Less than a month after trading 1992 MVP candidate Gary Sheffield to the Marlins for a trio of minor leaguers that included Trevor Hoffman, Werner traded All-Star first baseman Fred McGriff to Atlanta for three nonprospects. The McGriff trade was the last straw that turned Werner into a pariah. The howls were especially loud in San Francisco. Leading the Braves by nine games at the time of the trade, the Giants were overtaken by the Braves in the season’s remaining sixty-eight games as McGriff hit .310 with 19 home runs and 55 RBIs. As fate would have it, San Francisco was eliminated on the final day of the season by the rival Los Angeles Dodgers. Ironically, the Giants themselves had benefited from another club’s poor financial standing when they lured superstar slugger Barry Bonds away from the Pirates with a six-year contract worth a record $43.75 million the previous offseason.
In the wake of the fire sale, Werner shrank from public view. As he grew less popular, he took strength from his nine-year-old son, Teddy, who late one night called a local talk radio show that had spent the better part of the evening blistering his father. Werner peeked into his son’s bedroom and saw that the light was out, but the trail of the phone cord was peeking out from under Teddy’s covers. The son was defending the father. “Other than that,” Werner said, “the first go-round in San Diego was clearly one of the worst experiences of my life.”
Werner, who bought the Padres for just $75 million, would eventually sell the team following the 1994 season to a group that included Larry Lucchino. Nearly a decade later, Lucchino and Werner would become partners as co-owners (along with John Henry) in purchasing the Red Sox for $700 million.
FOR BUD Selig, the man chosen to replace Fay Vincent, Kohler had been disastrous. Selig was an insider whose greatest skill was forging compromise, but he had never seen ownership as fractured as it was in Wisconsin. The summit left him shaken. If Selig looked at Kohler as his first, biggest test as commissioner, he could not evaluate the two days as anything but an abject failure. “Revenue sharing then was inconceivable. It was a war. I couldn’t get the clubs to sit in the same room,” Selig recalled years later. “It was very sad. It was the most painful three days I’d ever been through. The large markets never came over. The small sat in the middle. That’s how ugly it was.” Jerry Reinsdorf embodied the attitude for the coming years with a bitter post-Kohler assessment. “In the past, we’ve made decisions that were good for the industry and not necessarily good for the White Sox,” he said. “That’s history. I’ll only think about what’s good for the White Sox from now on.”
The Kohler disaster not only resonated inside the game, as tempers flared, but also turned off potential investors. Irving Grousbeck, one of the founding fathers of cable television, wanted nothing more than to own a baseball team. Like so many before him, Grousbeck had long tried to enter the game, but simply could not find the right combination to unlock its closed door. He tried to buy the Red Sox in the mid-1970s after Tom Yawkey’s death, but Commissioner Bowie Kuhn ordered the team to Yawkey’s widow, Jean, who was ambivalent at best about baseball. A year before Kohler, Grousbeck tried to buy the San Francisco Giants. The Giants were in a state of disaster, and seemed poised to move to St. Petersburg, Florida. Grousbeck saw the Giants’ finances, however, and became the anti-Werner. “Someone back in Econ 101 told me that you don’t pay $100 million to lose $12 million per year,” Grousbeck said, and walked away from baseball forever. He would wait another decade before purchasing the Boston Celtics for an NBA record $360 million.
IF, IN 1993, there were no real signs that the coming decade would become tainted by steroid use and an offensive surge so pronounced that the game’s hallowed record book would be in danger of losing its integrity, Jerry Reinsdorf’s proclamation following Kohler, that he would only consider his own self-interest, would serve as something of a mantra for the rest of the decade. Get what you can, no matter what the consequences. As the 1990s progressed toward both unprecedented home run totals and doubts about the legitimacy of the feats of some of the biggest names in the sport, numerous acute baseball men would point to this period without fondness as the first sign of a new age. Records would soon fall, new legends would be built, and, for a time, the sheer accumulation of accomplishment would prove more important than how those feats were achieved. If the game’s leadership did not willfully encourage the erosion of baseball’s credibility, neither, because Reinsdorf’s dream of having an owner serve as commissioner was fulfilled, was there anyone left in a position of moral authority to stop it. By turning on Vincent in the fashion they did, the owners left their sport to be dangerously governed solely by market forces.
