Shlain, Bruce

• Baseball Inside Out

  • A short, readable anecdotal history of baseball over the last several decades. Shlain tries to approach various aspects of the game with representative stories, and for the most part, he succeeds. The highlight was anecdote about one of the most annoying Mariner announcers, Ron Fairly:

    • Any prominent general manager worth his membership in this peculiar fraternity developed some creative tricks for holding down player salaries. Buzzie Bavasi, longtime GM for the Dodgers, was right at the head of the class. "One year," recalled Bavasi, "I had signed Tommy Davis to a contract for $50,000. Ron Fairly was coming in to negotiate his contract, and I knew he was going to ask for far more than I felt he was worth. So I had a dummy contract drawn up. It showed that Tommy Davis would be paid $18,500. I put it on my desk, where it could be seen easily. "When Fairly came into the office, I came up with an excuse to leave for a minute. I knew Fairly would peek at the dummy contract. When he saw that Davis would make only $18,500, he figured he could not ask for more money than a National League batting champion was getting. Fairly signed for $18,500."

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