Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  *Hobson played most of the 1978 season with bone chips in his throwing elbow. He made 43 errors that year.

  *Earned run average is the average number of runs a pitcher lets up in a nine-inning game, and does not include runs that score due to an error or any runs that score after an inning-prolonging error. If a pitcher pitches for six innings and the opposing team scores three runs, one of which was due to an error, his ERA for that game would be 3.00: He allowed two earned runs in six innings, for an average of one run every three innings, which works out to 3.00 over nine innings.

  Chapter 5

  The Yawkey Trust

  BY 1987, Jean Yawkey had tired of Haywood Sullivan and “adopted” a new surrogate son: John Harrington. Harrington was born and raised in Boston, the son of Irish immigrants; his father was a bus mechanic and his mother a domestic. His career in baseball had begun in 1970, when the 33-year-old Boston College accounting professor took a call from former Sox player, manager, and executive Joe Cronin. Cronin was by this time the American League president, and was looking for a new league treasurer. A neighbor of Harrington’s, Cronin said, had recommended him for the job. Within a couple of years, Cronin had introduced Harrington to Tom Yawkey, and in 1973 Harrington was named the treasurer of the Red Sox. Harrington grew close to Tom Yawkey, but from early on, it was clear his strongest bond was with Yawkey’s childless wife. When Tom Yawkey died in 1976, Harrington helped Jean Yawkey with the ownership transition, but by 1978 he was burned out and left the team.

  Soon, Jean Yawkey had succeeded in luring Harrington back by promising him a small stake in the Red Sox. There was, however, a catch: It vested only when Yawkey died, thereby guaranteeing that one of the people she was closest to never left her employ. Before long, Harrington was named Yawkey’s legal proxy for all matters relating to the Red Sox.

  In February 1992, Jean Yawkey passed away. She was 83 years old, and most local observers assumed Harrington would sell Yawkey’s two-thirds controlling stake in the team to Sullivan, who still owned the other third. Instead, in 1993, the Yawkey Trust bought out Sullivan’s share and Harrington embarked on an eight-year stewardship of the team. With Sullivan gone, Harrington bumped general manager Lou Gorman upstairs and hired Dan Duquette, Montreal’s 35-year-old general manager, who, in 1991, had been made the youngest GM in baseball.

  Together, Harrington and Duquette led the team to some memorable successes. In 1995, the first year of baseball’s new three-division playoff format,* the Red Sox, led by eventual MVP Mo Vaughn, won the American League East. In 1997, Duquette traded pitching prospects Carl Pavano and Tony Armas Jr. to his old team for Pedro Martinez, who blossomed into one of the best right-handed pitchers in the history of the game. Nineteen ninety-seven Rookie of the Year Nomar Garciaparra flourished into a perennial All-Star, and his .372 batting average in 2000 was the highest for a Red Sox player since Ted Williams had hit .388 in 1957.

  The high point of Harrington’s and Duquette’s tenure atop the Sox was likely 1999, when the All-Star game was played at Fenway Park for the first time since 1961. Billed by Major League Baseball as the last All-Star contest of the twentieth century, candidates for an All-Century team were introduced on Fenway’s field before the game. Fisk and Yastrzemski were both there, along with Dennis Eckersley, Bob Gibson, Hank Aaron, and Willie Mays. After the ’99 squad had been introduced, the Fenway PA announced the arrival of “The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived.” With that, the 80-year-old Ted Williams emerged in a golf cart and slowly rode to the Fenway mound. Fenway Park seemed to pulse with adoration, as the 34,000 fans joined some of the greatest ballplayers ever to step onto a diamond as they bathed Williams with applause. Williams moved his hand to his head, and, finally acknowledging the cheers that had started with his career-ending home run 39 years earlier, tipped his cap to the crowd.* After struggling to stand and squinting to make out the plate, Williams threw the game’s first pitch to Fisk. And then, for several long minutes, the best players in baseball milled around the Splendid Splinter like a bunch of awe-struck schoolboys until Fenway’s announcer had to beg everyone to retire to their respective dugouts so the game could begin.

  Unlike many All-Star games, the 1999 contest would not be a mere exhibition. Martinez, who already had a 15-3 record on the year, made sure of that. He began the game by becoming the first All-Star pitcher to strike out the game’s first three batters, making Barry Larkin, Larry Walker, and Sammy Sosa all look foolish. Then, to begin the second, he fanned Mark McGwire. After Matt Williams reached on an error, Martinez struck out Jeff Bagwell, and Williams was thrown out trying to steal second. Martinez had struck out five of the game’s first six hitters,† and he was named the game’s MVP.

