Juicing the Game

by Howard Bryant

  This was particularly true when it came to young people, who over the years had grown distant to the staid nature of baseball. The game was inherently slow and getting slower every year. In 1996, the league attempted to get younger, hipper, and more relevant by introducing a new series of ads in which various pop music stars performed “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in their own unique styles. The choice of artists—LL Cool J, Aretha Franklin, the Goo Goo Dolls, and Mary Chapin Carpenter—was designed for the widest possible demographic reach. It was a great idea in theory, but the campaign, designed to spice up baseball’s image, ruffled some old-line baseball men. For his spot, diehard Yankee fan LL Cool J added a verse to the old vaudeville tune that included the line “Me and you can go out to the Stadium.” He was immediately rebuked for his streetwise choice of language.

  “Major League Baseball’s new ad campaign is clearly aimed at luring young people to the ballparks,” wrote Murray Chass in the New York Times. “But in trying to create new fans, couldn’t MLB have done it in a grammatically correct manner? English has become alien enough to school-age children without them hearing it spoken incorrectly in commercials.” Cool J was disarming in his response. “When I thought about everyday English and the average guy, it’s ‘me and you,’” he explained to Chass. “I said I was going to keep it regular. ‘You and I’ didn’t feel like ‘Me and you.’ ‘Me and you’ felt right to me. I wanted to bring some honesty to the campaign.”

  Lee Garfinkel, then the executive director of Lowe and Partners, the agency that created the new advertisements, was frustrated by baseball’s resistance. In retrospect, it seemed a minor miracle that baseball would be so radical as to allow different contemporary groups to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” To Garfinkel, it seemed that baseball’s first response to everything was no. How could a business so dependent on image be so self-unaware? thought Garfinkel. He grew up in the Bronx, about fifteen blocks from Yankee Stadium, and like most New York kids, idolized the Yankees. Garfinkel recalled telling the top executives of baseball’s marketing team that they needed to make the game less rigid and more fun if they wanted to win back old fans and cultivate new ones. What baseball really needed to do, Garfinkel recalled, was to stop fighting with itself and build up its players the same way the NBA had with Michael Jordan. He issued a prophetic warning to the baseball leadership. He was once a fanatical Yankee fan, he told them, but had since gravitated toward the NBA. “I remember telling them that the magic I felt around the Mantles, Marises, and Whitey Fords, the kids don’t feel - toward baseball players,” Garfinkel said. “But I think they feel it for basketball players. What we need to do is create that magic for baseball for the kids of today. You can love the game, but if you don’t love the players, you’ll begin to lose interest.”

  What Garfinkel found was a client that had very little interest in being aggressive and innovative. If he wasn’t speaking directly to a brick wall, he nevertheless knew he was dealing with hardcore resistance. They were too conservative, Garfinkel thought. What he had in mind was some of the irreverence that existed in the NBA’s commercials, as in its use of Bill Murray.

  Scott Grayson, who worked on the baseball account with Garfinkel, pitched numerous ideas that baseball summarily rejected. Grayson loved baseball. He grew up a Mets fan in central New Jersey, and a trip to the Polo Grounds with his grandfather was one of his fondest childhood memories. Looking back, he thought that his time working with Major League Baseball was one of the highlights of his career. Just sitting in the dugout in West Palm Beach with John Smoltz was a priceless experience. Coming into it, however, Grayson knew that baseball would be one of his tougher accounts. Baseball was not a business run like others. He recalled his nervousness before a 1996 meeting in Phoenix when he was to present the owners with his agency’s best ideas to promote the game. It was a hostile crowd.

  “I remember going to present work to them. I was up in my room the night before watching CNN, and I saw people like Jerry Colangelo and Marge Schott downstairs and I said, ‘Of all the people I presented work to,’ it was a tough room,” he said. “Marge Schott almost knocked me over trying to get to the omelets.”

