Juicing the Game

by Howard Bryant

  Tony Gwynn remembers being stung by the fans’ anger, especially in the way they now approached players. During the strike, Gwynn was shopping in a San Diego supermarket when he was engaged in an intense discussion with a fan that turned nasty. For Gwynn, quite possibly as iconic a figure in San Diego as Cal Ripken was in Baltimore, it was a telling scene. “From that moment, I realized how badly we had our work cut out for us,” he said. If fans always possessed some degree of bitterness about salaries and player attitudes, the players now returning from the strike noticed an entirely new level of vitriol.

  “I’d been there twelve years, but you couldn’t go to the gas station. You couldn’t buy groceries. You try to explain the player’s point of view and they didn’t want to hear it. You realized that you were wasting your breath. Even for me, it took awhile for fans to respond to what we’re doing. There was definitely a difference between the way the fans acted before and after the strike. I think before the fans were more appreciative. They were definitely friendlier. It wasn’t so personal. After the strike, it was definitely personal, and we as players, we all had to take it,” said Gwynn.

  To Dave Winfield, it was a question of feel, and 1994 felt different. In his view, the 1994 strike had produced more tangible and lasting effects on the game than all the previous confrontations combined. Winfield was a rookie with the Padres in 1973, just one year after the first strike, and had seen just about everything up close during his career. A strong union supporter and a great admirer of Marvin Miller, Winfield was there for the ’76 lockout, the ’81 strike, the ’90 lockout, and all the conflicts in between. Through each one, there were always signs that gave him hope the damage could be overcome, but 1995 was different, mostly because of the complexity of the poststrike landscape. Winfield didn’t quite know what to make of the signals, but he was convinced the game had serious work to do.

  The key was to give people a reason to come to the ballpark.

  BUD SELIG was convinced that twelve to nineteen clubs were losing money in 1995, figures hotly contested by the Players Association. But if the immediate poststrike landscape looked bad from a financial perspective, it was under this mountain of red ink that Bud Selig found his first victory. In those cities with new ballparks, the strike did not appear to have much lasting effect. Furthermore, the Cleveland Indians and Atlanta Braves, once doormats, were playing each other in the World Series. That, in itself, underscored baseball’s resiliency, for those two former also-rans not only played for a championship during the game’s nadir but captured the attention of a bitter public.

  For Cleveland, the turnaround could not have been more dramatic. Only a decade earlier, in the mid-1980s, the O’Neill Estate, the owners of the Indians, found themselves in a high-stakes poker game with the city, threatening to move the team out of town if they could not reach an agreement for a new stadium. It was a presumptuous request for a franchise with nothing going for it.

  Few teams over the history of big league baseball had been as bad for as long as the Cleveland Indians. If the Washington Senators and St. Louis Browns were the most consistently bad teams in the American League for the first half of the century, winning one championship between them in 113 combined seasons before relocating to Minnesota and Baltimore respectively, the Indians held that dubious honor during a forty-year stretch that began after the 1954 team set an American League record with 111 wins before losing to Willie Mays’s Giants in the World Series.

  Throughout the 1970s, the Indians were the team expected to move to another town. When a city pined for baseball, the Indians would usually be the target. Before the expansion Washington Senators moved to Dallas in 1972, the Indians were a possibility. Before Toronto was granted an expansion franchise for 1977, the Indians and the San Francisco Giants were positioning themselves for that market. When the Tampa area began to pressure baseball for a franchise, it was the Indians, Giants, and Chicago White Sox who were always considered.

  The result was a historic baseball town with nothing to show for it. The Indians, like the original Senators, had been a charter member of the American League. They were the first team in the American League to integrate on the field, adding Larry Doby in 1947. They also became the first team in baseball to hire a black manager when Frank Robinson took over in 1975. Cleveland itself, however, was just a bad town, period. Between 1956 and 1978, the Cleveland Indians drew one million fans only twice, repeating the act just once between 1981 and ’85. Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium held seventy-five thousand fans for baseball, but the Indians would average more than twenty thousand fans per game just once in their final forty-two seasons there. Dubbed “the Mistake on the Lake,” the stadium was a source of eternal ridicule. Once, when an unusual, debilitating fog rolled in from Lake Erie, canceling an Indians-Red Sox game, Boston pitcher Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd said, “That’s what happens when you build a ballpark on the ocean.”