All that was left was the imminent showdown with players. The failure at Kohler dampened the victory in ousting Vincent a year earlier, but the owners, led by Bud Selig and Jerry Reinsdorf, had come too far not to initiate the final confrontation with the union, a collision that would have deep, lasting, and unforeseen consequences for the entire decade and beyond.
CHAPTER TWO
On August 12, 1994, the seven hundred members of the Major League Baseball Players Association went on strike, and, at least publicly, members of the Expos front office were unconcerned. Richard Griffin, who had worked for the Expos for years, thought about parallels to 1981, when the players struck for fifty days. That was an especially bitter time, as the Expos were a baseball powerhouse that year, a status they rarely enjoyed over their twenty-five-year history. The team had always struggled to exist in Montreal but was finally showing promise, with a nucleus of young players that, if allowed to remain together, could have gelled into a dynasty. The Expos qualified for the postseason in 1981 for the first time and stunned the defending World Series champion Phillies in a mini-playoff. Out of sync, they then lost to the Dodgers in the National League Championship Series. Within a few seasons, the Expos would fall out of contention and their greatest players, Gary Carter, Andre Dawson, and Tim Raines, would go on to star for other teams: Carter won a World Series with the Mets in 1986, Dawson won an MVP for the Cubs the next year, and Raines would win a pair of titles with the New York Yankees of the late 1990s. The similarities to 1994 were staggering. The 1994 Expos were not only good, but arguably the best team in baseball, with the most young talent in the game. Baseball men everywhere predicted they were going to be great for years. When the strike hit, Kevin Malone, the team’s general manager, called for patience. Surely, he told the public, fate would not conspire to rob the Expos of their moment of glory again.
On August 11, the day before the darkness, Pittsburgh shut out the Expos 4-0. The loss dropped them to 74-40 on the year, but did nothing to dampen the team’s spirits. They had won their previous six games and twenty of their previous twenty-two. They had the best record in baseball, and were peaking. Two days earlier, a young pitcher named Pedro Martinez had taken the mound for Montreal and shut out Pittsburgh for 8⅔ innings, winning 4-0. “We were so good,” recalled Moises Alou, “that when we were stretching on the road, it was like we knew we were going to kick that team’s ass. And the other team knew it, too.”
When the games were canceled, Kevin Malone walked into the visitors’ clubhouse at Three Rivers Stadium and told his players to stay sharp, stay focused, and not wander too far. He stood in the middle of the room and told the players not to worry; the strike would end in a couple of days and they would resume their assault on the National League and head to the playoffs. Malone looked at Martinez, who then was but the third starter in the rotation, and told him to be ready, for the stretch drive awaited. “Stick around, fellas,” Malone said. “This one isn’t going to last very long.” The Montreal manager, Felipe Alou, echoed the same. “All they told us,” Pedro Martinez later recalled, “was to be ready for the next game and there was no next game.”
Nineteen ninety-four was supposed to be the culmination of a charge to the top of the baseball world that had begun in the final weeks of the previous season, when the Expos had engineered a dramatic but unsuccessful run at Philadelphia for the
division title. On August 17, 1993, less than a week after the owners’ disastrous meeting at Kohler, the Expos lost the first game of a doubleheader to the Cubs at Wrigley Field. The loss dropped them to 62-57 on the season, good for third place, 13½ games behind the Phillies. Then they took off, winning 32 of their final 43 games to come within three games of winning the division. Nineteen ninety-four was even more dramatic. In the newly realigned National League East, Atlanta began the season 13-1, while the Expos started in the basement, losing 9 of 13. By May 10, the Braves’ lead was down to 3½ games. By June 27, when the two clubs met for a charged three-game series in Montreal, the Atlanta lead was 1½ games. On July 8, the Expos’ Kirk Rueter shut out San Diego 14-0, while the Cardinals beat the mighty Greg Maddux. The division was tied. Two days later, Moises Alou hit two home runs in an 8-2 rout of the Padres, and the Expos led the division for the first time all year.
