Juicing the Game Read online

  The owners had had enough of Vincent. One high-ranking baseball person thought that Vincent wasn’t political enough. He had been the head of Columbia Pictures, one of the biggest moviemaking studios in the world, and yet didn’t know how to count votes. He had no idea, the executive thought, how to leverage the feelings in the room. That just so happened to be a specialty of Bud Selig. But the real reason the owners turned so hawkish as to take the unprecedented step of ousting a commissioner in midterm was that they didn’t trust him to stay out of labor, a lack of trust Vincent proved justified during the contentious labor negotiations of 1990. Vincent interceded, Reinsdorf thought, on the players’ behalf, ending the 1990 lockout just when the owners thought the union was at its weakest. Such a big-ticket transgression couldn’t be overlooked. “He was soft on the players,” Reinsdorf said.

  It was during that lockout that Vincent committed what Manfred felt was his ultimate betrayal. During negotiations in the spring of 1990, Manfred had alerted the owners that he had agreed with Gene Orza and Donald Fehr to relax over the weekend and let things, in his words, “percolate.” It was, he thought, a good cooling-off period. In the spirit of taking his mind away from the negotiations, he headed down to Madison Square Garden to take in the Big East basketball championships. At one particularly tense point during the game, Manfred received an urgent message from a staff member that, at that moment, while Manfred was watching a basketball game and taking his mind off the union, Fay Vincent was entertaining Donald Fehr in his living room, negotiating a settlement. Manfred had always felt ambivalent toward the commissioner, but this killed Vincent in his eyes. “Fay sowed the seeds of his own destruction,” Manfred recalled. “I don’t know if he even knew it.”

  By the end, the owners didn’t trust him, period, and the feeling would be hard and mutual. Ownership believed Vincent considered himself an overlord, a Judge Landis type who commanded absolute power and authority. Vincent saw ownership as finally out of control, having lost respect for the moral authority of the office of the commissioner. He believed the owners, in trying to firing him, had taken the first steps - toward devaluing the credibility of the sport. The vote of no-confidence in September 1992 that led to his resignation a week later was, Vincent believed, the first step in a master plan. The vote, which was not unanimous but a majority, brought Vincent back to a revealing conversation he had had with Reinsdorf years earlier.

  “I hate all commissioners. It’s nothing personal to you,” Reinsdorf once told Vincent. “All these guys get to be commissioner and then you come up with something called commissioneritis where you think you’re more important than the game, more important than us, and we own the game. All of us have money up. You don’t have any money involved. You have no financial interest in us doing well and I don’t think commissioners should be running the sport. I think that we should get rid of all of them and an owner should run the game.”

  Later Vincent recalled Reinsdorf’s candor and compared it to history. “That’s really what happened. He said the owner has the same economic interest as the rest of us. I would go around to ballparks and he would say, ‘I saw you on TV, and you really shouldn’t do that. You should be in New York making more money for the owners.’”

  Who then, Vincent wondered, would speak for the game? It wouldn’t be the players or the owners, who tended to protect their own interests. Even though the commissioner was in the employ of the owners, he did, at least ostensibly, carry a moral weight that could not be entrusted to ownership or the players.

  WATCHING VINCENT’S inevitable decline was Marvin Miller. Because he had been an outsider all those years, the sage knew the game better than the actors playing it, understanding the owners and commissioners better than they understood themselves. Commissioners, he thought, never got the message until they got fired. It was the only language they understood. Every commissioner who forgets he works for the owners, Miller often thought, has just begun the process of his own firing. “What is remarkable is that, since Landis, every commissioner falls for the malarkey that without investing one cent in the industry, his appointment gives him control of the industry!” It was as if he were in Reinsdorf’s head.

