by Bud Selig
Ubie wasn’t a friend of many owners. He led with a sharp tongue and an iron hand. He knew he had been hired because our economics were in bad shape, and that drove everything he did. He got the ball rolling on a lot of good things, including the marketing and merchandising of the game. He brought our business side into the modern world, more than it had ever been.
But he didn’t mind calling owners names in our meetings. Even worse, to some of the owners who had been staying away and sending representatives in their place, he required that the owners themselves come to the meetings, which he changed from two a year to four.
I got along great with him, but the meetings were very tough. You may quarrel with his style and how he went about it, but anybody who looked at the numbers, looked at what was going on, knew there was an institutional problem, a very serious one.
But Ubie thought he could dictate the terms. He didn’t go about trying to make changes in a way that would make them happen. I could see that. Years later, in the 1990s, it was moments like this that helped me recognize that if there was to be change, the kind of change that I knew we needed, you were going to have to work at it with all the owners. But that wasn’t how Ubie operated. He’d get them in a room and say, “Hey, we’re going to do this and do that.” Then the meeting would be over and he’d be off doing whatever else he did. There was no follow-up with everyone else, no politicking to make sure people actually implemented his decisions.
That said, Ubie did have his areas of focus. Ubie didn’t just worry about growing our revenues. He worried about our growing payrolls, specifically what we were spending to sign free agents. He liked confrontation. “Hey, what are you doing?” “You gonna sign this guy?” It was tough.
This became a cause for him, generating a lot of discussion at meetings and eventually the creation of an information bank that kept teams up to speed on what was happening with free agents. An undeniable change was happening in the market for free agents. These developments would be the basis for the union’s charges of collusion, and the owners were found guilty by arbitrators Thomas Roberts (1985) and George Nicolau (1986 and ’87 free agents).
Eventually these cases were settled with owners agreeing to pay $280 million, divided equally, and a group of players were given new-look chances at free agency. I testified in those hearings and said the Brewers weren’t looking to sign free agents. That happened to be the truth. I believe that Nicolau and Roberts both drew inferences not supported by the evidence. But what happened in the market was a manifestation of our serious problems.
There were all these charges about this guy did this, that guy did that. Look, the system was broken. Owners were desperate. Instead of solving the problems at the table, we solved nothing. I could honestly say, when I went to testify, that I never said to another club—“don’t sign my player, I won’t sign your player.” I never did any of that. As close as I was to all the owners, closer than anybody else, I never had that conversation.
The collusion rulings were frustrating to me. They were a manifestation of the system being broken. Salaries were rising dramatically and people were concerned. There’s the phrase “acting in concert,” which is prohibited in our Basic Agreement. It is prohibited for both sides. I always thought it was odd that the agents had more information on what everyone was doing than anybody. There was the sense that if our guys had the same information it was collusion. I often used to joke that if we’re colluders, we’re the wort colluders in the history of mankind. Because look what was happening with salaries.
Clubs are always going to make their own economic decisions. I have never understood why that was so hard to understand. Ubie talked to us all the time about fiscal responsibility. I did the same thing when I was commissioner. I used to say in my many speeches, “I’m not telling you who to sign, what to sign, but I ran a club. You sweat every game out.” To do that and lose money, what sense does that make?
Ueberroth had other issues with owners, of course. As Bowie had done in 1976, he killed any leverage owners might have had during a player strike in 1985. He didn’t want a prolonged strike to stain his record with the public, so he made sure it ended after two days.
Players had gone on strike August 6. We were represented by Barry Rona and were attempting to get the kind of salary cap mechanism that the NBA had ever so quietly gotten its union to approve years earlier. That was always our goal in negotiations during those years, and it was always a nonstarter for the union. We weren’t sure players could hold together again as they had in 1981 because their salaries had doubled since then. But it didn’t matter, because Ubie dived in after one day, telling our guy and Fehr they had till two o’clock to get a deal done or he was going to order players back on the field, without a deal.
Nobody wanted that, so a compromise was pounded out. Ueberroth had killed us.
After a while, everyone knew Ueberroth would be a one-term commissioner, gone when his deal was up. As usual, for whatever reason, I was in the middle of things.
When Peter decided he was done, he called me to meet him at the Regency Hotel in New York and negotiate the terms of his departure. I don’t know how I got these jobs, but I got them.
One of the biggest pleasures I’ve had, and one of the biggest heartbreaks, came from getting to know Bart Giamatti, who would succeed Ueberroth. The time hadn’t been right for him to leave Yale when we interviewed him in the earlier commissioner search. He eventually told us he’d given the school a longer commitment and needed to keep it. But when he did leave Yale, he was a great fit for a job we had open—National League president, replacing Chub Feeney.
Bart was a lifelong Red Sox fan, a Ted Williams man through and through. The first time I met him, we debated the merits of Williams versus DiMaggio and wound up in a delightful dissection of the 1949 pennant race between the Yankees and the Red Sox, which was decided when the Yankees beat Boston in the last two games of the season.