  One proposed spot featured famous actors and musicians fantasizing about being big league players. The premise was a simple one: Everyone has daydreamed about being a big movie star or famous rocker, so why not turn the logic on its head and feature those people, despite all their fame and wealth, wishing they could be baseball players? “We thought we’d use celebrities,” Grayson recalled. “If people thought it was great to be Bon Jovi, well, maybe his fantasy was to bat with the bases loaded with two outs in the World Series.”

  At Lowe, Grayson’s idea was enthusiastically received.

  Baseball said no.

  PETER GAMMONS was convinced that baseball’s future rested in the hands of Ken Griffey Jr. To Gammons, who had long lamented baseball’s reluctance to better market itself to a younger generation of fans, Griffey was a godsend. He had a gregarious yet cocky demeanor and was talented enough to back it up. If there was some debate in 1996 about whether Griffey was the best player in the game, he was clearly its most exciting. He was, Gammons thought, the type of player that baseball had enjoyed only a handful of times in its history: a player who could carry the league. Basketball had Michael Jordan. Hockey had Wayne Gretzky. At various points in history, football had O. J. Simpson, Bo Jackson, and Deion Sanders. Baseball had Ken Griffey Jr. Griffey had single-handedly given the sport a presence on Madison Avenue. He was, Gammons thought, what baseball had needed for years but, with its vision clouded by the strife between ownership and the players, had refused to recognize. He was the game’s Michael Jordan.

  To Gammons, Griffey wasn’t just essential to the game coming out of the strike, he was also vital to the game’s long-term survival. Football never had to worry about losing its speed, violence, or relevance. If basketball would never crack the football-baseball monopoly at the heart of American sporting interest, it nevertheless had cornered the market on cool. In a country that had almost completely given itself over to style instead of substance, there was always a place for cool.

  But if basketball was cool and football was king in TV numbers and popularity polls, baseball still seemed to hold the upper hand in other tangible ways. Football salaries would never reach the amounts paid to baseball players. Football owners, working in concert, and with a commissioner who controlled the game, kept salaries down. Baseball players, because of Marvin Miller, enjoyed powers football players could only dream about. After two and a half decades of strikes and lockouts, every penny of a baseball player’s money was guaranteed. Football players, whose careers were shorter and who played a much more grueling sport, not only earned less money, but theirs was not guaranteed. Boomer Esiason, who played quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals and New York Jets, said, “Whenever I read that a player has signed a seven-year, $53-million contract, I laugh. I laugh because there’s no way he’ll ever see the money at the end of that contract.” A football player could break his leg for his team on Sunday and be cut loose Monday. Baseball scouts would often remind young prospects of the physical dangers of football in contrast to the economic security of baseball. “Son,” went the old saying, “do you want a major league contract or a limp?”

  “I wanted to make sure I had that right,” said Dave Winfield, who was drafted by the Minnesota Vikings as well as the San Diego Padres. “They get hurt the most, can barely use their bodies when their careers are over, and don’t make the most money? We had Marvin to thank for that.”

  Miller was flattered that a few members of the NFL players’ association once tried to recruit him to head their union and fight for football players with the same tenacity as he did for baseball players. Miller demurred. For all their toughness and sacrifice, football players, he believed, would not stick together enough to beat the owners. Indeed, the player capitulation after the 1987 NFL strike made Miller all the more proud of his accompli
shments with the MLBPA.

  But baseball’s labor struggles had exacerbated the public’s shift away from the game, a thirty-year trend that dated back to the late 1960s, when pitchers dominated the game and football passed baseball as the top sport in America. In the years since, baseball had become flustered about how to compete as Madison Avenue gravitated toward the flashier sports of football and basketball. Football translated with advertisers better. It was a sport built around television, and its championship game, the Super Bowl, was known as much for its advertising as for the game itself. That was troubling enough, but now pro basketball had weakened baseball’s secondary flank. The NBA was the sleek, hip sport that resonated best, from the young black kids who played it to the corporate executives who paid top dollar for courtside seats. As the popularity of the NBA increased, baseball, the sport with the deepest historical roots in the black community, saw the number of African Americans at the big league level decline, underscoring another problem, emerging, yet at the time unarticulated.