  Nineteen ninety-nine was a transcendent, magical season for Martinez. He finished with gaudy numbers: a 23-4 record, a 2.07 earned run average,‡ 313 strikeouts. A better indicator of his sheer dominance is the extent to which he outclassed the competition. He allowed an average of 8.31 base runners per nine innings, or fewer than one base runner per inning of work. The next best average in the league belonged to the Minnesota Twins’ Eric Milton, who allowed 11.04 base runners per nine innings. No one in the twentieth century had ever led the league by so large a gap. Martinez was the American League’s unanimous choice for the Cy Young Award, and he received more first-place votes than any other player for the league’s MVP. He lost out on that award to Ivan Rodriguez only after two voters refused to put Martinez on their ballots at all. (One of the voters who snubbed Martinez, the New York Post’s George King, initially claimed he didn’t believe pitchers deserved to win the award. It was soon revealed that in 1998, King had cast votes for two pitchers—the Yankees’ David Wells and the Texas Rangers’ Rick Helling. In 1999, King was the only voter in the country to cast his first-place vote for Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter.)

  In 1999, for the third time in five years, the Red Sox won the wild card, and for the third time, they’d face the Cleveland Indians, who’d beaten the Sox in 1995 and 1998 in the first round of the playoffs. Martinez was on the hill to start the best-of-five series, but the spindly pitcher had to leave the game after four shutout innings with a strained muscle in his back. The Red Sox lost Game 1, 3–2, and dropped Game 2, 11–1, leaving them one game from elimination, with Martinez likely out for the rest of the playoffs.

  The Sox bounced back, winning Games 3 and 4 by a combined score of 32–10. But for Game 5, Sox manager Jimy Williams was forced to call on Bret Saberhagen, the old Kansas City Royals star who’d gutted out a late-career revival in Boston. Saberhagen surrendered three runs in the first before allowing two more without retiring a batter in the second. Derek Lowe, Williams’s next choice, wasn’t much better, and by the end of the third inning, Cleveland had scored eight runs. Boston, behind a grand slam Troy O’Leary hit following an intentional walk to Nomar Garciaparra, managed to crawl back into the game. The only problem was, there didn’t seem to be any pitchers left, and Williams had already ruled out letting Martinez pitch, saying, “We can’t hurt the kid.”

  Martinez, however, thought differently, and convinced Williams to let him take the mound to start the fourth. Just days after his injured back and shoulder caused him to fight back tears, Martinez no-hit the powerful Indians* lineup for six innings, finessing his eight strikeouts on guile and guts rather than brute force. In the seventh, O’Leary once again hit a homer after the Indians had intentionally walked Garciaparra, and the Red Sox won, 12–8, only to then lose, four games to one, to their archrivals, the Yankees, in the American League Championship Series. (Martinez, not surprisingly, helped provide the only highlight of the Yankees series, winning 13–1 in Game 3, in which he bested Roger Clemens, who had left the Red Sox after the 1996 season. That would be the only game the Yankees would lose in the entire postseason.)

  Despite the Red Sox’s string of playoff appearances, Duquette and Harrington had by this time become increasingly controversial figures in Boston. They were already known for facili
tating—some would say forcing—the acrimonious departures of some of Boston’s biggest stars, such as Clemens and Mo Vaughn, who left after the 1998 season. Duquette had famously called Fenway “economically obsolete,” a characterization many Boston fans found insulting, and had helped spearhead a campaign to shut down the independent sausage vendors that had been a feature of the pregame scene outside of Fenway since the park opened in 1912.

  Harrington and Duquette also brought the dysfunction of Boston’s front office to new levels. Both men despised Boston’s press corps, and under their leadership the organization became cripplingly secretive and paranoid. Oakland A’s manager Ken Macha, who spent four years in the 1990s working as a manager for Boston’s minor league teams, complained to Howard Bryant, then with the Boston Herald, about the situation: “What was I supposed to do? A reporter would call me up and ask about a prospect and I wasn’t allowed to speak about a player I was watching every day. I mean, I felt like an idiot.”

  *The three-division system debuted in 1994, but the players strike canceled the playoffs.

  *Unlike the other retired ballplayers on the field, Williams was not wearing the hat of his former team; instead, his cap advertised Hitter.net, a now defunct business started by Williams’s son, John Henry Williams.

