That the public tended to view owners as malicious was the one vital edge the players historically had enjoyed. In 1981, when the players walked out on the season for fifty days, there was a community of fans, media, and even some in the executive ranks that understood the necessity of the strike. Free agency was less than a decade old and ownership was convinced that the monument hadn’t stood long enough to be considered indestructible. In 1981, there were dozens of active players who had begun their careers before free agency and a handful more, such as union pillars Jim Kaat and Mark Belanger, who had entered baseball before Marvin Miller. In 2004, Miller, then in his late eighties, maintained his original position that the strike of 1981 was the most principled strike he had ever been a part of.
To Gene Orza, ownership’s goal in 1994 was the same as it had been in 1981: to break the union. Yet somehow ownership’s malfeasance did not translate as unscrupulously as it had in the past. Few fans possessed enough historical perspective to understand that ownership had been trying to impose a salary cap since the mid-1980s. This time, it looked more like two equal powerhouses fighting for the sake of hundreds of millions of dollars at the expense of the working public. A week after baseball canceled the remainder of the season and the World Series, with the players having been on strike for forty-one days, Lou Whitaker, the Detroit Tigers second baseman, arrived at a negotiating session in Tampa in a silky white stretch limousine. When confronted about how that might look, Whitaker responded, “What’s going to make me look bad? This is me, just like Tom Selleck. You play seventeen years with the salaries we get, you get the benefits.”
The conclusions drawn about World War I by gifted New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik seemed particularly pertinent to 1994. “It is not that wars are always wrong,” he wrote. “It is that wars are always wars, good for destroying things that must be destroyed, as in 1864 or 1944, but useless for doing anything more, and no good at all for doing cultural work: saving the national honor, proving that we’re not a second-rate power, avenging old humiliations, demonstrating resolve, or any of the rest of the empty vocabulary of self-improvement through mutual slaughter.”
Later in the summer of 1995, after the games had resumed and the two sides had agreed to work out a new Basic Agreement, Don Fehr received a letter. It was from Marvin Miller, requesting an update on the contract negotiations. Fehr’s reply was emblematic of the pessimism that pervaded the previous year. On August 8, Fehr responded to Miller in longhand. “Marvin, you asked: ‘How goes the unilateral quest for a contract?’ Reread Cervantes. Except, when you do, superimpose the notion that Don Quixote knows he is on a useless endeavor. So it goes.”
AND SO it went. Meanwhile, Bill Gould recalled an informal meeting at the White House in late 1994. In a light moment, President Clinton looked at Gould and told him, “If you guys can get these two sides to settle this thing, they’ll make me president for life.” What Clinton did not know was that he had already guaranteed that his impact would be felt on baseball for years to come. That October, with the World Series wiped out, Clinton signed into law the Dietary Supplements Health and Education Act, known as DSHEA, which had passed unanimously through both the House and the Senate. The bill was the brainchild of Republican senator Orrin Hatch and was ostensibly designed to provide consumers with a greater choice of medicinal remedies. It did not seem particularly important at the time, but DSHEA shifted the burden of proof concerning a product’s safety from the manufacturer to the Food and Drug Administration. Instead of a company’s having to prove its newest dietary supplements were safe, now the FDA, an often overburdened government agency, was forced to prove such products were not. The result of DSHEA would be a billion-dollar supplement industry that produced many muscle-building products that would soon become popular with professional athletes. While unknown at the time, DSHEA would to a large degree create a medicine cabinet the likes of which the sports world had never seen.
