by Bud Selig
There was blatant unfairness in allowing teams from the largest markets to pocket all of their local television revenue. Those contracts were created by the size of their markets, not the work ethic or ingenuity of the franchise. No matter how hard a team in a small- or medium-sized market worked, no matter how smart you were, how great was your baseball or marketing acumen, the biggest deals would go to teams in the largest cities. That’s unfair. They would have a huge advantage in signing free agents and retaining their own players when they reached free agency.
We all knew the economic model had to change. The gap between small-market, middle-market, and big-market clubs was growing at an alarming rate.
We were beginning to understand what was happening, but I’m not sure any of us fully realized how the game would be changed. It added a huge amount of fuel to a smoldering fire. There was tension among the owners like there had never been before.
Perhaps that’s why none of us should have been surprised when the 1990 labor negotiations ended up the same way as all the others. We were hunting big game again, with many of the owners continuing a push for a salary cap, like the ones in the NBA and the NFL. Jerry Reinsdorf owned the Chicago Bulls as well as the White Sox, and Stan Kasten had been Ted Turner’s man with both the Braves and the Atlanta Hawks. While Edward Bennett Williams wasn’t active in these negotiations, he understood the NFL’s system because he’d been president of the Washington Redskins.
We announced that we’d lock out players from spring training camps if we didn’t have a deal by February 15. The union didn’t blink and talks got off to a very slow start, threatening the start of the season.
Vincent was nervous from the beginning about having a work stoppage on his watch, just as Peter Ueberroth had been in 1985 and Bowie Kuhn before him. Only two days into the lockout, Vincent interjected himself into the negotiations, essentially gutting our proposal. So much for us getting the players on the run. But even with our initial proposal highly diluted—the salary cap was pulled off the table—talks dragged like the last hour of school on a sunny day. The outcome was predictable to anyone who had followed our labor history.
We wound up with a deal that saved the season, albeit starting a week late, and we neither solved any of our problems nor introduced any changes that would help us modernize a sport that was falling farther behind all the time.
Fay worked the media like a master, especially in New York and Los Angeles, where he’d been established before being hired by Bart Giamatti. He had the high ground there, which may have caused him to begin to rule like a monarch.
He publicly backhanded George Steinbrenner for paying forty thousand dollars to a man named Howard Spira for information he could use against Dave Winfield in a contract negotiation. It was bad judgment on George’s part, for sure, but he was stunned when the commissioner hit him with a two-year suspension (although in a bizarre twist, Steinbrenner negotiated a lifetime ban, which was lifted two years later).
Like the Rose camp, the Yankees felt that Vincent had been heavy-handed and unfair throughout the process. He had dragged Buck Showalter, the Yankees’ manager, out of the clubhouse to a meeting across town, at MLB headquarters, before a game because he wasn’t pleased with Showalter’s testimony during a grievance hearing regarding Steve Howe.
While Steinbrenner wasn’t the most popular of owners, everyone thought Fay had mishandled these two cases.
We had been studying our first expansion since 1977 for a long time, working to find two cities that could join the National League and give us fourteen teams in both leagues. We had set the expansion fee at $95 million per team, a pool of $190 million that would be shared by the teams.
This should have been very popular with everyone, but instead we wound up fighting among ourselves. We had to decide how many players teams could lose in the expansion draft and how many they could protect, and we wound up in a big fight between owners in the two leagues.
National League owners felt they deserved the full $190 million. American League owners wanted equal shares because they were going to lose players, too, along with having their slice of the national revenue pie made a little bit slimmer. Both sides were dug in, and Vincent was put into the middle of the dispute.
His ruling, revealed just before Miami and Denver were awarded teams, was a blow to the AL teams. He said they would get 22 percent of the revenue and lose three players each in the expansion draft. That was only three million dollars per team at the cost of three players. I hated the ruling, and other American League owners were livid.
I got a call from George W. Bush, the future United States president who then was running the Rangers. “You can’t let this happen,” Bush told me, which was interesting in that he was one of Vincent’s close friends and supporters. His uncle, Bucky Bush, was a close friend of Fay’s, and George was loyal to family friends.
“Buddy, we got screwed,” George said.
“Yes, George, we got screwed.”