Over the next month, the Expos won 20 of 27. This wasn’t just a hot team taking off, thought Terry Pendleton, the Braves’ third baseman, but one of those special moments in time when potential is transformed into performance literally in front of your eyes. Pendleton had witnessed it firsthand just a few years earlier, when the Braves went from a last-place team in 1990 to the World Series the following year. Even after the All-Star break in 1991, the Braves were happy just to be a .500 team. They then finished the season winning 55 of their last 77 games, starting a streak of intradivision dominance unseen in baseball history.
By the time of the strike, the Expos had blown past Atlanta, opening up a six-game lead. Martinez, all of twenty-two years old, would win his final five decisions to begin a nine-year period of dominance that would make him not only the best pitcher of his era, but one of the greatest ever. Nine players off that club would become All-Stars. One, Larry Walker, would be a National League MVP. Another, John Wetteland, would be the MVP of the World Series two years later with the Yankees, where he would be teammates with Tim Raines. Pitcher Jeff Fassero was the only man on the Expos’ twenty-five-man roster who had reached his thirtieth birthday. The Expos, thought David Justice, then of the rival Braves, were a dynasty in the making.
“They had everything,” Justice said. “You were scared of everything they could do. They could pitch, hit, run, everything. What happened to that team was the biggest shame of the whole thing.”
The Expos were not just fighting the Braves. They were fighting to survive. Kohler had revealed the deep philosophical chasm among the owners, and the Expos were living proof of it. To George Steinbrenner, the Expos, with their meager revenues and deep farm system, were the worst-case scenario of revenue sharing: a team with little money, but an abundance of talent. Why, Steinbrenner often lamented, should he give money to teams that were already well equipped to beat him?
Privately, Expos management knew better than to expect a short strike, and within a short time, the players knew it, too. “Whatever they told each other,” Martinez would say later, “they weren’t telling us. The truth was we weren’t going back that year.” Though their fundamental disagreements still existed, the owners temporarily forfeited their dislike of one another to focus on the players and, for nearly two years, struck a chord of unity throughout. Martinez knew the strike would not only wipe out the season, but quite possibly the future of baseball in Montreal. The Expos were barely breaking even financially and were in desperate need of the type of on-field excitement that 1994 brought. Participating in their first World Series, winning a playoff round, or simply making it to the postseason could have been the difference between survival and death.
There were those in the Montreal front office who believed the Expos were already being targeted for extinction. Donald Fehr, the head of the Players Association, had publicly stated that Montreal and Pittsburgh, because of shrinking revenues and a perceived inability to compete with the more financially muscular clubs in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and suddenly Cleveland, should be candidates for relocation. For their part, Expos executives, especially the native Canadians, were embittered by the rising belief that Montreal was a bad baseball town, a belief that ignored the city’s long baseball tradition. Montreal was where a young Jackie Robinson first played minor league ball after signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers, beginning a love affair between Robinson and the city. Montreal had always enjoyed considerable mileage from Robinson, but the city had also shown that it would support a competitive club. During the ten-game homestand in which they overtook Atlanta, the Expos averaged thirty thousand fans per game.
Geoff Baker, a Montreal native who would later become a writer for the Toronto Star, remembered being a college student during the Expos’ summer run. He would never forget the opener of that June showdown with the Braves, when the Expos’ arrival was complete. The lead was down to 2½ games, and the team’s aces, Ken Hill and Greg Maddux, were locked in a taut 1-1 game. In the seventh, the Expos exploded for four runs off Maddux, capped by a long home run by Cliff Floyd as the fans mocked the Tomahawk Chop, Atlanta’s signature rally chant. To Baker, the electricity at le Stade Olympique that season rivaled anything in New York, Boston, or St. Louis, long the proud centers of the baseball universe. Barring a trip through the playoffs and World Series, there would be no more glorious moment in Expos history, Baker thought. The best part was that there were 45,291 diehard Expos fans in the house. They were Canadians, and they belonged.
