BALTIMORE SPORTS NEST

Getting on with it didn't mean putting down roots in Baltimore, however. Camped out in a hotel room at Baltimore's Cross Keys Inn—he hadn't even bothered to rent an apartment in the area—Jackson began looking ahead to November, when the first "free agent re-entry draft," as it was then dubbed, would take place. He had very specific ideas of what would constitute a "good fit" for him: essentially, contenders located in cities where it wouldn't be problematic to be an outspoken black athlete. And since the rules of the re-entry draft dictated that players could only be drafted by 12 of the 24 major league teams, Jackson began publicly campaigning to make sure he wouldn't be drafted by teams that weren't on his list. "Nice try," he scoffed when a writer for the Long Beach Independent asked if he'd consider signing with the California Angels for 1977. He told Milwaukee writers that Brewers owner Bud Selig shouldn't bother wasting a draft pick on him. "I don't like snow," he said. "I don't like beer, either."

As for Baltimore, well, he wasn't exactly getting anyone's hopes up for a return to the Orioles. "Oh, it's all right," he told reporters. "It kinda reminds me of Halloween ... you know, these orange and black uniforms."

All of which would have been moot, if Jackson hadn't tapped back into his prodigious Reggie-ness in July. He hit .310 that month with nine home runs and 25 RBIs, including a streak in which he homered in a record-tying six consecutive games. "Park it, Sal," he joked to the press after hitting his 16th homer of the season, in reference to his former A's colleague Sal Bando, who was currently leading the AL with 19. "You're cluttering up the highway."

But on July 27, Jackson's shit-talking nearly got the better of him. After mouthing off to Yankees pitcher Ellis when the latter nearly grazed the slight Orioles shortstop Mark Belanger with a homeward toss—"Why don't you hit a big motherfucker like me?" Reggie taunted—he found himself on the receiving end of a high-and-tight fastball from Ellis, who may have also been delivering some delayed payback for the gargantuan home run that Jackson had hit off of him in Detroit during the 1971 All-Star Game. "Did I kill him?" Ellis chuckled to the home plate umpire, while Jackson writhed in the dirt, his signature aviator shades smashed to pieces.

X-rays showed no damage beyond a badly-bruised cheekbone. Jackson expressed disappointment to the press that Ellis hadn't called to see how he was doing; perhaps the pitcher was too busy counting the twenty-dollar bills that had been surreptitiously stuffed into his locker by his teammates as a tip for beaning Reggie. "Someone didn't like him," Ellis would later reflect in his autobiography. "He was supposed to get hit!"

Jackson continued to hit well through the end of the season, while playing capable defense in both right and center field, but the Orioles never managed to cut the first-place Yankees' lead below seven games, despite playing 54-32 ball in July, August and September; they finished a distant second in the AL East with an 88-74 record. Many Orioles fans believed that Jackson's April holdout effectively doomed their team to that finish; while it's hard to imagine that he could have single-handedly erased their 10.5 game deficit—Weaver estimated to Sports Illustrated in August that "If we'd had him all season, there's no question we'd be five games closer to first"—Jackson certainly would have had a shot at his second AL MVP award if he'd come to Baltimore straight from spring training. As it was, his 27 home runs were good enough to tie him with Sal Bando for second place in the American League, five behind Graig Nettles.

There was also no question that, even in a stacked field of free agents—it included his former A's teammates Rollie Fingers, Sal Bando, Joe Rudi, Gene Tenace, and Bert Campaneris—Jackson was clearly the most appetizing entrée on the re-entry draft buffet. Jackson, who had cracked to reporters in 1975 that, "If I played in New York, they'd name a candy bar after me," was now not joking around at all. He was openly angling to play for the Yankees, even dropping some less-than-subtle on-air hints about it while serving as a guest analyst during ABC's broadcast of the Yankees-Royals ALCS. "I can play for a man like that," he said of Yankees skipper Billy Martin.

The Montreal Expos, however, had other ideas. Having recently hired Dick Williams, who'd managed the A's from 1971 through 1973, the team ardently courted Jackson, even spending a reported $20,000 to fly Reggie and four of his associates in for a whirlwind tour of the city that included a lavish dinner party at the estate of Expos owner and multimillionaire Seagram's boss Charles Bronfman. They ultimately offered Jackson a five-year deal worth nearly $5 million.

Unfortunately for both Jackson and the Expos, the visit was marred by an incident in which Canadian Customs found a stash of marijuana in the ballplayer's luggage, and notified the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The authorities ultimately declined to file charges, since the amount in question was under an ounce and the bag in which it was found had been out of Jackson's control for at least 12 hours. But it led to some embarrassing headlines, and forced the Expos to do some hurried damage control. "We are satisfied that [Jackson] has absolutely no problem with any narcotic," Bronfman told the press.

More damaging to Montreal's case was the fact that Jackson's next stop after Montreal was New York City, where George Steinbrenner, over the vociferous objections of both Billy Martin and Yankees G.M. Gabe Paul, was waiting to woo him. Jackson proved incapable of resisting Steinbrenner's charm offensive and the allure of the Big Apple.

"It was as if I had seen New York across some crowded room, caught her eye, but never got the chance to talk to her," he recalled in his 1984 autobiography. "Now I was talking to her, feeling her. Being seduced by her. I was easy prey." He signed a five-year deal with the Yankees for $2.96 million, plus an extra sixty grand for a Rolls Royce. The Expos had offered significantly more money, but this was New York City, and Jackson was now the first black superstar to wear Yankee pinstripes. And in another year and a half, there would indeed be a candy bar named after him.