Yankees vs. the Tigers? Devil Rays vs. the Rangers?
How about some old-timers vs. Major League Baseball and its current players?
Dwight Siebler and Gary Neibauer were two of the hottest pitching prospects to come out of the University of Nebraska in the 1960s.
But the majors have a way of eating up pitchers. Most often, it's an arm injury: "I did some weird little thing to my arm, and all of sudden my fastball wasn't fast anymore," said Siebler, now a retiree living in Gretna.
"One day — bam, something's gone," Neibauer said. "That was just the nature of the beast for some of us."
Injuries, bad timing, getting jammed up behind stars in the organization, coaches tinkering with pitching mechanics that didn't need tinkering. "There are a thousand dumb little things that can take you off the path," Siebler said.
Still, Neibauer, originally from Billings, Mont., pitched short stints in 75 games mostly for the Atlanta Braves from 1969 to 1973. Siebler, a mid-90s flamethrower who graduated from Omaha North, saw mostly middle-relief action in 48 games with the Twins from 1963 to 1967.
Both were just months short of playing the amount of time deemed necessary at the time to become "vested" and thus eligible for pension and health insurance benefits from the players union and league.
Call them the Lost Boys of the Majors.
In 1980, players successfully bargained to gain benefits for anyone from that point on who played in the major leagues.
This spring, thanks to decades of pressure by former players such as Neibauer, and thanks to a book and ongoing crusade by author Doug Gladstone, the league and union agreed to retroactively pay benefits to nearly 900 pre-1980s players — a group that includes Neibauer and Siebler.
Yet, when Gladstone called Siebler at his Gretna home two weeks ago, Siebler had not received a check, nor had he heard he would be receiving a check.
When I called Siebler Tuesday morning, he confirmed that he "hadn't heard a thing from anybody about the money."
"It would be nice, I guess," he said. "A few thousand dollars? I would imagine that could be very helpful to some guys out there."
As part of the compensation agreement, Siebler appears to be owed $7,500, according to Gladstone, author of "A Bitter Cup of Coffee: How MLB & The Players Association Threw 874 Retirees a Curve."
Yet the curveballs keep coming:
Siebler told me he didn't know whom to call to get his money. Gladstone said Siebler should call fellow Husker Neibauer in Aurora, Colo., saying Neibauer kept all the records of how much time every player spent in the big leagues.
After I told Neibauer that Siebler hadn't received a check, Neibauer promised to review his records, research why Siebler hadn't been paid and "figure a way to take care of him."
But money, ultimately, is not at all the issue here, all three men told me.
"It's chump change — we know that," Neibauer said. "Even with the payment, there are numerous issues that the players association and the league have refused to resolve with some group of us ex-players. It's an ongoing fight for them to show respect to earlier players."
"Sounds like chump change," Siebler said of the deal from which he had yet to benefit. "But I guess it's something. I never expected anything. There just wasn't much respect for the player back then."
"I know it's chump change for them," Gladstone said. "They deserve better."
Chump change. It's a recurring term for a recurring theme for old baseball players, whether longtime pros or, even more so, for guys like Neibauer and Siebler who got bounced around and bounced out.
Both Neibauer and Siebler gave up on baseball after a few years, got out and got — and both used the term — "real jobs."
No more "chump change," that term for the money owners paid to the vast majority of players back then.
You don't think of "chump change" when you think of how today's pro baseball, football and basketball players are paid.
Although some of the current salaries can make players from past generations gasp as much as the average fan, those young guys you see in the playoffs right now making big money are paid a more appropriate percentage of the money they generate for the owners.
Those better salaries, those better compensation packages, came about because those past generations of ballplayers helped in the fight for a more appropriate cut of a big pie for the players.
Yet, in 2011, a guy like Dwight Siebler still is getting shortchanged by the game and, as Neibauer pointed out, in the case of the players association, "basically being disrespected by the people his generation helped get paid what they now get paid."
The simple idea at the heart of this complicated game, Neibauer said, is this:
"There is no reason players from before 1980 should be treated as second-class citizens compared to those who played after," Neibauer said. "This payment is a start in finally recognizing this group of players. I mean, it took more than 40 years just to get this.
"It's not over yet, though," he said. "It's still short of what is fair."
For Gretna's Siebler, the check from Major League Baseball is still short of, well, even existing.
"It's wonderful that these guys have been fighting for some sort of retirement (payment) for us," Siebler said. "I guess I appreciate the effort even without seeing the money."
Contact the writer:
402-444-1129, robert.nelson@owh.com
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