CHAPTER THREE
Bud Selig had wanted into baseball for much of his life, everyone he didn’t want the commissionership. He recalled taking the job on one condition, that he would be able to run the game from his hometown of Milwaukee and come to work every day to the Firstar Building, a vertical rectangle with an exterior that resembled graph paper. But Fay Vincent always believed that his greatest tactical error was underestimating just how badly Selig secretly wanted his job. Now that Vincent, who frequently referred to himself as “the last commissioner,” was gone, the game sank into ruin on Selig’s watch. It began with Kohler and continued with the strike. Selig’s spring 1995 decision to have replacement players on the field instead of stars such as Cal Ripken, Ken Griffey Jr., and Roger Clemens could have been disastrous. The imagery that scenario produced was chilling: a replacement player standing in for Ripken on the September day when the Oriole great was scheduled to break Lou Gehrig’s cherished consecutive-games streak. Even the resumption of play in 1995 did not seem to produce any political windfall for Selig, as it would not have happened without Sonia Sotomayor and the National Labor Relations Board’s intervention. When the 1995 season finally did begin, it did so without a contract. Play resumed while negotiations continued. The two sides would not reach a new agreement until after the 1996 season.
Now that he was in charge, Selig was no longer affable old Bud, the person everyone in the game could call and rely on for warmth, and it wore on him. He was convinced that 1994 was the loneliest year of his life. Even in Milwaukee, where he was a sacred hometown hero, the man who brought baseball back after the Braves left for Atlanta, he was now the Man Who Canceled the World Series. Waiting for him each week in his office on the thirtieth floor of the Firstar Building were bags of letters, maybe ten thousand of them, from fans vowing never to return. Selig’s explanation, that he dealt the final blow to the season not because the owners had chosen to stop negotiating but because the game’s television partners needed answers (and programming) in case baseball would not be played in the fall, did not matter. His protestations fell on deaf ears. He was the commissioner. He was the guy on national TV killing the season. He would have to shoulder the blame.
What Selig really needed were victories. The game needed rebuilding and he was the man in charge. Or was he? He was already being criticized as a puppet, a charge that wounded him. It was said that it was really Chicago’s Jerry Reinsdorf who wielded true power in the game. The notion of Selig as something less than an inspiring leader would not disappear, even as his power base solidified.
ALLAN HUBER Selig was born in Milwaukee on July 30, 1934. The nickname Bud had been with him almost since the day he was born, when he arrived home from the hospital and his mother said to Selig’s older brother, Jerry, “There, now you have a buddy.” Selig’s father, Ben, was a Ford dealer. Bud’s original plan, after graduating from the University of Wisconsin (where he roomed with future U.S. senator Herb Kohl), had been to become a professor, but Ben Selig asked his son to join the family business and Bud reluctantly agreed because, as he once said, he could never say no to his father. Shortly thereafter, the younger Selig sold the dealership to concentrate on returning baseball to Wisconsin.
Selig had been taken by baseball as a youth watching Henry Aaron and Eddie Mathews with the Milwaukee Braves. When the Braves left bitterly after the 1965 season, he was thirty-one years old and became instantly committed to returning baseball to his hometown. He was nothing if not persistent, pressing baseball to consider Milwaukee for an expansion franchise. He was behind organizing efforts on numerous fronts, once engineering ten Chicago White Sox games to be played in Milwaukee as an audition for a potential White Sox move from Chicago or for baseball’s next round of expansion. His attempt to buy the White Sox failed, as did his bid for an expansion franchise in 1969, losing out to San Diego and Kansas City. Finally, when the Seattle Pilots folded after their inaugural 1969 season, Selig’s group pounced, buying the team for $10.8 million and moving them to Milwaukee
Bud Selig ran the club, but
the true power behind the Brewers in those days was Ed Fitzgerald, a longtime baseball man and a member of the Brewers’ ownership group who introduced Selig to the baseball world. Still, for his tirelessness in pounding the flesh of the cartel of owners to return baseball to Milwaukee, Selig became a prominent figure in Milwaukee. He was also the preeminent executive figure in Wisconsin sports, as he also served on the board of the publicly owned Green Bay Packers.
