One on One

by John Feinstein

  I liked Vincent. We argued about politics all the time, but I thought he was 100 percent right in his views on what was going on in baseball. One of the reasons I gave my book Play Ball the subtitle The Life and Troubled Times of Major League Baseball was because I believed Vincent was right that there was serious trouble ahead. A couple of reviewers called me an alarmist—although the book actually got very good reviews, considerably better overall than the tennis book.

  In August of 1994 the players went on strike because the owners were trying to unilaterally invoke a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA). The World Series was canceled and spring training began in 1995 with “replacement players”—scabs in big league training camps. It was only after future Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor—then a Federal Court judge in Minnesota—ruled that the owners could not unilaterally impose a new CBA and that the players could return to work under the terms of the old one that the strike finally ended.

  Just as Vincent had predicted, baseball took a huge hit because the owners decided to buy into Ravitch’s notion that they could break the union. Ravitch was fired soon after the strike ended, but the damage had been done: a lost World Series, one-third of a season lost, and most important, many fans lost.

  On a number of occasions during the strike, politicians got involved, including President Clinton asking both sides to meet with him at the White House. I was actually asked to testify before a congressional subcommittee that was looking into the possibility of revoking baseball’s antitrust exemption. Believing all along that the owners were wrong, I sat in front of the committee and explained why. The person testifying at the same time was Bud Selig.

  I had gotten to know Selig well during the 1992 season. In those days he would wander through the press box in old Milwaukee County Stadium each night and trade barbs with the local media. He worked out of a tiny, cluttered office, and when he talked about how much he loved baseball and how much it had meant to him to bring it back to Milwaukee five years after the Braves had fled to Atlanta, you could absolutely feel his sincerity.

  That said, Bud was no different than any other owner: he wanted to weaken the union and, in his dreams, he wanted a salary cap—which still hasn’t happened in baseball, unlike in the three other major sports.

  Not long after Vincent had been ousted by the owners, I was on Chet Coppock’s radio show in Chicago discussing the situation. Most people I knew in the game believed that the overthrow of Vincent had been initiated and led by White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf. Jokingly I said, “If you look very carefully when Bud Selig’s talking you can see Jerry Reinsdorf pulling on the strings.”

  It was a throwaway line designed to make the point that Reinsdorf was wielding most of the power back then, even if Selig had the acting commissioner title. I finished the interview, hung up the phone, and thirty seconds later the phone rang. I figured it was Mark Gentzkow, the show’s producer, who always called to thank me after I made an appearance.

  It wasn’t Mark. It was Bud Selig. He was a regular Coppock listener up in Milwaukee, and he’d been listening.

  “How can you say that about me, John? It’s just not true,” he said.

  I was genuinely caught off guard. Needless to say, I was surprised that Bud would even care enough to pick up the phone and call, but I heard what sounded like genuine hurt in his voice.

  “Bud, I’m sorry, I was exaggerating to make a point,” I said. “I’m not exactly the only person who thinks Reinsdorf was the driving force behind Fay getting dumped.”

  We got into a lengthy debate on the subject. There was no shouting; in fact it was very valuable for me to hear in detail what Bud thought. We hung up with no hard feelings.

  A little more than two years later, with Bud still the acting commissioner—he wasn’t officially named commissioner until 1998, after he’d been on the job for six years—we were face-to-face, or at least side-by-side, in a congressional hearing room. At one point as I was explaining to the committee why I thought the owners were to blame for the work stoppage and had in fact hired Ravitch specifically to go to war with the players, Bud sat back in his chair, put his hand on the microphone, and said, “Do you really believe that? You can’t believe that!”

  I sat back, put my hand on the microphone and said, “Absolutely, I believe it.”

  After we were finished testifying, Bud and I engaged in another debate, this one in the hallway outside the hearing room. David Cone was standing there as we talked but didn’t say a word. The commissioner arguing with me was about as newsy as February coming after January. One of the leaders of the players union arguing with the commissioner would have been entirely different.