  The two did not cross paths much, but Miller did not seem to think much of Vincent as a commissioner. One of the reasons was that Miller hated Bart Giamatti, Vincent’s greatest friend and inspiration. Miller thought Giamatti a fraud, whose literary reflections about baseball Miller thought were naïve, and worse, distracted from and trivialized the real problems the game faced. Miller never forgave Giamatti’s assessment of the 1985 strike as a “nonissue,” especially as Giamatti had overseen a bitter strike himself as the president of Yale. Vincent never forgave Miller for the passage in his 1991 memoir in which his wife, Terry, Vincent thought, essentially said that Giamatti deserved his premature death. Months before Miller’s book was due to be released, Vincent pleaded with Don Fehr, the head of the Players Association and a close friend of Miller’s, to encourage Miller to strike the passage from the book. Miller would not relent. The passage remained.

  Labor was another source of tension between the two. Vincent received credit from the press for calling off the 1990 lockout, but to Miller, all Vincent did was act in the interest of his employers, the owners, by saving them from the public embarrassment of shutting down the game. “What is so revolutionary about that?” Miller asked. He did not believe Vincent deserved credit for the collusion settlement, and didn’t think much of it when Vincent later said that “collusion wouldn’t have happened under my watch.”

  The most likely reason for Miller’s low opinion of Vincent, though, was personal disappointment. “I thought he had the potential to become the best commissioner since I started with the Players Association. He was more intelligent than Bowie Kuhn, more interested in the game and the problems of the industry than Peter Ueberroth—who often looked like he was counting the house when speaking at baseball functions—and far less pompous and righteous and less of a dilettante than A. Bartlett Giamatti,” Miller said. To Miller, the turning point in Vincent’s commissionership was the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which leveled parts of San Francisco during the World Series. “It’s possible the most unfortunate result of the quake, after the toll of life and property, was that it turned Fay Vincent from such an ordinary man with some sense of balance and humor about his situation into someone who actually began to take seriously the role the media assigned him. I really think he came out of the Bay Area a different person.”

  If ownership believed it had just cause in eliminating Vincent, it no doubt failed to anticipate just how badly it would look after the deed was completed. To the public and the media, the mutiny against Vincent, executed with muscle and a lack of statesmanship, looked more like a palace coup. If Miller was correct that all commissioners, if they anger enough owners, will get fired, it was nonetheless true that no commissioner had ever been pushed out in midstream simply because the owners had gotten tired of his act. Shortly before Vincent’s resignation, Tom Callahan of the Washington Post wrote, “Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was God’s Commissioner. Albert B. (Happy) Chandler was the player’s commissioner. Ford Frick was the sportswriter’s commissioner. Spike Eckert was the Pentagon’s commissioner. Bowie Kuhn was the owner’s commissioner. Peter Ueberroth was the corporation’s commissioner. Bart Giamatti was the dilettante’s commissioner. Fay Vincent is the last commissioner. Vincent is likely to leave office soon . . . whether he decides to leave Thursday or two years from now, the job will not survive him.”

  LESS THAN a year after Vincent’s forced resignation, acting commissioner Bud Selig called a meeting of the owners in Kohler, Wisconsin. The agenda was simple: to arrive at a revenue-sharing plan that all sides could agree upon. The secondary purpose of Kohler, and the one that was to have a more immediate impact, was for ownership to form a united front for its upcoming showdown with the players over the 1994 collective-bargaining agreement. What arrived at Kohler, however, was a gr
oup of owners so splintered that the union became the least of their worries.

  To Larry Lucchino, then the president of the Baltimore Orioles, there was no better example of the sorry state of baseball’s ownership than the ill-fated August 1993 summit. Kohler was a mess. Ownership had divided into two factions—large- and small-market clubs—each with its own agenda. The powerhouses in the game (the Red Sox, Yankees, Dodgers, Mets, Athletics, and Blue Jays) were swimming well into the black financially. The rest, especially the teams in the smallest markets and thus with the lowest revenues (the Reds, Royals, Padres, and Pirates), were hemorrhaging money to stay alive . . . or so they said. Neither the players nor their fellow, more-moneyed owners believed the claims of the small-market clubs. Nonbelievers, such as Boston’s John Harrington, frequently used the Yankees as the best example that there was nothing structurally wrong with baseball’s financial model. If the Yankees had such a tremendous advantage, the thinking went, why had they not qualified for the playoffs since 1981 while small-market teams such as Oakland and Kansas City had found themselves in the postseason multiple times during the intervening years?

