They said he was the fastest man in baseball.
In the summer of 1980, in the midst of a historic presidential campaign and the infamous Atlanta child murder mysteries, Jimmy Carter was serving his one and only term as president while fellow Georgian Gary Cooper was playing his one and only season in the MLB. Some of the fastest ballplayers of the era – Rickey Henderson, Ron LeFlore and Willie Wilson – were fast becoming household names.
But for Cooper, baseball held a different fate.
“If he wasn’t the fastest man in baseball,” said Paul Snyder, longtime scouting director for the Atlanta Braves, who died Nov. 23, 2023. “he was right up there with the next guy.”
Cooper, then a 23-year-old rookie outfielder, spent 42 days on the Braves’ roster that summer as a pinch-runner and leftfielder for manager Bobby Cox. He played in 21 games and went to the plate twice.
Just a week after a rainout against the San Francisco Giants on Sept. 29 that year, a game the Braves were not required to make up, Cooper was sent back to the minor leagues and never made it back to the show. After one more season in the Braves’ farm system with the 1981 Durham Bulls, Cooper decided to hang up his cleats.
“I didn’t have nothin’ to prove back in the minors,” he said. “I just felt like it was time to call it quits.”
But what Cooper didn’t fully realize until many years later is that he had come within 24 hours — just one day on the Braves’ roster — of qualifying for a pension from the Major League Baseball Players Association.
The MLB Players Association, according to Rod Nelson, chairman of the Society for American Baseball Research Scouts Committee, is “the most successful and well-endowed labor union in the history of mankind.” As of its latest filing in 2021, the MLB Players Benefit Plan had 9,847 participants and more than $4.5 billion in assets. But since 1980, the union’s minimum amount of major-league service time needed to qualify for a pension has been 43 days.
“It’s a game of inches,” Steve Butts of the Institute for Baseball Studies said. “But when we’re talking about millionaires and billionaires, the rank and file get lost in the shuffle.”
In Cooper’s era, Black players who were regarded as marginal prospects would only get one chance in the show, said Gary Gillette, co-editor of the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia and founder and chairman of the Friends of Historic Hamtramck Stadium.
“And if they didn’t perform well,” Gillette said, “they would be sent back to the minors and often never got a second shot to prove themselves.”
And while Cooper might be a day short of qualifying for MLB’s minimal pension stipend, Nelson said, “the real injustice is that he’s been denied the quality health care benefits he was entitled to receive for decades.”
Atlanta Braves
Cooper first discovered baseball through his father, Nathaniel, who made a name for himself as a shortstop on the sandlots of Savannah, Georgia, in the 1950s.
“My daddy should’ve been in the majors,” Cooper said. “He was awesome. That’s all our family did — we just eat, s— and played baseball.”
As a three-sport star at Robert W. Groves High School in Garden City, Cooper also excelled at football and track and once ran the 100-yard dash in 9.7 seconds. As a starting pitcher for Groves, he went 19-3 and threw three no-hitters. In his senior year, he batted .454.
Cooper was selected by Atlanta in the third round of the 1975 MLB draft. He spent seven seasons in the minors, hitting .234 and stealing 211 bases. And before he got called up to the majors, he played three seasons with the AA Savannah Braves, whose home games took place at Grayson Stadium, now home of the Savannah Bananas exhibition team.
At the time, the Braves’ vice president and director of player personnel was Bill Lucas, the first Black general manager of an MLB team.
“Luke was like a father figure to me,” Cooper said. “When he passed, it was a huge loss for the Braves.”
Cooper spent much of his time in the minors playing with catcher Brian Snitker, who’s been the Braves manager since 2016 and led the team to a World Series title in 2021. But while Cooper got a taste of the big time back in the day, Snitker never made it past AAA.
In August 1980, Cooper and Atlanta’s AA Savannah Braves farm club were in Florida for a game against the AA Jacksonville Suns when his manager, Eddie Haas, took him aside.
Haas had just gotten off the phone with Braves vice president of player development Hank Aaron, who called to say the Braves needed Cooper’s speed in the big leagues. Aaron wanted Cooper to meet the big club in Pittsburgh, where the Braves were scheduled to take on right fielder Dave Parker and the defending world champion Pittsburgh Pirates at historic Three Rivers Stadium.
“I thought Eddie was playin’ with me,” Cooper recalled. “I asked him, ‘Man, why you took me out the lineup?’ ”
It was a big surprise, he told the Atlanta Constitution that day. “I started sweating the minute they told me.”
“I’d never even been to Pittsburgh before,” Cooper said. “I was so excited, I walked into the wrong locker room!”
With the Braves leading 8-4 in the bottom of the seventh, Cox inserted Cooper into left field for his defense amid the giant expanse of Tartan Turf at Three Rivers Stadium.
In the bottom of the ninth with the Braves up 8-5, Pirates centerfielder Omar Moreno stepped to the plate with two out and a runner on second. Moreno promptly laced a single to left off Braves reliever Larry Bradford. Pirates pinch-hitter Mike Easler dashed home from second to cut the Braves’ lead to 8-6, but then Moreno got caught trying to stretch a single into a double.
“Omar lined one to me in left and it bounced over my head,” Cooper said. “But I turned around and snagged it and threw him out at second base — and that ended the game.
“That was one of my biggest thrills in the major leagues. It was just like hitting a home run to win the game.”
Gavin McIntyre for Andscape
What is an MLB pension worth? According to Phoenix-based Athlete Wealth Management, an MLB player can earn a partial pension for each quarter (43 days) of service time, which was valued at $5,750 in 2021.
