In an era when run-of-the-mill major league baseball players own fleets of Hummers and aging superstar pitchers command $1 million a start -- here's looking at you, Roger Clemens -- it's almost comical to learn that a reported $205,000 bonus paid to an amateur 43 years ago sent ripples through the sport.
But it did.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday May 30, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 43 words Type of Material: Correction
Crowe's Nest: An article on former Angels outfielder Rick Reichardt in Monday's Sports section said Reichardt had his picture taken April 19, 1966, with then-Gov. Ronald Reagan. Reagan was a Republican gubernatorial candidate at the time and wasn't elected until later that year.
After Rick Reichardt, a promising outfielder and former Wisconsin football star, extracted that paltry-by-today's-standards sum from the Angels in 1964, club owners instituted the amateur draft a year later to keep themselves from bidding up the value of top prospects.
"There was quite an uproar," Reichardt, 64, says from his home in Gainesville, Fla., where he is a semi-retired financial planner, self-described "computer geek," father of four and grandfather of two. "No two ways about it."
In the days before the draft, which will be held June 7-8 this year and televised for the first time, amateurs were baseball's only true free agents.
And Reichardt, projected to be a star, played it to the hilt.
Over a period of about two months in the late spring and early summer after his junior year at Wisconsin, where he played in the famous 1963 Rose Bowl game won by USC, 42-37, Reichardt says that he and his attorney visited virtually every major league team, taking advantage of his leverage and the ensuing bidding war. While the two of them toured Los Angeles, Reichardt notes with a laugh, "The Dodgers kind of got scared away because we made the mistake of staying in Gene Autry's hotel on Sunset. They got all frosted about that and pulled the plug."
Though other teams offered more money -- Charles O. Finley and the then-Kansas City Athletics offered twice as much, he says -- Reichardt says he signed with the Angels because he felt most comfortable with Autry, their owner.
"They really romanced me," he says of the Angels, whose manager, Bill Rigney, enthusiastically compared Reichardt to Willie Mays.
Reichardt hit the first regular-season home run in Anaheim Stadium, a second-inning solo shot in a 3-1 loss to Tommy John and the Chicago White Sox on April 19, 1966, and got his picture taken with Walt Disney and then-Gov. Ronald Reagan. Of Reagan, he says, "I remember his cherry cheeks, for some reason."
Handsome and strapping -- "The first time I saw him, I thought he fell off a Wheaties box," Joe Garagiola once said of the
6-foot-3, 210-pound Wisconsin native -- Reichardt played in parts of seven seasons with the Angels.