  The concept of revenue sharing was as foreign to the owners as a salary cap was to the players. The game had always prided itself on the strength of individual markets. Good markets were created by good teams, went the thought. There was little sympathy for the sad-sack franchise because baseball had always proven that winning could be the solution to all problems. Whenever an owner groused about his market, especially in comparison to that of New York, which practically printed money, the collective response was always the same: “Win some games.” The Toronto Blue Jays, for example, were never considered a powerful franchise until the team began winning in the mid-1980s. That success produced, in Canadian dollars, a $550 million stadium, SkyDome, in 1989. By the early 1990s, not only were the Blue Jays two-time defending World Series champs, but thanks to their new stadium, they were spending as much as the richest teams in the game.

  In the San Francisco Bay Area, the conventional wisdom for nearly three decades had been that the region could support only one team. Yet in 1989, the Giants and Athletics met in the World Series. This was just ten years after the A’s had finished 54-108 and drawn a paltry 306,763 fans, a single-game average of 3,984 in a stadium that held nearly 50,000. In 1989, coming off their first World Series appearance in fourteen years, the A’s drew 2,667,225, followed by 2.9 million in 1990, the year they captured their third-straight American League pennant. By 1992, the A’s would boast the highest payroll in baseball at $48.02 million. Six years earlier, in 1986, they had spent just $9 million on players. To many, this was proof that the game’s financial structure was fine. All that was needed was better management.

  What people such as Harrington did not grasp was that, in the 1990s, traditional market analyses no longer applied to baseball because of the growing influence of cable television. In the past, teams drew revenues from their stadiums, the postseason (if they were lucky), and the revenue splits from the leagues’ national broadcast packages. Now, local cable TV revenue separated markets like never before. New York always had the biggest advantage, but with the addition of the cable television market, threatened to dwarf every city except Los Angeles and Chicago. Before collecting a single dollar from ticket sales, the Yankees and Mets could count on local television packages that exceeded the entire payrolls of many teams.

  This disparity would reveal itself most starkly during the high times of the Cleveland Indians. During the mid-1990s, the Indians would enjoy a renaissance, making them a baseball power for the first time since the late 1940s and early ’50s. They were a perennial playoff team, went to the World Series in 1995 and 1997, and were selling out a brand-new stadium. Still, despite making the playoffs every year from 1995 to 2000, the Indians’ local TV package was worth just $7 million annually. The Yankees, by contrast, brought in an average of $80 million per year from local TV alone. While it might have been true that some bad markets could become good ones with winning ballclubs, those markets would not be able to sustain the payroll required to keep those teams together over the long haul thanks to the disparity created by cable television. Sooner or later, teams not in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Boston would have to watch their best players sign lucrative free-agent contracts with other teams. That, or die a quick financial death in the wake of mounting losses.

  To George Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ principal owner, however, small-market owners didn’t want revenue sharing to improve their teams. They wanted the money to line their pockets. The Minnesota Twins were a favorite target. Billionaire owner Carl Pohlad wasn’t trying to win, Steinbrenner thought, he was giving his secretaries raises with Steinbrenner’s money. Steinbrenner felt nothing for the Clevelands and Kansas Citys of baseball. “You buy in New York, you know what you’re buying,” Steinbrenner said. “You buy in Cleveland or Kansas City, you know what you’re buying, too.”