“I have no idea what that valuation is all about,” said former Montreal Expos pitcher Steve Rogers, who now serves as special assistant, player services with the MLB Players Association.
“Benefits are paid monthly,” he said, “but there’s no present value — we don’t deal in that. You can make some assumptions, but there’s no lump-sum value.”
So even if Cooper qualified for the bare minimum, it’s not clear what his pension would be worth or what it would cost the MLB Players Association.
“There’s a relatively small group of these players who don’t receive a pension,” Butts said. “A net cost could hypothetically be calculated to show that it would be a thimbleful of money compared to one of the league’s streaming deals.”
Few major leaguers accumulate enough savings or pensions to retire comfortably.
Because Cooper debuted in the major leagues in 1980 after MLB’s new collective bargaining agreement took effect, he needed only 43 days on the Braves’ roster to qualify for a pension. And while he’s unique in that he’s just one day shy of qualifying, he’s not the only former major leaguer struggling to secure his retirement. One such player is former Detroit Tiger Les Cain, who’s been fighting to obtain a pension for years.
There are more than 500 former major-league players who played before 1980 who receive a non-qualified retirement benefit that pays up to $11,500 a year, according to researcher Max Effgen, of BitterCupBaseball.com.
Of those players, “there are 176 poor, unfortunate souls who don’t get anything because they had less than 43 days of service credit,” said Doug Gladstone, author of Bitter Cup of Coffee: How MLB and the Players Association Threw 874 Retirees a Curve.
And then there’s former Houston Astro Aaron Pointer, who receives an annual pension of about $900.
Had Cooper been given a longer look in the big leagues, Gillette believes his ability to draw walks and get on base could’ve helped his chances. Back then, however, it was almost completely ignored.
“When the Moneyball analytics revolution came along two decades later,” Gillette said, “the perceived value of getting on-base skyrocketed, and a progressive team like Oakland might have given another chance to a speedburner like Cooper who walked a lot, but not in the 1970s and 1980s.”
Cooper’s attorney Kevin Campbell of Detroit recently requested an exemption for Cooper from the MLB’s 43-day minimum amount of service time to qualify for a pension. But in its response to Campbell, the Major League Players Benefit Plan denied Cooper’s request for a pension and health benefits.
“The Pension Committee appreciates Mr. Cooper’s difficult circumstances,” its letter reads, “but is unable to grant him benefits under the Plan.”
Gavin McIntyre for Andscape
Even if Cooper’s 1980 Braves had made up their rainout game from Sept. 29, Rogers says the players union still would not have counted that as service time for Cooper. Former players like Cooper can earn service time as a major-league coach, he said.
Savannah business executive Robert Jonas has launched a petition urging the Atlanta Braves to add Cooper to their coaching staff for just one game of the 2024 season.
“I’ve known Gary for about 11 years now,” Jonas said. “He’s so down-to-earth — you’d never know in a million years, as humble as he is, that he actually played for the Braves. Over the years, his path hasn’t been the easiest, but he just keeps on truckin’. When life gives him lemons, he finds a way to make lemonade.”
Currently, the Braves do not have a baserunning coach listed on their staff. And no one on the team’s 40-player roster has been assigned Cooper’s old jersey No. 22.
The change.org petition for Cooper says in 1968 when legendary former Negro Leagues pitcher Satchel Paige needed just 158 days on an active major-league roster to reach the five-year minimum required to receive a pension, 19 teams turned him down. But one club stepped up and signed the 62-year-old former star as a part-time pitcher and special team adviser: the Atlanta Braves.
Although he never played a game that season, Paige eventually got his pension.
“The Braves could do Coop like they did Satchel Paige,” former Detroit Tigers outfielder Ike Blessitt said. “If they just add him to their [coaching] staff for a day — maybe then the man can finally get his pension.”
Today, Cooper, 67, lives a spartan lifestyle in his hometown of Savannah. According to the change.org petition, in recent years, Cooper has struggled with homelessness, but today he is a proud senior citizen. Last spring, Cooper was even inducted into the Greater Savannah Athletic Hall of Fame.
The change.org petition says that Cooper works part time as a landscaper in his hometown of Savannah, but that work has been scarce. Cooper has no car, no home, no savings, no pension, and struggles to pay his phone bill. That’s why Jonas is swinging for the fences. If he strikes out on his petition drive, he’s also launched a crowdfunding campaign to help support Cooper.
“Whatever I can do to help Gary,” Jonas said. “It’s been a rough ride for him these last few years, so hopefully this petition and the GoFundMe will help the cause.”
“I think most of us, as humans, can identify with being, at one point or another, a day late or a dollar short,” Campbell said. “But Gary’s case is unique … because he came up short through no fault of his own, under rather freakish circumstances.”
So what would Cooper do if the Braves actually reached out to him?
“Man, I wouldn’t know how to react,” he said.
But Blessitt sees a light at the end of the tunnel for players like Cooper and himself.
“If we all work together with Major League Baseball, I know we can fix this,” he said. “It might not be the easy thing, but it’s the right thing.”
SPJ Award-winning journalist Dave Mesrey has contributed to the Detroit Metro Times, the Detroit Free Press, WDET and ESPN’s Grantland.com. He’s the editor of Pro Football Hall of Famer Lem Barney’s biography and, for BLAC Detroit magazine, chronicled the storied relationship between Barney and Motown legend Marvin Gaye. Mesrey is also a founding member of the Hamtramck Stadium Grounds Crew.