  The O’Neill Estate wanted a domed stadium, and they wanted the public to pay for it. When the referendum came to a vote in 1984, it was rejected by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. The Cleveland Domed Stadium Committee went out of business and the plan was scrapped. Dick Jacobs bought the Indians in 1986 and launched another appeal for a stadium. This time, in 1990, voters agreed to a fifteen-year tax on alcohol and cigarettes to pay for a new $300-million ballpark scheduled to open in 1994. In the meantime, Cleveland, one of the more densely populated cities for corporate headquarters, underwent a massive revitalization. As a result, the Indians sold luxury boxes at will. In addition, they sold out every seat in the new Jacobs Field before the 1994 season even began, giving them fistfuls of cash to sign free agents and compete with the big boys in New York, Baltimore, and Boston. For the first time since the Korean War, the Indians were back in business.

  Armed with corporate sponsorship, and a well-stocked farm system, the Indians, along with the Orioles, carried baseball through the strike. President Clinton threw out the first ball in Jacobs Field on April 3, 1994, and the Indians averaged 39,121 fans per game that year, a 45.5 percent increase over the previous year and more than two and a half times their per game average from 1992. Faced with an angry public in 1995, the Indians actually increased their attendance by more than three hundred fans per game while winning the AL pennant for the first time since 1954. What followed would be more of the same. The Indians, flush with young talent, would win five division titles in six years, and capture another pennant in 1997. After averaging just over fifteen thousand fans per game from 1986 to 1992, the Indians sold out their new stadium a record 455 consecutive times.

  A similar phenomenon occurred in Texas. After finishing with a losing record in ten of their first eleven seasons, the expansion Washington Senators moved to the Dallas-Ft. Worth area in 1972. Renamed the Texas Rangers, the team finished as high as second just five times in its first twenty-two seasons there and never made the playoffs. Baseball folklore suggested the murderous Texas heat wilted the Rangers by the end of summer, just when the games became important. Then in 1994, the Rangers opened the Ballpark in Arlington and their fortunes changed. When the strike wiped out the 1994 season, Texas was in first place and would go on to make the playoffs in three of the next five years. In ten of the team’s first eleven seasons in their new ballpark, the Rangers drew more fans on average per game than in any season in old Arlington Stadium.

  Longtime baseball people were not just pleased by the Cleveland and Texas stories, but seemed, even with the strike a very recent memory, emboldened by what these new parks did for once-dormant clubs. The proof was on the field. Cleveland and Texas were now perennial playoff teams. In 1993, two years after the new Comiskey Park opened, the White Sox won the American League West, and were in first place in the Central Division the following year when the strike happened. Even Toronto’s SkyDome coincided with a Blue Jay run of four division titles in five years. It was clear not only to baseball owners, but to the game’s leadership, that the best way to raise the revenue required to assemble
a winning team was to get the public to build new parks. But what truly ignited the stadium boom was a retro-style ballpark in Baltimore known as Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

  DURING THE construction of Camden Yards, Larry Lucchino, the president of the Baltimore Orioles, issued a hard edict to his staff: Anyone referring to the Orioles’ new home as a stadium and not a ballpark would be fined five dollars.

  To Lucchino, it was not a semantic quibble, but a more important question of mind-set. Baseball was not meant to be played in a stadium. In his estimation, that was an inelegant word that denied baseball its rightful claim. Football, rugged and violent, was played in a stadium. The Dallas Cowboys played at Texas Stadium. The Washington Redskins, with whom Lucchino picked up a Super Bowl ring during the 1980s as a member of the team’s front office, played at RFK Stadium. Rock concerts were held in stadiums. Baseball, pastoral and poetic, was played in a ballpark. Camden Yards was Lucchino’s greatest achievement to date, and it was important to him that his employees understood the difference.