Bart loved baseball so much that he wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times during the 1981 strike, essentially demanding that the players get back on the field and start giving us baseball. I loved everything about the man and was so happy when we got him involved in baseball. He was the easiest choice ever as a replacement for Ueberroth.
There was a romance to Bart that you didn’t see in most others involved in baseball management. He was a wordsmith and did a lot of writing about baseball, the game’s charm and its nature, its integrity. But Bart was smart and he was tough. He had dealt with a lot of tough labor situations at Yale. I think he could have been a great long-term commissioner. I think he would have brought about a lot of the change that wouldn’t happen for years.
One of the many qualities that pointed to Bart Giamatti’s potential to be a great commissioner was that he wanted to discuss issues, not just dictate change. He understood that being commissioner requires you to persuade people to see your point of view, not order them to do your bidding. He also understood that he represented owners—who, after all, had hired him and could fire him—and not the players. He understood that the union represented the players. He understood that his influence as commissioner would go only so far in labor issues, because, to quote him, “I only have suasion over one side.”
He and I had spent endless hours talking. He understood the problems and what the commissioner’s role should be in resolving those problems. Now, every commissioner in every sport is knee deep in labor and business, and should be. You can’t say “I don’t care,” because you’re the commissioner and it’s your job to stay involved.
When we named Bart as commissioner-elect, we had another labor agreement to negotiate. The Basic Agreement expired in 1990. Bart knew he’d have to hit the ground running. He also knew he could use all the help he could get. That’s why we created a new position under him—deputy commissioner. He wanted someone with a strong business background and brought us Fay Vincent.
They’d been friends for ten years, drawn to each other’s intelle
ct, passion for literature, and love of baseball. Fay was a New Yorker who had been hired as an outsider to run Columbia Pictures. His success there put him in Bart’s orbit. He got Bart onto the board at Coca-Cola, which had purchased Columbia, and Bart returned the favor by giving Fay a chance to work in baseball.
We needed strong leadership more than ever, leadership that would focus on the economic issues, which were becoming bigger by the year. They thought they’d love working together, and from the outside it seemed they did. But they couldn’t have really enjoyed that period, as it was largely occupied by a much more public drama they’d inherited from Ueberroth: Pete Rose.
Reports of Rose’s gambling and dealings with shady people made their way to the commissioner’s office when Pete was a player-manager with the Reds. Ueberroth called Rose to New York to confront him in February 1989, about a story dealing with Rose’s alleged gambling that was set to run in Sports Illustrated. When the New York Times got wind of the meeting, Ueberroth told Murray Chass that “there’s nothing ominous and there won’t be any follow-through.”
Ueberroth had his foot out the door and essentially turned it over to Giamatti and Vincent, both of whom believed the issue merited a full investigation. Vincent hired a lawyer he knew well, John Dowd, a former federal prosecutor who had gone after mobsters in the 1970s, to build a case. There was no way to get around the issue. It had to be addressed. But the shame for our sport was that it turned into such an ugly chapter for everyone. It’s to Bart’s everlasting credit that he took on the weight of holding the Hit King accountable for his actions, but it was one more bad story for baseball. Because of Rose, there was little romance in baseball for Bart during his brief tenure, and that’s a shame.
From the very start of MLB versus Rose, the sides had squared off, creating a battle royale that would result in no winners. Dowd was extremely aggressive throughout his investigation. He got to the bottom of the matter, proving beyond a doubt that Rose, as a manager, had bet on baseball. He did it by turning some of Rose’s acquaintances against him. But his investigative style blew up on everyone on the MLB side when a Cincinnati judge read a letter that Dowd had drafted seeking leniency for one of the men who provided information on Rose. The wording of the letter made it seem as if baseball had prejudged Rose, rather than merely gathering information on him, and Judge Carl Rubin—a Reds fan who, like almost everyone in Cincinnati, worshipped Rose—took his concerns to Rose’s attorney and to the press. Bart had signed the letter, so there was no wiggling out of having a hand in this. Before Bart could call Rose to a meeting, Rose sued him. He wanted the process to be shut down and even for Bart to pay damages.
Vincent and Dowd should not have put the commissioner in this terrible position. I think that greatly impacted the relationship between Giamatti and Vincent. Bart felt that internally we had mishandled the Rose situation. He was unhappy with some of the letters and details of the investigation.
Bart eventually prevailed upon Rose to sign off on a deal that made him permanently ineligible to participate in baseball but allowed him to apply for reinstatement provided he had lived up to his side of the agreement, including a requirement that Rose “reconfigure” his life.
It was August 24 when the deal was announced. Several days later, Bart headed to his home on Martha’s Vineyard to take a little break. He died there on September 1, after suffering a massive heart attack.
I had talked to him the night before. I called about ten o’clock at night and he returned the call after having dinner with Senator Bill Bradley.
“Buddy, you sound so forlorn,” Bart said. “Are you okay?”
I told him I was fine. We’d beaten a good Oakland club that day, so I was in a good mood, actually. We talked from about midnight until around one in the morning. We just gossiped. Bart loved to hear what was going on with the owners and other people.
That was the last time we spoke.