This was just an ugly era for everyone in the game. The whole tone for baseball was bad coming out of the 1990 labor agreement. Small-market clubs were hurting and nobody was acknowledging it.
Doug Danforth, who had become the point person for the Pirates, was scared stiff about the future of his franchise and expressed the concern directly in a letter to Vincent.
Danforth begged the commissioner to address the concerns many clubs had. He referred to the growing economic disparities as “startling and apt to get worse if something is not done very soon.” He estimated that teams on the low end were producing roughly one-third as much revenue as teams on the high end.
“Local TV and radio revenues will run from a low of about $3.5 million to a high of $50 million,” Danforth wrote, saying teams in even medium-size markets would be hard pressed to survive economically while fielding competitive teams. He pleaded with Fay to consider some form of revenue sharing.
“You will get howls from six or seven owners, and applause from twenty others,” he wrote. “I am sure that neither you nor I are in favor of the game of baseball becoming just a toy of the very wealthy, but I believe that’s what will happen unless a new direction is sought.”
Danforth eventually came to believe Fay simply wasn’t the right man for the job.
I knew that, too. Fay had revealed it to me in an unexpected way one night in January 1992.
I met Fay for dinner in Arizona before spring training, and afterward, on the drive home, I talked to him about how unhappy the clubs were.
“Fay, I’ve run the Brewers for more than twenty years,” I said. “I think I understand what’s going on. It’s getting tougher now. We’re starting to have disparity we never dreamed about. We’ve got to do something about it. I know others have talked to you about it.”
Fay didn’t even look at me. He stared straight ahead and gave me a dismissive wave.
Huh? That wasn’t what I was expecting. I pushed ahead, telling him that I had talked about this frequently with his old friend Bart Giamatti. I told him that Bart knew the economic problems and disparity had to be addressed. Then Fay said something that absolutely stunned me. It still does, really.
“Buddy, this is the best job I’ve ever had,” he said. “I don’t want Fred Wilpon and Nelson Doubleday mad at me.”
He was talking about the owners of the Mets, one of the big-market teams that needed to make sacrifices for the good of the sport. I knew right then that Fay wasn’t going to last. He wanted the job, but he didn’t want the hard work of uniting owners to get behind changes that were imperative if we were ever going to get out of neutral.
The writing was on the wall, but no one knew exactly how Fay’s time as commissioner would end. During an owners meeting in June 1992, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Fay acknowledged that “baseball may never have been in such a sad financial state.” He said that one club had almost been unable to make its payroll and that clubs had been borrowing so much money that banks were constantly calling him for assuran
ces that we could make it good if they failed. He said teams had taken loans as large as thirty-five million dollars to cover their deficits.
But Fay didn’t have any solutions. He basically just told us to fix the problems. I couldn’t believe he didn’t see it as his role to fix the problems. He somehow thought the commissioner was above the economics of the game.
Some owners were so upset with Fay that they were again studying the Major League Basic Agreement to see if they could find grounds to fire him. The rules arguably prevented him from being fired during his term, and he fully understood that, but Jerry Reinsdorf and other owners were working to find historical precedents or other means to make a change.
As a group, we wanted Fay gone so we could get a fresh start and begin working toward curing the disease that was spreading throughout baseball. There were a lot of owners lined up against Fay, for a lot of reasons. “This guy doesn’t get it,” said Peter O’Malley, whose Dodgers were doing just fine economically.
I had tried to play peacemaker, taking the owners’ complaints to Fay, but the reality was he’d lost my confidence with the comments he made that night in Scottsdale. But still I was reluctant to see this play out in an ugly fashion.
I’d talk on the phone with Reinsdorf all the time, and he’d say, “Buddy, how long is this going to drag out?”
While we had agreed not to discuss the Vincent situation with the media after the meeting at the Waldorf, the next day’s New York Times had a big story in it by Murray Chass, whom we viewed as Fay’s unofficial spokesman. It portrayed how Fay was fighting to preserve the commissionership from a cabal headed by Reinsdorf and Selig.
I called Fay and reminded him we didn’t need the publicity.
“Buddy, I don’t know how that got in the newspaper,” he said.
Yeah, right. I might have been born in the morning, but it wasn’t yesterday morning.
