.

The Angels, not the Orioles, benefited from Baylor’s full blossoming as a player. In 1978, he hit 34 home runs and scored 103 runs. A year later, he had a massive season with 139 RBIs and 120 runs scored — both league highs – as the Angels won a division title. Fulfilling Weaver’s prediction for him, Baylor was named the league’s MVP.

Although the Orioles defeated the Angels in the American League Championship Series that year, many Oriole fans were still sorry to see Baylor playing for another team. It never felt right. Even Baylor admitted, long after he was gone, that he still considered himself loyal to the Orioles and their way of playing baseball.

It is interesting to contemplate what might’ve happened to Baylor if the Seitz ruling hadn’t occurred when it did. Baylor almost surely would have stayed with the Orioles, and he had many productive years left. Playing until age 39 for the Angels, Yankees, Red Sox and Twins, he bashed 281 of his 338 career home runs.

But contemplating any baseball scenarios without the Seitz ruling is not unlike contemplating a day starting without the sun coming up. It was a transformative moment like few in the sport’s history. With free agency in place, the task of building a roster became an entirely different creature. The elimination of the reserve clause altered the sport profoundly and forever, nowhere more than in Baltimore.

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Ken Singleton
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