  †In baseball’s second All-Star game, in 1934, New York Giants pitcher Carl Hubbell struck out five American League batters in a row after allowing the first two American League hitters to reach base. Hubbell’s victims were Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, and Joe Cronin. All five are now in the Hall of Fame.

  ‡After the 2005 season, Martinez had a career ERA of 2.72; he is the only active player with at least 1,000 innings pitched who has a career ERA under 3.00.

  *The Indians, with Manny Ramirez, Jim Thome, Roberto Alomar, Omar Vizquel, David Justice, and Kenny Lofton, had by far the most potent lineup in the league. They led all of baseball with a .372 on base percentage, and were the first team to score more than 1,000 runs since the 1950 Red Sox.

  Part II

  For Sale

  Chapter 6

  Selling Boston’s

  Salvation

  LES OTTEN IS A GRAY-HAIRED, exuberant man who is always coming up with fantastical, half-baked ideas. It can be hard to take him seriously: He’s the type of guy who’ll spend 20 minutes talking in excruciating detail about how he’s looking for someone to ghostwrite a novel he’s plotted before acknowledging that the storyline is essentially the same as the Bernard Malamud book The Natural, which was made into a hit Robert Redford movie in 1984. (“I know they’re similar,” Otten says. “But I had thought of this before the movie came out.”)

  But just often enough, Otten comes up with an idea that, when combined with his certitude, leads to considerable success. Take his career in the ski resort industry. Beginning in 1972, when he took a job at Maine’s Sunday River Mountain as a 22-year-old assistant general manager, Otten devoted nearly three decades to building the largest ski resort operation in the country. In 1980, he bought Sunday River from the Sherburne Corporation, and over the next 13 years, he transformed it into an East Coast destination, proving that superlative snowmaking and aggressive marketing really could make all the difference. In 1994, Otten began snapping up other New England mountains, and over the next three years, he bought up more than half of the skiable terrain in Vermont, including Sugarbush, Killington, and Mount Snow. By 1997, Otten’s American Skiing Company owned property not only in New England, but in Colorado, Utah, and California as well. That November, Otten took ASC public. The IPO netted the company $244 million, and Otten retained majority ownership. He seemed to be at the peak of his power and influence. Ski Magazine named Otten one of the 100 most influential people of the century, and he was perhaps the ski industry’s most effective evangelist during the 1980s and much of the 1990s.

  Unfortunately for Otten, the story of the American Skiing Company did not end there, and within three years, much of his personal fortune and prescient acquisitions were undone by his pie-in-the-sky expansion plans. Vermont Magazine compared Otten’s company’s accumulation of debt to a “college student with a Visa.” Instead of focusing on skiing, Otten wanted all the money consumers spent on ski vacations—for lodging, meals, or entertainment—to be funneled through his company. Despite the fact that the ASC was recording millions of dollars of losses a year, Otten continued to snatch up resorts and dump money into hotels, condos, and on-mountain services, simultaneously endangering his company and fostering the resentment of truculent New Englanders not eager to see their once-pristine mountains transformed into high-end destinations. (“More Snow, Less Otten,” a popular bumper sticker from Otten’s expansion years, can still be seen decorating cars in some northern New England towns.)

  By 1999, consecutive bad ski seasons had left the American Skiing Company in danger of collapsing. The business Otten had built up from scratch was sagging under $400 million in debt; ASC’s stock, which initially traded at $18, had fallen to just over $1 per share. A Merrill Lynch analyst summed up the company’s problems succinctly: “management arrogance.” That year, Otten ceded majority control of the company to the Texas-based Oak Hill Capital Partners in return for a $150 million investment. By fall 2000, Otten, while still nominally connected with the company he built, had begun to cast around for his next adventure.*

  It was at virtually that moment, on October 6, 2000, that John Harrington announced that he had finally decided to put the Yawkey Trust’s 53 percent stake in the Red Sox up for sale. At first, Boston’s power brokers were stunned. While it was widely known that Jean Yawkey’s will compelled her charitable trust to sell the team at some point, Harrington didn’t appear to observers to be a man who was about to walk away from his position at the head of the Red Sox’s chain of command. “This announcement is obviously a bittersweet moment for me,” Harrington said that day. “I have said in the past that every kid under 15 wants to be Nomar [Garciaparra] and every kid over 40 wants to be me.”

