On the face of it, there is room for fans with long memories to be concerned. This is, after all, the same franchise fined for signing a former Bahamian cricket player named Tony Curry to a contract calling for $500 less than the minimum of $6,000.

I think general manager John Quinn's basic rationale went something like this: If it weren't for the Phillies, this guy would be diving for quarters tossed from cruise ships in Nassau harbor.

If you're under 45, you probably don't remember when all but a very few elite ballplayers were treated like flannel-clad field hands. Language in the standard contract bound

a player to the signing club in perpetuity or

until he was traded to another club or granted an unconditional release.

Now, I'm going to shock you. Hell, it still shocks me when I think back on it.

When I became the Phillies beat writer for this newspaper

in April 1966, I was making more money - such as it was - than about half the players on manager Gene Mauch's roster. Thanks to my newspaper salary and a morning drive-time radio gig for WCAU (1210-AM), I made about $20,000. Dick Allen, who hit

40 homers that year, drove in

110 runs and batted .317, earned around $30,000.

A year later, when Marvin

Miller became executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, the average player salary was $16,000. Only four players in the game made as much as $100,000. In 1968,

Miller negotiated a raise in the

minimum salary to a princely $10,000. By that time, my

newspaper salary had

skyrocketed to about $15,000.

Hey, it was good to buy the lads a round once in a while. One night in Chicago, a mix of players, including infielder Cookie Rojas, and media were having dinner at Johnny Lattner's Pier Two - if you've seen the current TV commercial with an auto plunging about 15 stories off a circular parking ramp into the Chicago River, it lands just outside where Lattner's Heisman Trophy sat atop a baby grand

piano. When the check came, Cookie picked it up with an

expansive wave. "This one's on me, guys," he said, flashing a roll of meal money.