  When we finally decided to agree to disagree, Bud put out his hand and said, “Let’s get together sometime soon for dinner.”

  Okay, seriously, how can you not like a guy like that? We had just almost screamed at each other while testifying before Congress and his parting shot is “let’s get together for dinner.” It wasn’t a matter of Bud trying to court someone in the media; it was just who Bud was, and is—just as the phone call when his feelings were genuinely hurt was who Bud was.

  Almost seventeen years after we had testified before Congress, Bud and I had a long talk about his stewardship as commissioner. To say that a lot had happened in those intervening years is a vast understatement. Bud had successfully pushed for expansion of the playoffs to include two wild-card teams. He had successfully pushed for interleague play. Both were notions that horrified baseball purists but were major steps forward for the sport and added to its popularity.

  He had also overseen the entirety of the “steroids era,” from the 1998 home run barrage led by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa—both outed later as steroid users—to the Mitchell Report to (finally) a comprehensive drug-testing policy. He had stood, literally, with his hands in his pockets and watched Barry Bonds trot around the bases after tying Henry Aaron’s record as the all-time home run king. He wasn’t there a few nights later when Bonds broke the record, leaving arguably the greatest record in sports in tatters, tainted by steroids.

  “Sometimes I get genuinely angry when people say we stood by and did nothing about steroids,” he said. “It isn’t as simple as people think. You have to get the union to agree to drug testing, and I think even the union would now admit that they dragged their feet. We moved as quickly as we could when we could. When it was clear that things had gotten out of hand, I went to my good friend Senator [George] Mitchell and asked him to undertake an investigation, and he did it. Remember, the union wouldn’t cooperate with him at all. He did an absolutely marvelous job.”

  At seventy-seven, Bud still has boundless enthusiasm. He still loves the game. He still refers to almost everyone whose name he brings up as his “good friend.” John Fetzer, the former owner of the Detroit Tigers, was not only his good friend but his “mentor and teacher” when he first owned the Brewers in the 1970s. Bud has only good things to say about people—with one notable exception: Fay Vincent.

  I asked him if he and Vincent had ever made up after Selig and the other owners had overthrown him. Vincent has written books about what went wrong with baseball and has been outspoken for years about the mistakes made by Selig and the other owners.

  “No, I never did,” Selig said. “I know Fay loves the game, and he has a lot of opinions on the game, but…. Let me just say this: it’s my belief that an ex-commissioner should be like an ex-president. He should step aside and let whoever has succeeded him try to do the best job they can. I really don’t think I should say much more than that.”

  That said, it is impossible not to tease Bud about the six years he spent as “acting commissioner” and the fact that he has now been on the job for almost twenty years. Stan Kasten, the former president of the Braves and Nationals, likes to joke that Bud will remain commissioner even in the afterlife.

  “I know, I know,” he said, laughing. “The day after we voted and the other owners asked me to take the acting j
ob, I flew home to Milwaukee from St. Louis and my wife picked me up at the airport. As soon as I got in the car, the first thing she said was, ‘Buddy, what is this and how long is it going to go on?’ I said, ‘It’ll just be a few months—tops.’ She was skeptical and I guess you’d have to say with good reason.

  “But look, when I took over I think the game was stagnating. We had labor issues, obviously, and the strike [of 1994 and 1995] and the lost World Series [1994] is still one of my most painful memories. It was a terrible thing for everyone. I remember testifying that day in Congress and feeling sick, just sick about the whole thing.

  “But look at the progress we’ve made. The wild card has worked wonders. Interleague play has been great. The steroid thing was awful, but we’ve got the strongest drug-testing program in sports now. We’re breaking attendance records. We’ve got great energy in the game again. I’m proud of what we’ve done.”

  His current term as commissioner is due to end in 2012. Will that finally be it? “I’ll be almost eighty,” he said. “I feel great but I have lots of things I want to do. I thought I’d be in the job a few months. It’ll be twenty years. I know a lot of people don’t believe me when I say it, but, yes, I’m going to retire.”