  Steinbrenner’s rips on the small-market clubs were not unlike Ronald Reagan’s attempts to convince the public of the 1980s that welfare queens actually existed in America’s ghettos, living in project penthouses and driving shiny new Cadillacs with millions of taxpayer dollars taped to their mattresses. Yet in his own way, Steinbrenner touched a nerve. There would be embarrassing moments for poorer clubs. One year, while in contention, Cincinnati lowered its payroll, yet gleefully accepted a revenue-sharing check. Later in the decade, Oakland owner Steve Schott took his $9-million cut of the expansion fees paid out to owners for the addition of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and Arizona Diamondbacks and, rather than purchase more pitching, bought a private plane instead. Steinbrenner seethed.

  Marred by such glaring disparity and self-interest, Kohler, Lucchino recalled, was a total disaster. At the time, Lucchino watched from a position of strength. He was the visionary behind the revolutionary Camden Yards and the Orioles were flush with cash. Being in the same division as the Yankees and the Red Sox, though, Lucchino had no illusions that even a new ballpark would allow the Orioles to compete dollar for dollar. That, he felt, would be suicide.

  Despite being on the same side as big-market teams, Lucchino possessed a deep loathing for the Yankees inherited from his mentor, the high-powered Washington lawyer and late Orioles owner Edward Bennett Williams. Williams hated the Yankees from the start, courtesy of Baltimore’s epic season-long battles with New York in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Lucchino followed suit. In turn, Steinbrenner hated Lucchino because Lucchino thwarted a lucrative local television contract for the Yankees when the two served on the league’s broadcasting committee in the late 1980s. Even then, before cable television revenue skyrocketed, Lucchino sensed the tremendous advantage the Yankees would have simply by being in New York. A local cable TV contract for one year in New York might be worth nearly as much as all the other teams’ deals combined.

  Over the years, as the paths of the two men continued to cross, Steinbrenner and Lucchino forged a rivalry stoked by a genuine dislike for each other. Intimates recalling Kohler remembered with no small degree of irony Lucchino’s big-market stance. Within two years of Kohler, Lucchino would be the president of the San Diego Padres, and would transform himself from a person cool to the small-market dilemma to its biggest champion. “Luckily,” one rival baseball executive sneered, “Larry’s morals are flexible.” Steinbrenner took to calling Lucchino “The Chameleon.” In 2003, Lucchino would once again find himself in the same division as Steinbrenner, this time heading up the other half of baseball’s greatest rivalry. As CEO of the Boston Red Sox, Lucchino would refer to the Yankees as the “Evil Empire.” The title stuck.

  It was in this spirit that Kohler disintegrated. John Harrington of the Red Sox led a big-market boycott of the talks, refusing, in the words of Bud Selig, to even sit down with the small-market caucus. At one point, Harrington grew tired of listening to the small market’s gripes. “Okay,” he said, “we’ll just form another league.” There could be no united front
in the face of such crippling divisions. In 1984, Edward Bennett Williams greeted new commissioner Peter Ueberroth with the words, “Welcome to the den of the idiots,” a phrase befitting the infighting of those two days in Wisconsin. George W. Bush, then owner of the Texas Rangers, left Kohler bitter and unsatisfied. Even the future president was unable to get a deal done.

  Padres owner Tom Werner was crushed by Kohler, which capped off his devastating first entry into the closed world of baseball ownership. Werner, who became a television superstar and multimillionaire in the 1980s as executive producer of the hit sitcoms The Cosby Show and Roseanne, wanted to buy into baseball, as well as exert his influence on the game’s television committee. When he headed a group that bought the Padres in 1990, he saw himself as a creative, youthful (he was forty at the time) force that could turn the Padres into a special club. That notion was demolished when, with his team losing money, the Padres suffered a three-game sweep at home at the hands of the expansion Florida Marlins in early June 1993. He began to trade away an underachieving Padres club, piece by piece, week by week during the summer of 1993, making the Padres the symbol for the disparities in wealth between rich and poor in the sport.