  Harrington, who’d been accused of loving the limelight too much ever to sell the Yawkey Trust’s stake in the team, explained why he had waited almost a decade after Jean Yawkey’s death before putting the team on the block. “When I first took over the club in the early ’90s,” Harrington told the media that day, “baseball was in terrible shape. Teams were being sold on a regular basis. The economics of the game were lousy. [The Red Sox’s] television contract was terrible. That wasn’t the time to sell. Now all of that has changed. You don’t see teams being sold or up for sale.” Harrington did allow that he was saddened by the fact that it appeared the Red Sox would not win a championship while being formally associated with the family that had shaped and guided the team for much of the twentieth century. “It would have been great to win the World Series at least once with the Yawkey name still on the team,” he said. Publicly, Harrington said he hoped the sale could be completed by the start of spring training in 2001. Privately, he suspected the sale wouldn’t be completed until the end of the 2001 season, and he let himself hope that he might get one last chance to win it all for the Yawkeys.

  In either case, whether the sale took a couple of months or more than a year, John Harrington wasn’t walking off the stage just yet. He would, he announced, personally handle the negotiations for the sale with the help of Justin Morreale and Daniel Goldberg, the Red Sox’s and Yawkey Trust’s lawyers and partners at the venerable Boston law firm Bingham, Dana & Gould. Harrington, Morreale, and Goldberg would begin by doing background checks on prospective bidders to see if they had the financial heft and the moral character to own the team. Bidders who made it through their initial screening—and who plunked down a nonrefundable $25,000 fee required for the bid—would then be allowed to examine the team’s books.

  Like virtually everything connected with the Red Sox, the sale would not be a straightforward process. Unlike normal team sales, which are conducted through private negotiations, Harrington and his lawyers decided to c
onduct what was essentially an auction, with the highest qualified bidder winning the team. Even then, though, Harrington would not have the final say. Although the Yawkey Trust owned a majority of the Red Sox, it had, in a weird through-the-looking-glass arrangement, very little ultimate control over who would buy its stake in the team. That was to be decided by the seven limited partners who owned the other 47 percent of the Sox. Under the terms of the agreement governing the team, “the limiteds,” as they were called, had functional veto power over any new owner, who had to win 12 out of the 23 total votes controlled by these minority partners. After that, the sale, like the sale of any ball club, had to be approved by three-quarters of Major League Baseball’s 30 owners, and this, too, was far from a rubber-stamp process. In 1998, the charitable trust that took control of the Kansas City Royals following Ewing Kauffman’s death in 1993 agreed to sell the team to New York–based lawyer Miles Prentice for $75 million; the next year, baseball’s owners rejected Prentice’s bid because they were concerned he had too many partners and not enough money. Finally, because the Yawkey Trust’s proceeds from the sale would be used as seed money for The Yawkey Foundation, which would become one of the state’s largest private charities, Tom Reilly, the Massachusetts attorney general, would have to sign off on the sale as well.

  The sale of any sports team is almost guaranteed to be a big local story. Interest in the Red Sox’s sale was greatly enhanced by both the team’s unique place in New England’s collective unconscious and an escalating sense of anxiety about Boston’s national identity. By 2001, Boston, which for much of the nineteenth century had thought of itself as the most important city in the country, had been almost entirely transformed into a second-tier metropolis. As recently as the 1980s and 1990s, there were still a number of prominent national companies based in the area, including Continental Cablevision, which at one point in the mid-1990s was the third-largest cable operator in the country; Gillette, which was founded in Boston in 1901; and Wang Laboratories, which, at its peak in the 1980s, employed more than 30,000 people. But the Denver-based US West acquired Continental Cablevision in 1996, and Wang filed for bankruptcy in 1992 and was bought up by the Netherlands’ Getronics N.V. in 1999. Even Jordan Marsh, the venerable Boston department store that had been founded in the mid-nineteenth century, was acquired by (and eventually rebranded as) the New York–based Macy’s. Paul Grogan, the president and CEO of The Boston Foundation, a community group dedicated to “building and sustaining a vital, prosperous city and region,” acknowledged what was becoming the unavoidable truth when he said, “You find yourself in more and more conversations where people are referring to Boston as a branch office town.” Such a designation was devastating for Bostonians, who prided themselves on their sophistication and urbanity and desperately wanted to think of their hometown as an international attraction on par with London, Paris, or Rome. Boston, the branch office town? It was an embarrassing thought.