  Really?

  “Really,” he said. “Of course my wife doesn’t believe me either, so if you don’t, I’ll understand.”

  IT WAS FIFTEEN YEARS after Play Ball before I got around to writing another baseball book (Living on the Black), but I still spent a lot of time around ballparks—in part to write columns for various publications, in part because I never stopped enjoying it.

  The two guys I always tried to go and see when I had the chance were Joe Torre and Bobby Cox. When Torre took over the Yankees in 1996, in spite of my lifelong affection for the Mets, I couldn’t help but pull for him—and, thus, for his team. I was actually torn during the 1996 World Series because part of me wanted to see Cox and the Braves win back-to-back but part of me wanted to see Torre win, since it was his first shot at a World Series as either a player or a manager and I had no idea at the time that he was going to win four of the next five.

  What Torre and Cox had in common, besides being great storytellers, was their honesty. Both had been around the game so long that they didn’t worry about saying the wrong thing. They would tell you who they thought was good and who they didn’t think was good. When Torre pulled Mike Mussina out of the starting rotation in 2007, Mussina was upset with the way it came down. Torre walked into a small room off the main area of the clubhouse where Mussina was sitting about fifteen minutes before a game began and said, “We’re going to have [Phil] Hughes take your start on Saturday.”

  Stunned, Mussina said, “Is this a one-shot deal?”

  Torre shook his head. “Right now I’d say no.”

  Mussina thought he deserved more than the ninety seconds Torre spent with him to learn he would be skipped for the first time in a sixteen-year Major League career.

  “He was right,” Torre said when I asked him about it. “It happened fast. We had a meeting in which we made the decision to go with the kid [Hughes], and I had to get onto the field. I didn’t want to take a chance that one of my guys [coaches] might say something to the media after the game and Moose would end up hearing it from a reporter.

  “But I screwed up. I should have made time and talked it through with him so he understood. I have a feeling he still wouldn’t have liked it, but there’s no doubt I could have handled it a lot better.”

  Both Torre and Cox had decided that 2010 was going to be their last season. Torre was turning seventy on July 18 and was wisely concerned about the future of his last team, the Dodgers, because of the chaotic and expensive divorce the team’s owners, Frank and Jamie McCourt, were going through. Cox, who is ten months younger than Torre, had simply decided it was time. He had been managing almost nonstop since 1971, starting in the Yankees’ minor league system before managing the Braves, the Blue Jays, and the Braves again—for almost twenty-one years the second time. He had announced at the end of the 2009 season that 2010 would be his last. Torre waited until two weeks prior to the end of the season to make his exit official.

  But Torre knew all along he was going to leave. “Unless something drastic happens that I can’t think of right now, this will be it,” he said to me on a Sunday morning in late April. His team was in Washington for a weekend series with the Nationals, and Torre, not being your typical jock, had spent the early part of the day watching the taping of Meet the Press.

  We had started out talking about being an older father. I was about to become one, he had become one fourteen years earlier. “Here’s the hardest thing,” he said, sitting down in an armchair. “When they’re old enough to roll a ball but not throw a ball, you’re going to want to sit in the chair and roll the ball with them. But after a while you’re going to hear, ‘Daddy, sit on the floor with me.’ That’s really not so bad until your legs start to lock up and go to sleep.

  “But what’s really bad is when you have to try to stand up.”

  Torre had left the Yankees in the fall of 2007 after taking the team to the playoffs for twelve straight seasons and going to six World Series, winning four of them. He had written a book with Tom Verducci that chronicled in detail his relationship with George Steinbrenner, the Steinbrenner family, and general manager Brian Cashman. The book was extremely well done because Verducci is very good at what he does and because Torre allowed him to write it in the third person, meaning he could do a lot of reporting independent of Torre.

  The book had been a major bestseller, but some in New York had sniped at Torre, saying he shouldn’t have burned his bridges with the Yankees. Torre sighed.