  If there was a figure in baseball who did not elicit neutrality, it was Larry Lucchino. His style, as described by admirers and detractors alike, was fierce, bullying, and always in need of an edge. Lucchino could be charming, but also condescending. A difference in opinion with Lucchino might result in a civilized debate that resembled fencing, or it could be uncomfortable and primal, more like boxing than professional disagreement. One baseball executive believed Lucchino often sought to exploit weakness in others, which produced a difficult dynamic; engaging with Lucchino always tended toward some level of confrontation. “Larry isn’t necessarily mad if you don’t agree with him,” thought Charles Steinberg, who worked with Lucchino in Baltimore, San Diego, and Boston. “He just feels it’s his duty to change your mind. I think that’s the lawyer in him. He wants you to always understand both his position and the fact that he’s trying to sway yours.” What gave Lucchino his power was his intellect, vision, and pure stubbornness.

  As baseball sank to its lowest point immediately after the strike, Lucchino’s importance as a historical figure in baseball rose dramatically. It was Lucchino who would be credited with taking the lead in baseball’s revival. Camden Yards was Lucchino’s project, and while there would be dozens of people whose input contributed to the finished product, it was Lucchino who would receive the credit for having the creative vision to pursue so grand an undertaking. By the time the strike ended, Camden Yards had existed for only three years, but its success would lead to an unprecedented era for park construction.

  Lucchino grew up in Pittsburgh, and recalled the happiest times of his childhood being trips to Forbes Field to watch the Pirates. He was an adolescent when Pirates’ second baseman Bill Mazeroski homered in the bottom of the ninth of the seventh game of the 1960 World Series to beat the Yankees, easily the greatest moment in Pittsburgh’s baseball history. Ten years later, Lucchino would become embittered when Forbes Field fell victim to the multipurpose stadium trend of identical, characterless structures that also plagued Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and St. Louis as the sixties turned into the seventies. He vowed to avenge what he considered to be one of baseball’s most destructive movements.

  “I grew up in Pittsburgh, where we had Forbes Field, which was a charming, old-fashioned ballpark, built in the early part of the century, relatively small in size, quirky, idiosyncratic, warm, et cetera,” Lucchino once said. “It was replaced by a concrete donut called Three Rivers Stadium and forever changed the charm and nature of baseball in Pittsburgh.”

  As early as 1979, Lucchino was dispatched by Edward Bennett Williams to scour potential sites for a new facility for the Orioles. Baltimore was a blue-collar town with a chip on its shoulder similar to that of Philadelphia in that it stood between two cities of greater reputation. Just as Philadelphia could not compete with the global reach of New York or the political power of Washington, Baltimore could not escape the shadows of Washington and Philadelphia.

  But Baltimore held one card: The Orioles were a baseball powerhouse, while the Phillies had yet to win a single World Championship and the Washington Senators had failed on two separate occasions. The first Senators team did not post consecutive winning seasons once in its final thirty-seven seasons in Washington before moving to Minnesota in 1960. The second team managed just one winning season in eleven years before also leaving, this time to become the Texas Rangers in 1972. Both times the team was a bust, both in the stands and on the field. The bitter quip that Washington was “first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League” was, at least in the case of baseball, completely accurate.

  Baltimore, meanwhile, was far more stable and influential. From 1969 to 1974 the Orioles won their division five out of six times. Whereas the World Series had last come to Washington in 1933, Baltimore played for the World Championship in 1966, ’69, ’70, ’71, and ’79, winning it in ’66 and ’70. They would win it again in 1983.

  By the mid-1980s, Lucchino and Williams had sifted through nearly forty potential locations, and made a fateful decision: They would buck conventional wisdom and build their new ballpark in downtown Baltimore, on a parcel of land known as Camden Yards that was no larger than eighty-five acres, tiny compared to other ballpark sites. Maryland governer Donald Schaefer had convinced Williams that the park would serve as the crown jewel of a new era of downtown development, even as Williams was being offered some two hundred acres to build a new facility in suburban Lansdowne.