  To Harold Reynolds, a former Gold Glove second baseman who would go on to become one of the more visible broadcasters on ESPN, baseball’s inability to reach the public was particularly pronounced when it came to the African American community. Reynolds recalled many black kids’ being frustrated by baseball’s rigid culture. “Individualism was never accepted. It was almost as if you were a hot dog. And if you were a hot dog, you didn’t respect the game. That made you an outcast.”

  Baseball seemed to be the only sport whose traditions were so strong that the people who played the game were forced to adapt to the game’s culture and not the other way around. In basketball, for example, the game’s culture adapted to the new generations of players playing it, for better or worse. Brian Cashman thought back to the worst days of the NBA, in the late 1970s before the arrival of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson pumped new life into a game thought of as too black and lacking a connection with the general public. Certainly, the NBA gained little traction with the networks, which before the arrival of Bird and Johnson ran the 1979 NBA finals on tape delay. To Cashman, there was no reason why baseball couldn’t do the same. For all of the encouraging signs that baseball—with a few small-market exceptions—could survive the worst of the strike, what the game really needed, thought Cashman, was a star, someone who could transcend baseball’s inner turmoil and return the focus of the game to where it belonged.

  Enter Ken Griffey Jr. Griffey was born with a baseball pedigree. His father, Ken Senior, was a member of Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine teams of the 1970s, and little Ken Junior had been walking around big league clubhouses from the time he was in diapers. Privately, Griffey always harbored conflicts with baseball—he was terribly disappointed as an adolescent that the game had taken his father away so much, but publicly he exuded a joy for the game that baseball would have been wise to immediately capitalize upon.

  “All of a sudden, our whole perspective went from conservative to having some flavor,” Reynolds said. “Even the white guys were listening to rap, and to me baseball for the first time reflected the culture of the country. Baseball’s mind-set was always in the fifties, it was Mantle and Ruth, and kids didn’t want to see that.

  “And then here comes Griffey. He takes BP with his hat backward. He flies into walls. He made playing defense fun. And he hit the balls where they’d never been hit before. He was a kid. He was just nineteen when he came up, laughing and joking and enjoying himself. This was exactly what the sport needed, an infusion. The old guard of baseball didn’t think it was possible to be an individual and still respect the game. But - people started to wake up upstairs. Somebody said we have to take this thing to the next level.”

  To Gammons, what was most enjoyable about Griffey was his ability to make playing baseball look like so much fun. Barry Bonds may have been the greatest player of his generation, but it would have been difficult to organize a marketing campaign around the sullen, mercurial Bonds. Griffey was different. He was accessible. To Mark Thomashow, then an executive with the sneaker giant Nike, Griffey possessed the requisite star power to give baseball that ice-cool edge enjoyed by football and basketball. To Thomashow, the more baseball focused on Griffey as a pitchman, the better. There was no question to Thomashow that Griffey could do for baseball what Bo Jackson had done for football (and baseball), and what Jordan had done for basketball. The key, - Thomashow thought, was to make Griffey the public face of the game.

  As the television presence of sports increased, especially on the twenty-four-hour cable channels where images and highlights were played literally dozens of times in an overnight period, Griffey’s dazzling catches and towering home runs became baseball’s calling card. In the 1995 playoffs, Griffey made the most of his first trip to the national stage, creating a lasting image that exemplified the sport at its best.

  The Yankees, having been denied an opportunity to return to the postseason by the strike, made the playoffs in 1995 as a wild card team, the newest innovation by Bud Selig, which promoted the second-place team with the best record in each league to the playoffs. Facing Griffey’s Mariners in the new five-game Division Series, the Yankees won the first two games in New York, before Seattle evened the series by taking the next two at home. In a memorable fifth game in Seattle, the Mariners eliminated the Yankees in the bottom of the eleventh inning when Griffey dashed home from first on a two-out double by Edgar Martinez. The scene of the euphoric Griffey, safe at home and mobbed by teammates, was exactly the kind of moment the limping sport needed. It was proof once more that when played at its best, no sport could match the power of baseball. If Cal Ripken had softened the public to baseball’s charm, Griffey’s playoff sprint helped the sport put the memory of the strike even further behind.