As the strike commenced, owners across the game brimmed with confidence, bolstered by their newfound solidarity. Richard Griffin, who worked in the Expos front office for twenty years before leaving the club following the strike, believed neither baseball nor the Expos owners ever fully explained to Malone and Alou the depths of the conflict. “They were allowed to believe in this magical season, but everyone upstairs knew it was over the day the players walked. There is no doubt in my mind that the strike killed baseball in Montreal forever.”
FOR THE first two months of 1994, Matt Williams had been hitting the ball, in player speak, on the screws. To his San Francisco teammates he seemed to be in one of those special zones in which a hitter makes almost perfect contact with every ball he hits. There were no jam jobs where the ball ran in so hard on the hands that he couldn’t get around on it, nor was Williams so far out in front of off-speed pitches that he popped cue shots off the end of the bat. His hands were so quick that it was rare when a pitcher was able to throw a fastball hard enough inside to break his bat. Everything he hit that year, it seemed, was on the fat part of the barrel.
Every hitter goes through such streaks. Not only are they the most glorious times a hitter could have, but they make up for those inevitable periods when he suffers through slumps so terrible it appears he couldn’t hit the ball off a tee. Yet as Memorial Day rolled around, Williams seemed to grow even hotter. His manager, Dusty Baker, had played nineteen years in the big leagues and was not easily given to hyperbole, especially where home runs were concerned. When Baker first came up with the Atlanta Braves, his mentor was none other than Hank Aaron. Baker was a teammate and confidant of Aaron’s during Aaron’s greatest and most treacherous moments chasing Babe Ruth’s career record of 714 homers. Now, Baker watched Williams end the month of May with 15 home runs. It - wasn’t the sort of total that got anyone particularly excited, but what caught Baker’s eye was Williams’s consistency. The hot streak could no longer be considered just a streak. Streaks rarely last two months, especially for a slugger like Williams. Even so early in the season, it began to dawn on Baker that Williams might just have a shot at Roger Maris’s single-season mark of 61 home runs, the most hallowed of all baseball records. “Matty that year was just locked in. Everything he hit, man, was hard. He was on everything, and didn’t miss anything.”
As with Maris thirty-three years before him, there was no prior evidence that suggested Matt Williams would one day challenge the single-season home run record. Williams had once been the Giants’ heir apparent, the farm system phenom destined to return a moribund franchise to greatne
ss, yet he was always struck by some maddening injury. Although Williams was an excellent fielder, his durability was often questioned early in his career before he established himself at the plate with 33 home runs and 122 RBIs in 1990. In the four seasons since, Williams had become the blue-collar mainstay of a team that always seemed to feature more glamorous stars.
Like Maris, Williams did not possess the larger-than-life character that would make him a suitable heir to the Babe. Whereas Maris was a country boy uncomfortable with the cosmopolitan vibe of New York, Williams was balding and unspectacular, looking more like an electrician than a slugger. Likewise, just as Maris was marginalized by the presence of the speedy, switch-hitting Mickey Mantle, Williams also found himself overshadowed by a teammate. In his case, it was Barry Bonds, who at the time was considered nothing less than the best, not to mention the best-paid, player in the game. Bonds was flashy, a powerful slugger, a base stealer, and a dynamic fielder who could beat his opponents in virtually - every phase of the game. He was also a player who, at least during the regular season, tended to grow with each moment. When Bonds returned to his native San Francisco in 1993 after seven years in Pittsburgh, the Giants enjoyed a renaissance, posting their best record since the days of John McGraw as Bonds nearly carried them to a pennant with one clutch moment after the next.
Once, while still with the Pirates, Bonds beat St. Louis with a dramatic home run. As soon as he made contact, he knew the ball was gone and threw both arms in the air before even leaving the batter’s box. In the era of twenty-four-hour cable sports networks, in which images were seared into the collective memory due not only to their significance, but also to the sheer frequency of their repetition, the home run made for a classic ESPN moment. Years later, his status as a legendary manager well established, the Yankees’ Joe Torre liked to remind those who dwelled on Bonds’s postseason failures of that moment, which came when Torre was managing the Cardinals. “You know that clip you see a million times with him throwing his arms in the air? Well, he did it against me, so don’t say Barry Bonds can’t beat you. He beat me.”
Juicing the Game Page 4