  In making his decision, Williams understood that Camden Yards represented something of a gamble. The Lansdowne site was the safe choice. By 1985, stadiums were being built with an eye toward appeasing the suburbs. That’s where the fans were. The massive migration to the suburbs in the postwar years combined with the upheaval of the 1960s in the inner cities made the word “downtown” a pejorative one. Even corporations were leaving the downtown areas of cities and moving to industrial parks that ringed the interstates and offered lower taxes. Minus a few special cases, mainstays such as Chicago’s Wrigley Field and Boston’s Fenway Park, attendance drooped at city parks, the belief being the suburban customer no longer wanted to be bothered with the hassles of parking and having to navigate unsafe neighborhoods just to go to a ballgame. White flight and the crumbling of once-vibrant sections of town crushed baseball in Brooklyn and Harlem in the 1950s, forcing two of New York’s three teams to move to the West Coast. When it came time for the Phillies to build a new park, they left cramped and dilapidated North Philadelphia and moved south to an open space between the city’s two major highways for easy access. Detroit suffered in Tiger Stadium, even when their team was of pennant caliber, as did the White Sox at Comiskey Park. Even the mighty Yankees, with the greatest inherent advantages of any sports franchise in America, had never drawn three million fans to their ballpark in the Bronx. The city was too difficult, too black, and too inconvenient to be considered a viable option for a project that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The risk was too great.

  The baseball people thought Kansas City was the perfect situation. Royals Stadium stood at the optimum point between the area’s major interstates, was surrounded by parking, like Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, and was right next door to the stadium where NFL’s Chiefs played, creating what became known as a “sports complex.” Meanwhile, the new model of stadium at the end of the 1980s was almost futuristic. When the Orioles broke ground on Camden Yards in 1989, Toronto’s SkyDome represented the cutting edge in sports architecture. Not only was it an all-purpose stadium for the Blue Jays, concerts, and Canadian football, but it also possessed a retractable roof, which eliminated rain delays and inclement weather. SkyDome was so advanced it included a Hard Rock Café, a luxury hotel, and a videoboard that was three stories tall and as long as a blue whale.

  Still smarting from the Pirates’ leaving Forbes Field, Larry Lucchino wanted a different kind of facility. It wouldn’t be a stadium, it would be a ballpark. It would be baseball only. On such a
tight parcel of land, ham-strung by the borders of neighboring streets, it would possess the quirky dimensions of the old-time ballparks, such as Boston’s Fenway Park and Shibe Park in Philadelphia. It would be a replica of the ballparks of his youth. Lucchino liked to say he was seeking an “old-time ballpark with modern amenities.”

  What Lucchino wanted had never been done, and baseball did not have a history of being proactive, or even remotely innovative. It was a sport that feared change, and came down swiftly on mavericks of any kind. Back in the fifties, George Weiss, then the general manager of the Yankees, was once approached by an assistant who had an idea. Why not, for a promotion, give the first few thousand fans a free Yankee cap. Weiss was furious. “Do you really think I want every kid in New York walking around wearing a Yankee cap?” he fumed.

  Many Orioles insiders thought the idea was a loser as well. Charles Steinberg, a Lucchino lieutenant and Baltimore native, was one of them. “I thought Larry was crazy. I was thinking ‘go to the suburbs.’ But Larry was persistent.” The way Lucchino remembered it, Edward Bennett Williams needed only ten minutes to get back to the governor about his choice.

  “He hung up the phone and said to me, ‘Building a ballpark halfway between Baltimore and Washington is like building a house halfway between your wife and girlfriend. You can’t do that. You’ve got to make a commitment. Let’s do the Camden Yards things for all the reasons the governor was talking about.’”

  Years later, after baseball had undergone a period of rapid construction, producing fourteen new parks in eleven years, the wisdom of Camden Yards seemed a given. Its style was copied in San Francisco, San Diego, Philadelphia, Houston, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, and with the exception of San Francisco, all of the parks were built with public money.