For the Good of the Game

by Bud Selig

  Thank goodness Baumer won that battle. Yount and Paul Molitor, a University of Minnesota shortstop we took with the third pick of the ’77 draft, would change the history of our franchise.

  Robin’s older brother, Larry, had pitched at Arizona State and been drafted by the Astros in 1968. He’d helped Robin grow up early, and the seventeen-year-old we got was already a man. Robin played only sixty-four games in the low minors in that ’73 season and was such a good shortstop and so mature that Wilson and Del Crandall made him our Opening Day shortstop in ’74, when he was eighteen.

  No one was more surprised than Robin. He thought he was about to be cut when Crandall summoned him during a bus ride late in spring training. Instead, Crandall told him, “You’re our shortstop,” and he was for the next eleven years (and then our center fielder for nine more years).

  It sounds a little crazy to put an eighteen-year-old in the big leagues, but some players are just different than the rest, and Robin was certainly one of those. He would collect 3,142 hits and two MVP Awards on his way to Cooperstown. When you’ve got a player like that on your roster, you’ve got something big, especially when he’s also the toughest, most reliable guy on the team.

  It took a long time for us to get the team going in the right direction, too long, maybe, but baseball is hard. It always has been, always will be. I hated every loss back then, believe me. Just ask Robin.

  Robin told me that I used to make him nervous, especially after he moved from shortstop to center field. He said he’d look in to home plate at County Stadium and see me pacing on the catwalk in front of my box. That’s how he knew it was a tight game. I’d be walking back and forth, like a madman.

  But there was one time nobody could find me. That was when we had a lead in the ninth inning and needed three more outs to close it out. I’ve got to give Lee MacPhail and Chub Feeney credit. They taught me what I call the Seven-Minute Rule.

  When a game is on the line in the last inning, you don’t watch it for seven minutes. If you’re at home or in the car, you turn it off for seven minutes. Then you turn it back on, and if it’s still being played you know you’re in big trouble. I believed in that. Much easier on the nervous system. At County Stadium I’d walk behind my box and look the other way, not at the field. I’d basically hide behind a girder. You could tell by the crowd what was happening, but it was easier hearing the cheers or the groans than watching what was happening.

  During those early seasons, let’s just say I spent my share of time behind my box listening to the bad news rather than watching it.

  One thing I understood early on was if you’re going to own a team, you’d better have somebody there every day, preferably yourself. This is not a toy. It needs somebody watching it every day. That wasn’t the case for most owners when I got into baseball. They just didn’t pay much attention to the business side, at least not until the end of the season when they found out they’d lost a bunch of money. Then they paid attention, fired people, but it was too late.

  I’m good with numbers, even though I hate math. I was a history major, with no accounting background, but I am good at knowing how to run a business. I’ve always made sure there is more money coming in than going out. Well, except the first few years of the Brewers.

  Initially I had put only about three hundred thousand dollars of my own money into our ownership group, so mostly I was managing money for other people. We were struggling financially in ’71 and ’72. At times we had bills coming in faster than we could pay them. There were some cash calls where I put in more money and all of the partners put in more money. I really hated those meetings. Anybody would. I was always more sensitive about other people’s money than I was my own.

  But I understood what a good player was worth, and if you wanted to have a winning team you needed good players. Once my phone rang and my father said, “Your mother just told me you signed your first baseman and you paid him a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Well, Ma’s right,” I told him.

  “I thought I raised a smart kid,” he said. “You’re going to pay a player a hundred thousand dollars a year? What are you, crazy?”

  He was serious, and he hung up. That was the end of that conversation.

  But eventually the team got better and we began to understand how to run a baseball franchise as a business. There weren’t a lot of great examples to follow at that time. In fact, I didn’t know of any.