  GRIFFEY HELPED restore baseball’s image with the fans, but what really troubled Andy MacPhail and the baseball inner circle was the sport’s image problem with its most valuable business partners, the television networks. In 1990, CBS had paid baseball $1.06 billion to broadcast games over the next four years, but the sport under CBS was worse off than ever. Adopting a strategy of broadcasting fewer games in order to create greater demand in response to shrinking ratings, CBS essentially abandoned the Game of the Week, a Saturday afternoon staple for half a century. The plan backfired miserably as fans became frustrated that the network had paid so much for the sport but rarely broadcast the games. To the CBS executives who were convinced that baseball was always a slam-dunk moneymaker, watching the game atrophy was heartbreaking. “Everyone at CBS who cared about the game felt like they went through hell with it,” former CBS Sports executive Ed Goren recalled. The emerging belief among television executives was that baseball was a loser.

  In the winter of 1995, Fox paid baseball $565 million for five years, less than half the annual average of the CBS contract, to try to resuscitate the game and its sagging image. Baseball might have been the grand old game, but it was also a joke. People were now calling it the “National Past-its-time.” David Hill, president of Fox Sports, was convinced the problem was how baseball presented itself. In anticipation of Fox’s signing the deal with baseball, Hill tried watching a game and said he fell asleep in the fifth inning. To Hill, baseball spent too much time navel gazing. It was always looking into its past, when the viewership the game needed, the young, couldn’t remember what happened last Thursday. Baseball was still about Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams, men who played so long ago they seemed to have lived in black and white. Basketball had respect for its past, but no one was talking about Jumpin’ Joe Fulks or George Mikan. They were talking about Magic, Michael, and Larry. They were talking about Dennis Rodman and Shaquille O’Neal. Football lathered itself in the image of Vince Lombardi, but only for voiceovers. The action came from the players of the moment, not from the ’65 Browns or the ’57 Detroit Lions. Baseball was still about Ty Cobb, and that was part of its problem. Young kids didn’t care about Cobb, Hill said. More important, Hill himself didn’t ca
re about Ty Cobb.

  It was in that spirit that Hill splashed cold water on baseball, sending the message that it was time baseball lived in the now. In the winter of 1995, Hill sent a chilling edict throughout the offices of Fox Sports.

  “And one more thing,” Hill said to his lieutenants. “If anyone talks about any dead guys during a broadcast, I’ll sack ’em. I’m sick of dead guys! Whenever I turn on a baseball game, all I hear about is dead guys. If I hear a name, I’m gonna ask, ‘Is he dead?’ And if he is, you’re fired. You’re all fired!”

  Under Fox, baseball was going to get hip. The attitude at Fox, already irreverent, was that the old way didn’t work, so the network had nothing to lose. This, after all, was the network that, having bought the NHL package for $45 million per season for four years, was convinced that a central failure with hockey on TV was that it was too hard to follow the puck. The game was moving too fast. So, using a little technology, the network added a bright trail to every slap shot, and every corner dump, making the puck look more like a comet. The purists howled, and Fox abandoned the experiment.

  They were going to do the same with baseball. They were going to put a microphone under second base. They were going to put microphones in the dugout. They were going to interview players during the game! This was the video age; that’s what kids responded to. It wasn’t just pandering for the sake of expediency. Those kids grew up to be the adults who drove the sporting economy. If baseball wound up looking more like a video game, so be it. It was what the kids knew.

  The marketing was going to be just as edgy. Fox had a plan to celebrate Cal Ripken, baseball’s iron man, in a commercial. They had conjured up a bit in which Ripken would be hit by a truck before a game, and, while lying on a stretcher, bandaged from head to toe, Ripken would demand to go back into the game.