Loyalty Oath

There was a touch of nostalgia this past week up on the Heights at Boston College when the Athletic Director, Gene DeFilippo, fired his successful football coach and old friend, Jeff Jagodzinski, for having the audacity to interview for the head coaching position with the New York/New Jersey Jets. De Filippo had warned Coach Jags not to do it, but gosh darn, he went to the Meadowlands anyway. It brought back memories of the Boy Scout Law, the creed that had young boys swear loyalty: "A scout is true to his family, Scout leaders, friends, school, and nation." Whatever happened to those values we said we would live by? How could Coach Jags have forsworn his loyalty oath simply to test the waters in the swamps of Secaucus, New Jersey?

This is not a situation unique to college football coaches. Each year during free agency season, sports devotees bemoan the demise of player loyalty. How could our great young star leave the cozy and friendly confines of [fill in the blank] just for more money? Doesn't anyone have any team loyalty anymore?

The answer, of course, is no one ever had any loyalty. Players, coaches, general managers, even clubs are ready to move for bucks. In the early years of professional baseball, players would "revolve" from club to club, sometimes during the same season. The reserve system was invented by National League club owners in 1879 to stop this player practice. The owners were not concerned about player loyalty, but about player salaries. Without any competition for a player's services, owners could pay whatever they wished and in this way the owners keep salaries "under control." With the advent of the American League in 1901 and the Cincinnati Peace Agreement of 1903, the universal reserve system bound all players to their clubs for life. Free agency did not arrive until 1975 when Arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the player's contractual option clause covered only a single year. It was not a perpetual promise.
Even when the reserve system ruled, it never bound the owners to keep their players. From time immemorial, which in baseball goes back to the 1880s, club owners have sold players to other clubs for cash and "other considerations," typically other players. Albert Spalding invented the practice and Connie Mack perfected it in the twentieth century, periodically selling his future Hall of Fame players for cash. (Senators owner Clark Griffith even sold his son-in-law, Joe Cronin, to the Red Sox.) But what about loyalty? Apparently, loyalty was never meant to be a two-way street.

Starting in earnest in the 1950s, baseball club owners became free agents themselves, moving their franchises from city to city for "cash considerations." Would Walter O'Malley turn down the offer from Los Angeles just because Brooklyn's beloved baseball team had been part of the borough's life for almost a century? Loyalty does not trump financial opportunity.

This winter as a few top-rated baseball free agents have cashed in, owners have continued to exchange their non-free agents. If the Red Sox need a fine relief pitcher like Ramon Ramirez, then outfielder Coco Crisp would have to relocate to Kansas City. All trades must be approved by the Office of the Commissioner, but no Commissioner to my knowledge has ever refused to sanction a trade because the hometown fans would have been upset to lose one of their favorites and the player wanted to stay with their previous club.

That is what makes the Boston College termination of its football coach so interesting. It would have been easy to insert a provision into Coach Jags' employment contract that said: "In exchange for your $1 million a year, you hereby promise not to interview with any other college or professional club." I would also have included a penalty clause providing for liquidated damages for the violation of that promise: "You will pay Boston College $500,000 for the first violation of this clause, $1 million for the second, etc., and you will also forfeit your reserved parking space on campus." Without these types of provisions, unless some court or arbitrator were to determine that Coach Jags' visit to the Jets was a material breach of his contract, BC is on the line for the remainder of his five-year deal.

Nevertheless, AD De Fillippo has made his point. The Boy Scout Law lives in Newton, Massachusetts. Another part of that Law requires strict obedience: "A Scout follows the rules of his family, school, and troop. He obeys the laws of his community and country. If he thinks these rules and laws are unfair, he tries to have them changed in an orderly manner rather than disobey them." Once again, loyalty has become a treasured value, at least until BC steals someone else's coach to guide its football fortunes.

Comments

[nevernine]

Agreed. It is always money.

The funny thing is today, with baseball, is how athletes will complain when owners won't give them enough money, or won't extend a contract, etc, then site a lack of loyalty on the owners part. This lame argument is regularly supported by ex-players now employed as sportscasters on ESPN and the new MLB channel. Of course, when the player jumps for more money, well, he's doing what's good for his family, blah, blah, blah. Just today I read a post, where Carl Pavano, who the yankees paid 33 million for three years only to have him not play virtually the length of his contract, complain that the Team didn't give him enough support. It gets harder and harder to get behind these guys when you see so many of them have their heads up their rear end--as they cash their enormus checks.

[larry278]

Loyalty, an atavistic concept in the USA; often a synonym for slavery & peonage before 1900.

[mountainweb]

Most excellent post and dead on. Just ask all of the employees that are being laid off so that management can make it appear, for a brief time, that they are still making good decisions and they have "turned the company around". 6 months later they lay off more because they turned the company 360 degrees and they are back in the same spot....