Selig cultivated for himself a small-town feel, for years driving a mid-sized Chevrolet Caprice instead of a car of greater opulence. He was a storyteller, and seemed to enjoy more than anything else being part of the closed world of the baseball fraternity. He liked to tell people that he had the same lunch every day, a $1.50 hot dog with mustard and relish and a Diet Coke from Gilles Custard Stand, a venerable Selig institution. Selig was such a creature of habit that his daughter Wendy once said she - could always locate her father just by knowing what time of day it was.
Selig was accessible. Over the years he had cajoled and cultivated enough reporters to build a powerful stable of opinion makers whom he - could count on when the fires got hot. When he became commissioner, men such as Phil Rogers of the Chicago Tribune or Hal Bodley at USA Today could always be counted on to push a Selig position. When he owned the Brewers he would take a walk into the press box at least once per series to chew the fat with the visiting writers. He also read everything, and was intensely aware of what was being said about him across the country. Each day, as the morning’s news stories were gathered, Selig would be alerted by baseball to anything that a reporter might have written about him and it became something of a badge of honor for a writer to receive word that the commissioner was on the telephone.
Oftentimes, the owners did not like Selig’s approach with the writers. They found him to be too accessible, too willing to engage in dialogue. That type of grassroots communication, some owners believed, was beneath the office of the commissioner. Yet Bud Selig kept things simple. He liked to be one of the guys. It was part of the baseball tradition. Selig’s approach made him a popular, genial figure. Few owners and even fewer commissioners had ever maintained such an open-door policy.
To those who preferred a leader who made decisions and brought people to his will, however, Selig cut a maddening figure. That was not the Selig way. He preferred consensus. He would check the tea leaves first before deciding his move, and it was an important skill to be able to consistently read the leaves correctly. During his rise in influence in the 1980s, few - people could take the temperature of a room like Bud Selig. Fay Vincent long believed that Selig began to consolidate power at his expense, but Selig saw himself as a reluctant member of the mutiny, only signing on when the anti-Vincent forces were insurmountable.
If Selig was underestimated because of his down-home mannerisms, he long possessed strong ideas of how he believed baseball should be run. Selig could be a polarizing figure outside of owners’ meetings, but was committed to reshaping the relationship between owners inside them. He learned from the ouster of Fay Vincent that it was crucial to avoid dissension in the ownership ranks, for it led to the type of mutiny that finished Vincent. Perhaps better than any other owner, Selig seemed to understand that the reason the players consistently beat them in labor was their solidarity.
Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the U.S. federal judge who became baseball’s first commissioner in 1920 and ruled with the word of God, had long been the standard by which all future commissioners were judged, but Bud Selig was different. Selig saw Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner who led football into the television age, as the model of a perfect commissioner. Selig was taken by how Rozelle, who was just thirty-three years old when he took office in 1959, was able to appeal to a cabal of owners with decidedly different interests and get them to work together. He marveled at how the Packers and the New York Giants could coexist as equals when his Brewers and the Yankees, thanks to a disjointed economic system and owners who did not see the partnership in their endeavor, could not. That was not to say that the NFL did not have its own mavericks, such as the Raiders’ Al Davis, but their number was kept to a manageable level. Selig had long been convinced that following Rozelle’s example—that the owners, whether they be in a megamarket such as New York or in a cow town such as Kansas City, share the same interest—was the best way for baseball to maximize its profits. It was Selig’s goal for - every owner to share this vision.
Under Selig, there were to be no mavericks. The new owners entering the game were tamer and less radical than in the past. George Steinbrenner and Peter Angelos, the two most unpredictable owners in baseball, both predated Selig’s tenure as commissioner. The instances in which the warfare was public—as when Jerry Reinsdorf said, “How do you know when George Steinbrenner is lying? When his lips are moving”—grew rare. The newer owners, men such as Steve Schott in Oakland and Jeffrey Loria in Florida, tended to think in economic terms along with Selig. They did not always agree with him, but they possessed enough of a team-player attitude to not challenge him publicly. In later years, these were men the commissioner believed he could count on for support.
