By Douglas J. Gladstone
For The Herald
Snohomish native Jim Ollom is among 641 former professional baseball players currently not receiving a standard pension from Major League Baseball.
A graduate of Snohomish High School, the 73-year-old Ollom, who lives in Everett, was a Minnesota Twins pitcher in 1966 and 1967. In 24 games, three of which he started, he hurled 45 innings and gave up 39 hits. (During his playing years for Snohomish High School, 1961-63, however, Ollom threw five no-hitters and five one-hitters.)
Granted, he didn’t put up big league numbers that would earn him enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. But Ollom did something that only 11,000 men have done since 1947, namely, play in “The Show.”
Ollom and the 640 other men do not receive a traditional pension because the rules for receiving MLB pensions changed over in 1980. Ollom and the other men do not get pensions because they didn’t accrue four years of service credit. That was what ballplayers who played between 1947 and 1979 needed to be eligible for the pension plan.
Instead, as of April 2011, all they receive are non-qualified retirement payments based on a complicated formula that had to be calculated by an actuary.
In brief, for every 43 game days of service a player accrued on an active MLB roster, he’d get $625. Four quarters (one year) totaled $2,500. Sixteen quarters (four years) amounts to the maximum, $10,000. And that payment is before taxes were taken out.
What’s more, the payment cannot be passed on to a surviving spouse or designated beneficiary. So none of Mr. Ollom’s loved ones will receive that payment when he dies. These men are also not eligible to be covered under the league’s umbrella health insurance plan.
By comparison, post-1980 players are eligible to buy into the league’s generous health insurance plan after only one game day of service. And they only need 43 game days of service on an active roster to get a pension.
These men are being penalized for playing the game they loved at the wrong time.
This is an injustice that nobody is writing or talking about. What makes it more unseemly is that the national pasttime is doing very well financially. MLB recently announced that its revenue was up 325 percent from 1992, and that it has made $500 million since 2015. What’s more, the average value of the each of the 30 clubs is up 19 percent from 2016, to $1.54 billion.
And the 30 club owners recently wrote a $10 million check to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
The owners chose relics over retirees.
As for the union representing current players, the Major League Baseball Players Association to date has been loath to divvy up anymore of the collective pie. Which is weird, since unions are supposed to help hard-working women and men in this country get a fair shake in life. But the players union labor leader doesn’t seem to want to help anyone but himself; Tony Clark receives a MLB pension and an annual salary of more than $2.1 million, including benefits.
Ollom and all the other men are being shortchanged by a sport that can afford to do more. Just increase the bone that is being thrown these men to $10,000 a year. Are MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred and Clark suggesting they can’t afford to pay these men more?
The great newspaperman Heywood Campbell Broun once wrote that sports “doesn’t build character, it reveals it.”
What does that say about Clark and Manfred?
Douglas J. Gladstone is a freelance writer living in New York He is the author of “A Bitter Cup of Coffee: How MLB & The Players Association Threw 874 Retirees a Curve.” You can visit his website at www.gladstonewriter.com.
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