  One day in the ’75 season, probably in July, I was on the phone with John Fetzer. I told him I was really happy because I had just hit my break-even mark in attendance, so everything the rest of the year was profit. He was astonished that I knew that. He wanted me to talk to Jim Campbell, general manager of the Tigers. Campbell and I were good friends. Campbell didn’t want to hear about it but said the boss had told him to talk to me. I explained how I made my budget. It wasn’t rocket science.

  I projected our attendance on a game-by-game basis—I did it on all these scratch pads, and kept them on my desk so I could adjust them all the time—and I knew pretty well what our fixed costs were, in addition to our little bit of guaranteed revenue from radio and TV. The variable was player salaries, the payroll. I added that on to fixed costs and made sure the total was below what I projected we’d make in revenue from the crowds. I had a set figure for average ticket price and averages for concessions and parking.

  This seems basic, I know, but nobody was doing it in baseball. That’s how I came to be known as Budget Bud. That nickname got thrown around in the newspapers a lot in the 1990s, when the game was in crisis and I was in charge. It would get used by writers as a pejorative, as if I were the little penny-pincher from Milwaukee, but believe me, within ownership it was first used as a compliment.

  Jim Campbell must have mentioned my budgeting to Edward Bennett Williams, the brilliant Washington lawyer who had purchased the Orioles from Jerry Hoffberger. I got a call from Ed, asking what I was doing. He wanted me to come see him, so I did. We had lunch at Duke Zeibert’s and I met Art Buchwald, the humorist who wrote for the Washington Post.

  We eventually formed a small group of owners and I tried to teach them what I was doing while also learning from them. Word got around and we eventually grew to a group of sixteen to eighteen.

  We talked about the best ways to run a team and how it had become essential for owners to be involved. I knew that if we were going to grow as a sport—survive, even—we had to start doing a better job on the business side. The NFL seemed to understand that from the start, but let’s be honest here. It’s a lot easier to conduct business when you have sixteen games a season, all carried by national television, than it is playing 162 games with local television. And in the end, it’s not good enough to do just a decent job, because fans hold baseball to a higher standard than other sports. They just do.

  I understood back in the seventies that it’s hard work, not just fun, to be a successful owner of a team. That was the mind-set I was trying to help my fellow owners develop.

  While I focused on the bottom line, I wasn’t like George Steinbrenner or Charlie Finley. I hired baseball executives to run the team and then stayed out of their way. Usually I did, anyway. But there were exceptions.

  After the Henry Aaron deal, there was only one other but it would prove to be a big deal. I personally conducted the trade talks that got us Cecil Cooper, and he would be an important piece as a left-handed hitter alongside Yount and Molitor.

  We were at the winter meetings in 1976, in Los Angeles. Dick O’Connell was running the Red Sox for Tom Yawkey, whom he always called “the old man.” Dick was one of those guys who moved fast.

  Jim Baumer was our general manager, but O’Connell came to see me. He said Yawkey wanted him to make a deal to get back George “Boomer” Scott, whom we had acquired from the Red Sox in a trade after the ’71 season. Scott was really productive, leading the league in homers and RBIs in ’75, but had dropped off in ’76.

  He was a very good player, but w
e were anxious to bring in new blood. He was getting older. So I was all ears. I walked over to our scouting director, Dee Fondy, who was nearby, and told him we could trade Scott to the Red Sox and asked who we wanted back.

  “We want Cecil Cooper,” Fondy said. “He hasn’t hit his stride yet but I have no doubt he will.”

  We also wanted them to take Bernie Carbo, who wasn’t happy in Milwaukee and couldn’t stay healthy. So I went to tell O’Connell we’d do Scott and Carbo for Cooper, and he said done! Just like that. The whole thing took five, six minutes.

  Scott had good years back in Boston, but Cooper turned out to be one of the best hitters in baseball for eleven seasons. He hit .300 with us and delivered fifteen or twenty homers every year—when you needed them, not when they padded his stats. He was a high-character guy, too, and became a good friend.