As baseball resumed in 1995, however, the commissioner was isolated, alone with his thoughts and a game that had relationships to repair. While the summer pennant races simmered and the hard feelings softened, Bud Selig made a deal with himself: Baseball would never lose the public again. Not on his watch.
THE IMPACT of the strike proved to be something of a schizophrenic animal. For those in baseball who lived through it, 1994 represented a demarcating line between the old baseball and the new. The old way, when baseball was considered more a game than a business, was gone forever. This was, of course, nostalgia, to a large degree. Baseball had been a revenue-generating business since the turn of the twentieth century. There was, however, something to the lament. After the strike, the gentlemen of the game realized that baseball had changed in mind-set. If it had always been a business, now it was a game for corporations. In terms of flashbulb memory, everyone in baseball had a story about where they were on August 12, when the players walked, and again on September 14, when Bud Selig canceled the World Series. For people who worked in the game, a season without a World Series was just so unthinkable that the shock of those months without baseball grew in importance.
The reality was that the strike was much harder to gauge in the long term. If anything, subsequent years proved that it was not so devastating after all. “It was bad, don’t get me wrong. It was like a pox on both your houses. The fan’s attitude was, ‘I don’t care who’s right and who’s wrong. You’re both assholes,’” Rich Levin, baseball’s top public relations man, recalled. “But I never thought the game was on life support.” If it was possible to extract the emotional elements, the game recovered fairly quickly, and over time the formula for recovery was a familiar one: Win ballgames. It sounded elementary, and to a large degree it was. The teams that were baseball’s bedrock—New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Baltimore—saw attendance drop in 1995, but returned to normal levels almost immediately. For everyone else, the key was winning. The teams that saw their poststrike attendance return to prestrike levels the fastest were the teams that won, had a new stadium built, or both. Cleveland and Texas were the best examples of the latter, while Seattle’s first foray into the postseason in 1995 would not only reduce the hard feelings of the strike, but would forever alter the financial fortunes of the Mariner franchise.
If anecdotally the fans seemed disgruntled and even vitriolic, the numbers tended to send another message: The fans were mad, but were willing to forgive. That meant they could all be seduced back quickly.
The strike was most devastating emotionally. There were hard feelings to go around, and those feelings defined the poststrike period. Even as fans returned to the ballparks, they returned angrily. Periodically, when relationships got tense, fans would heckle players, a favorite taunt being, “We pay your salaries.”
Internally, Selig instructed his ow
ners to begin the healing process. Players were encouraged to engage more with the fans, to sign autographs before and after games or wave for a photo. Ballboys were instructed to no longer hoard foul balls, but to gently toss them to fans (preferably children, for they made the best photo opportunities). Promotions and giveaways were no longer relegated to the obligatory cap day or fan appreciation day on the last homestand of the season, but occurred frequently throughout the year. During the late 1990s the Anaheim Angels would host a fireworks night after every Saturday night game.
It was a necessary strategy, but one that made Ken Singleton laugh. Singleton, who played nearly fifteen seasons for three teams, but mainly with the Baltimore Orioles, remembered his early days in the big leagues, when the last thing owners wanted to do was reach out to fans. Singleton recalled a game when he had tossed a couple of foul balls into the stands only to be accosted by then Orioles’ owner Jerry Hoffberger. “Singleton,” Hoffberger began, “the next time I see you toss a foul ball into the stands, it’s coming out of your pay.”
To Steve Vucinich, the longtime clubhouse man with the Oakland A’s, it would take more than handing out baseballs to kids and smiling for photos to placate the fans, who had returned to the ballparks in a particularly ugly frame of mind. “When we came back, it was almost as if the fans felt the players owed them something,” Vucinich said. “All of a sudden, you had fans coming to the game only to heckle and harass the players. In the past, you always had your share of yahoos, but after the strike it was different. Even the everyday fans now seemed to possess a sense of entitlement. It wasn’t, ‘Hey, would you mind signing this for me?’ It was now, ‘Hey, gimme a ball, you fucking bums.’”
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