The next day, he went shopping for a wedding gift for my daughter Lisa and wrote a beautiful note. Then, in the blink of an eye, he was gone.
Fred Wilpon, the Mets’ owner, called me with the news. I was speechless, for once.
As Bart’s wife, Toni, later told me, the note to Lisa was the last thing Bart wrote. I sent it on to her, so she would have it.
Sadly, Bart’s short time in baseball is basically remembered for two things: suspending Pete Rose for life because he gambled on baseball and dying of a heart attack at age fifty-one, only five months after we had welcomed him as our seventh commissioner.
There’s a widespread belief that stress over the Rose investigation and its ugly aftermath was what killed Bart. But that wasn’t it. Bart was a chain smoker and was a little heavy. He just didn’t take care of himself well. You can’t live like that forever without it taking a toll.
I had realized that for myself shortly after the 1982 World Series. I quit smoking those Tiparillos and started eating better. Sue stopped smoking, too.
About two weeks before he passed, Bart and I had dinner in New York, and he ate a big Italian dinner with a lot of cream sauce. Afterwards we were walking to the Yale Club, where he was staying. He was lighting up a cigarette, and I said, you shouldn’t be doing that. That was the only time he ever got mad at me.
“Toni put you up to this, didn’t she?” he said.
Well, I liked Toni, but I hadn’t talked to her about his smoking. It was just common sense, really.
We were all crushed when Bart died. It was a huge personal loss for everyone who had gotten to know him, and it was a blow because he had seemed the perfect leader for a tough time.
It was only two weeks later, at an Executive Council meeting in Milwaukee, that we got down to the business of finding the next commissioner. Vincent, as an extension of Giamatti, was the default option, and a lot of us were worried about the ongoing labor negotiations. I remembered how time consuming the search leading to Ueberroth had been and wasn’t anxious to repeat that process, not at that point in time.
So the thought was to just give the job to Fay Vincent, though the support for Fay was hardly unanimous. Peter O’Malley was the most outspoken of the dissenters. He said, “We’re rushing this.” He was right, but I was head of the Executive Council and I said, let’s do it. I’ll take responsibility. But looking back, I was in shock over Bart’s death, which had really shaken me to the core.
A short while after we named Fay as Bart’s replacement, maybe five or six days later, I got a call from Bart’s widow, Toni. She was stunned that we had given the commissioner’s job to Fay. She said Bart had developed major differences with Fay and was even talking about firing him in the weeks before he died.
For all the time I spent on the phone, I should have made a few more phone calls before we named Fay Vincent as No. 8.
12
NOT ONLY DID Pete Rose give us headlines no sport would want, but he also distracted Bart and Fay from our economic challenges, which kept growing larger. And as the 1980s drew to a close, one of the biggest issues facing the game was about television.
Few things have transformed baseball—or any sport—the way that television has. That was true in the 1950s and it was true in the 1980s, too, though by then the economics looked vastly different. Nothing encapsulated baseball’s problems in the 1980s as clearly as its relationship to TV.
In December 1988, we were at another owners’ meeting, beginning to discuss strategy for the next round of labor negotiations with the union, when someone burst in with the news.
Steinbrenner had signed a twelve-year, $486 million deal with the Madison Square Garden Network. Fred Wilpon didn’t believe it at first.
“Don’t be silly,” he said.
When Wilpon found out the report was accurate, he looked like he was going to pass out. He was stunned. We all were, really. It was hard to comprehend those numbers.
The Yankees’ MSG deal was going to change the economics of the sport. The Yankees were going to get $50 million before a single game was
televised, and their annual local television revenues would start at $7.5 million in 1989 and rise to $29 million by 1991.
That one TV deal illustrated many of the financial problems facing the league. The widening gap in revenues between franchises had been an irritation for a majority of teams over the previous decade, and neither Steinbrenner nor the owners of other big-market teams regarded it as a problem. They would not consider making short-term sacrifices for the good of the sport.
As news of the MSG deal landed, I couldn’t help but think of an exchange years earlier. It was in 1983, when Orioles owner Edward Bennett Williams said something I never forgot. It was in a labor committee meeting, and we were talking about making some minor changes to revenue sharing. There was some thought that we had to do these during negotiations with the Players Association because of federal labor laws. It was after one of these discussions that Williams confronted Steinbrenner.
“The peasants are going to come down from the hills,” Williams said.
“Peasants?” growled Steinbrenner. “Don’t tell me about peasants. I know how to take care of the peasants!”
Back in 1983, we were a sport beginning to fight for its life, but by the decade’s end the situation was becoming scary, and now the nuclear bomb of all local television contracts had landed square in the middle of our troubled landscape. At the time, many of the other twenty-five teams were receiving less than a million dollars a year for their TV contracts. The Brewers were getting only about twenty-five thousand dollars per game, with less than a quarter of our games televised.
This is a problem the NFL never had to confront. Their inventory of games is so small that they’re all carried on national television, not local networks. Pete Rozelle had somehow convinced the teams to divide their TV pie equally, meaning that teams in cities like Green Bay and Cincinnati would get as much as the ones in New York.