  After the Aaron deal, that was the only time I ever made a trade, so I can honestly say I never made a bad one.

  We had losing records our first eight seasons, but I could tell things were close to turning in ’77. Robin was starting to be a threat at the plate, as well as the best athlete on the field, and we believed Molitor was going to be able to help us in short order. I knew I needed to change management again, however, so I thanked Baumer and Alex Grammas, the manager, for their service and turned the page.

  We made the firings on a Saturday, and they came to be known locally as “the Saturday night massacre.” I never liked that part of the job—nobody does—but the timing called for decisive action.

  I knew who I wanted to hire, but he wasn’t available. Harry Dalton, who had run the Orioles’ farm system and then essentially been their general manager as director of player personnel, was at the time the GM of the Angels.

  I wasn’t sure who was my second choice behind Dalton. But one day I picked up the newspaper and read that the Angels had hired Buzzie Bavasi away from the Padres to run their operation.

  As soon as I could get to a phone, I called Gene Autry and asked if I could interview Harry for the job here. He was wonderful. All he wanted was ten minutes to call Harry and let him know I’d be calling. It was a long ten minutes, let me tell you. But when I called I told him right away I wanted to hire him, and he was anxious to make a move.

  I knew this was going to be great for us. I had known Harry for a long time and I really had faith in his ability. I knew we had the beginning of a very good young team, but there was just something missing in the front office. And frankly, he was the guy I wanted, the only guy I wanted. I was excited. By the way, he didn’t disappoint me, either.

  It was Harry’s call on the manager. I was at the University Club in January, at a luncheon, and Harry said to me, “I got George Bamberger coming in. I think he’s our guy, but I want you to meet him.”

  Bamberger had spent the last decade as the pitching coach for all those great teams in Baltimore, working for Earl Weaver. I had huge respect for him as a baseball man, not just a pitching coach. So I went up to meet Harry and George. I met George and I liked the idea a lot.

  George was blunt. I said, “George, delighted to meet you, glad you’re here, and hope you’re going to come with us.”

  He said, “Why would I come here? You guys are a bunch of losers.”

  “Well, I don’t think we will be,” I said.

  That was it. He got hired that afternoon. We were starting to put something together, and I could feel it.

  That year, I was excited going to Sun City for spring training, and it turned out to be one of the best camps we’ve ever run, thanks to the talent we’d assembled and a manager who cussed like nobody’s business.

  One day I walked into the manager’s office and Bambi was there. I was just getting to know him. He said, “Hi, boss.”

  “Hi, George. How are you?”

  “Well, I told you about that fucker.”

  He couldn’t complete a sentence without calling somebody a fucker, so I was just listening to him, enjoying his way with the English language. He kept going.

  “I’ll tell you what I’m calling the fucker.”

  I didn’t know who the hell he was talking about. No idea.

  “The guy is the Ignitor. He’ll ignite us. That fucker will ignite us.”

  Now I got it. He was talking about Molitor, who was in his first spring training. I was surprised how excited Bambi was, so I asked him what he was going to do with him.

  “What am I going to do with him?” Bambi replied. “He’s going to lead off. He’s going to ignite this fucking club.”

  No manager was ever more correct about any statement he made. For the next fifteen years, on his way to the Hall of Fame, Paul Molitor did exactly that.

  He was such a special player that even Ted Williams noticed.

  I spent some time with Ted late in his life, really getting to know him when Major League Baseball celebrated its All-Century Team at the 1999 All-Star Game at Fenway Park. There were a lot of events and we had a great time talking baseball.

  From then on he’d just call me out of the blue. My phone would ring and Ted’s son would be on it, telling me his dad wanted to talk to me. Then Ted would come on the line. We had great conversations.

  “You have the worst fucking job in America,” he said one day. “How do you put up with all those assholes?”

  He was talking about the owners. We got through that and then he said, “Your guy has the most beautiful stroke.” I thought he was talking about Yount, but he was talking about Molitor. He said, “He’s got the best stroke in this game since me.”

