Brief Excerpts
from
"All That Once Was Good"
Preface
It's Father's Day, 1964. I'm 10 years old. My family -- Mom, Dad, brother
and myself -- pile into the family car, an Olds '88, for the drive from
Philadelphia to Atlantic
City to visit my grandparents. It's a beautiful drive; colorful roadside
stands hawking birch-beer and hot dogs line the old Black Horse Pike. From
Camden on I have my head stuck out the window trying to smell the first
whiff of ocean air.
A couple hours later, we pull up in front of Grandmom and Grandpop's house.
After greetings and the obligatory socializing, we all take the one-block
walk to the beach, set up chairs, set out towels and turn the transistor
radio to Phillies
baseball. Jim Bunning is on the mound against the Mets. After a couple of
hours splashing in the foamy Atlantic and running through the hot sand,
we head back to my grandparents' house to watch the end of the game on television.
Bunning, through eight innings, hasn't allowed a Met to reach first base.
We all stare expectantly at the small black-and-white screen.
We are still in our bathing suits because no one wants to head for the shower
and risk missing one of the rarest events in all of sports.
We're holding our collective breaths as Mets go down one by one. Finally,
Bunning does it -- a perfect game -- and the Phillies win 6-0. It's the
kind of thing that sticks in a 10-year-old boy's mind forever.
Chapter 1
It is well past 5 o'clock on a Monday afternoon in late August 1994. Despite
the hour, Colorado Rockies
president and CEO Jerry D. McMorris has just started yet another meeting
in his corner office on the twenty-first floor of downtown Denver's Norwest
Bank Building. This session, like far too many others in recent weeks, had
been postponed and rescheduled and postponed and rescheduled -- all so McMorris
could focus his considerable energy on the labor dispute that to date had
erased 16 games from the Rockies' sophomore-season schedule. This was to
have been a year, McMorris solemnly pledged to Denver fans during the previous
spring, that his team would make progress on the field while simultaneously
shattering the all-time attendance record it set during year one. Instead,
it would prove to be a season marked by the most acrimonious labor dispute
in professional sports history.
To meet McMorris' on-field goals, his organization had spent a great deal
of time and money to sign promising free-agent players. To meet his off-field
objectives, it needed to do little more than just sit back and watch as
both full-season admission packages and single-game tickets literally flew
right out the door. In fact, from the day they went on sale in early '94,
totals actually exceeded the unreal levels that the franchise had set the
year before when 4,485,350 adoring fans squeezed through the turnstiles
at Denver's aging Mile High Stadium. From all indications, the Rocky Mountain
region's love affair with its new Major
League Baseball team seemed ready to reach even loftier heights.
And then, on August 12, everything collapsed. Players went out on strike,
owners hunkered down against them, and the business of baseball ground to
an excruciating halt. And, at this very moment, when the Colorado Rockies
should have been taking the field at Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Stadium for
the first of three games against the Pirates, its players were instead scattered
across North and South America. They were at home, instead of at home plate.
Their team -- like the 27 others in one of the most exclusive and envied
clubs in all of modern society -- was embroiled in a labor controversy like
none seen before in the history of professional sports.