  “I knew that would come up, but I just told the truth about what happened and how I felt,” he said. “If you read it, I didn’t kill anybody, I just told Tom how I felt about the whole thing. Walking into that room in Tampa [the day he had his last meeting with the Steinbrenners and Cashman] was one of the toughest things I ever did in my life. After five minutes, I knew it was over.”

  In fact, Torre said, midway through that season he told his assistant to start quietly packing up things in his Yankee Stadium office. He didn’t want to have to go back there when the end came and he was convinced the end was coming at the conclusion of the season. He had signed on to manage the Dodgers about fifteen minutes after leaving the Yankees—an interesting final twist for a kid who had grown up as a Giants fan in Brooklyn when the Dodgers were still there. In 2008 and 2009 the Dodgers had extended Torre’s postseason streak to fourteen years (matching Cox’s mark with the Braves), losing to the Philadelphia Phillies in the National League Championship Series both years.

  But with the McCourts’ divorce putting the team in a financial bind and injuries making life on the field difficult, Torre had decided enough was enough even though he hadn’t made it public yet. His coaches, including Don Mattingly, his handpicked successor, knew. So did his wife, Ali, who had been pushing him to give it up for a number of years.

  “I’d come home upset about something or frustrated, and she’d just look at me and say, ‘Let’s just go to Hawaii,’ ” he said. “The thought crossed my mind, especially those last few years in New York. Now though, I’m ready.”

  He had no plans to return to broadcasting, which is what he had done for five years after being fired in Atlanta before getting the managing job in St. Louis. “I liked it,” he said. “But if I’m going to travel like that, why wouldn’t I just keep managing?”

  Managing the Dodgers—having success with the Dodgers—was important to Torre. There are always going to be people who will claim he won with the Yankees because of an unlimited budget. The fact that the Yankees hadn’t won a World Series since 1978, before he became the manager in 1996, is just coincidence, they will tell you. Those who know better will point out that Torre was a very good manager in Atlanta—where he won a division title after succeeding Cox in 1982, the Braves’ first postseason appea
rance in thirteen years—and in St. Louis. The Yankees certainly had more assets. Torre made the most of them.

  “Managing George [Steinbrenner] was a big part of what I did,” he said. “It never pissed me off when he’d call and rant or come into my office and rant. I just figured it was his team, he had the right to do that whenever he wanted. But after he was through, my job was to talk him off the ledge. Most of the time I’d just tell him, ‘George, we’re going to be okay.’ ”

  In the end, the irony of Torre’s leaving the Yankees was that it happened because Steinbrenner, the renowned manager killer, had to give up control of the team to his sons and to Cashman because of health issues. For all his complaining and threatening, Steinbrenner clearly knew deep down that Torre was the best manager he had ever had. The sons didn’t get that. They thought their money made the Yankees successful. So they offered Torre a one-year contract for 2008, knowing he had too much pride to accept it.

  Torre went to the Dodgers and the Yankees hired Joe Girardi. A year later the Dodgers were in postseason and the Yankees weren’t—for the first time since 1993 (there were no playoffs in 1994). The Yankees bounced back to win the World Series a year later, but lost the 2010 ALCS to Texas and headed into 2011 with almost as many questions on their pitching staff as the Mets had about their finances.

  I asked Torre on that bright Sunday morning in Washington if this was truly it and if he would walk away when the season was over and not look back. He laughed. “I never say never,” he said. “But that’s certainly the plan. I’ve been promising Ali and [daughter] Andrea this for a long time. I’ve been in the game pretty much nonstop for more than fifty years. I’ll still be around, still do some consulting or something. But I think the days in uniform are over.”

  As the season wound down, even before Torre formally announced his retirement from the Dodgers, there were all sorts of rumors about his future: The Mets needed a manager, maybe he would go back to where his managing career began and try to stick the needle into the Yankees’ side from across the Triborough Bridge. The Cubs had lots of money, maybe he would go there.