  Wow. That’s saying something when Ted Williams compares you to him. I immediately called Paul to tell him what Ted had said. He didn’t believe it. But that’s the kind of hitter Molitor was, and when you had him and Yount in the same lineup you really had something.

  8

  MARVIN MILLER.

  Or Marvin.

  Sometimes just Miller.

  Put those names together any way you want and they were sure to make the hair on the arms of baseball owners stand up in the 1960s and ’70s. After all, because he was the first head of the players union, Miller’s name was generally said with an adjective in front of it, and that adjective was not brilliant or dashing. It was bleeping.

  That bleeping Marvin Miller. Or Marvin bleeping Miller.

  Needless to say, he wasn’t real popular when I got into baseball. But it’s easy to see now, looking back, that few men have had such a profound impact on the business of baseball. His role shaping the game, pushing it forward to become a more player-conscious enterprise, fundamentally changed the way owners and fans viewed the players on the field—for better and worse. Marvin Miller should be in the Hall of Fame—no question about it—and I can’t explain why he isn’t. I do know this: it’s not because there is some conspiracy among baseball’s blue bloods to keep him out—that’s just not true. Regardless, he deserves to be honored for what he did to help players. But his prolonged all-out war against steroid testing caused him to lose support, even among some of the great players.

  When Marvin was put in charge of the players union, he’d left the most powerful union in the United States—the United Steelworkers—to essentially create one from scratch. It’s been written that it had only a fifty-four-hundred-dollar bank account and one old filing cabinet when he arrived. He grew it into the most powerful union in sports—probably in America, to be honest—in a period of about fifteen years. That’s having an impact.

  Robin Roberts, Jim Bunning, Bob Friend, and Harvey Kuenn were among the players who realized early that it was time for them to organize. They’d been represented as a group in the past, but the only issue that was ever really discussed was a pension plan, which Happy Chandler, the second commissioner, had agreed to fund through money generated from World Series radio and TV money. That was essentially found money when it arrived, but the growth of broadcast revenues would continue through the decades, becoming a battleground for first owners and players and later among owne
rs themselves, with the dividing lines being the size of their markets. In fairness, the players probably realized the role that TV money could play quicker than most of the owners.

  Miller was the players’ choice to lead them, and he was brilliant. He had graduated from high school at fifteen and earned a New York University economics degree at nineteen. Marvin dove into the challenge of representing the players the same way that I jumped into baseball—with both a passion and people skills. He did a wonderful job both leading and educating players.

  Marvin empowered players. They had been raised in a culture that often didn’t make them feel valuable. But Miller banged away at them when he visited camps in spring training or held meetings of player reps, selling them on their value and power. He encouraged them to come by the Players Association offices—he didn’t like to call his group a union, even though that’s what it was—when they were playing games at Yankee Stadium or Shea Stadium. He wanted them to understand exactly what they were a part of, to show the players that they mattered.

  Miller’s initial focus was negotiating a new pension agreement—this was playing out while I was working behind the scenes to try to bring baseball back to Milwaukee. But it’s safe to say owners weren’t throwing open their doors to Marvin. They were so stuck in the past, the distant past. Most of them could not imagine change, let alone embrace it.

  The owners at the time were relentless in their belief that they should control all of the power in the sport. These were barons of industry who enjoyed having things their way. I’ll never forget a meeting that we had in St. Louis with Gussie Busch when a casual mention of changing the reserve clause in player contracts to give the players more freedom led to Gussie slamming his hands on the table and screaming. That reaction was symbolic of the sentiment of that era among the owners. Gussie was honestly expressing what he felt about the division of power between the people who owned baseball teams and the men who played for baseball teams. It was the way most owners felt in the 1960s. They didn’t see anything wrong with controlling a player’s rights throughout his career, with the only guideline being the minimum salary.