The Waldorf meeting, coincidentally enough, was the first for a trio of new owners. David Glass (Royals), Drayton McLane (Astros), and John Ellis (Mariners) all told me later they went home wondering what they’d gotten themselves into. I’d felt the same way back in 1970, so I understood, but the issues were so much tougher now. We couldn’t afford to just keep walking away from them.
More time went by without anything getting done.
Rockies CEO John Antonucci circulated a memo in which he expressed “grave concerns over certain issues facing the game, including labor relations, television, inequities between large and small markets,” and concluded by writing, “We have not seen leadership exhibited by the commissioner sufficient to move the game in the required direction on these issues.”
Padres owner Tom Werner wrote Vincent, telling him simply, “We feel you have lost the capacity to lead.”
Doug Danforth called for a no-confidence vote on Vincent at a special meeting convened near O’Hare Airport in early September. It wasn’t unanimous, but it passed 18–9 with one abstention.
The fight was out in the public now, but fortunately it didn’t last much longer. Fay initially vowed to stay on in the job, knowing there would be a showdown at the scheduled quarterly owners meeting in St. Louis a week after the special meeting.
But Fay finally did the right thing for everybody. He resigned.
13
NOBODY WAS IN charge of baseball for about forty-eight hours. Nobody.
Fay was out, but nobody was in on even an acting basis for a couple of days, including me. And, to be honest, I was distracted.
After spending so much time and effort on the business side of the game, thinking about the good of the sport, I needed to take a little bit of time—a scintilla, maybe—and think about the Brewers and our No. 19, Robin Yount.
He was in his nineteenth season and pushing to become the seventeenth hitter ever to collect three thousand hits. I knew I was needed in St. Louis for the quarterly meeting, but I couldn’t imagine missing Robin’s milestone hit.
So I was sitting in my office at County Stadium at about five thirty when Eli Jacobs, the Orioles owner, called. He told me that I’d be the man in charge. I told him to hold on. We’d talk about it in St. Louis. He said, “No, you’re the only logical guy.” Later on, Fred Kuhlmann of the Cardinals and Stanton Cook of the Cubs also called. Everyone was saying I was the guy they wanted to take over. We needed a leader, and I was the guy who gave the owners the most confidence. It was as simple as that.
I was really hoping for Robin to get two hits on Monday night in Milwaukee, before I left for the meeting, but he only got No. 2,999, not the big one. So I flew to St. Louis the next morning knowing I’d be coming straight home afterward because the Brewers were playing the Indians on Tuesday night at County Stadium.
When the Executive Council put my name in nomination to be chairman, I said, guys, shouldn’t we think about this? They said, we’ve thought about it; you have to take over. So I did. Then we broke into our scheduled American League and National League meetings, with league presidents Bobby Brown and Bill White welcoming me to sit alongside them. This was exciting. But a part of me was like a kid on a long day at school. While I knew I was taking on the biggest responsibility of my life, all I really wanted to do was get back to Milwaukee for the baseball game.
George W. Bush is as much of a baseball fan as I am. He knew I was going back to watch Robin and asked if he could come along. Gussie Busch was having a big party at his farm, but George wanted to see baseball history, not spend another night listening to owners talk.
I’ve always said I’m happy in my life where I am, and I mean it. I really hadn’t thought about taking on more responsibility. I know people will be cynical about it, but they’re wrong. I had accepted the job as chairman of the Executive Council with the understanding that we would eventually have a search committee for a new commissioner, going through the usual process. I really did not believe I’d be the next commissioner. I loved what I was doing with the Brewers and we had begun an attempt to get a new ballpark, which I felt was vital for not just our success but our survival.
Robin Yount, a Brewer for life, made this a great night for all of us by dropping a single to right field in the seventh inning off Jose Mesa, triggering a happy celebration. Our group headed back to St. Louis afterward, but I’ll be honest: I could have floated there without the plane. This had been a day I’d never forget.
I returned to St. Louis for the second day of meetings but then came right back to Milwaukee, to my little office at County Stadium, the one I’d moved into when the Braves fled to Atlanta. I usually loved that office. But I’ve got to admit, the tone of the place changed overnight after I took over as chairman of the Executive Council.
Until you’re in that chair, you really don’t know the extent of the problems. You don’t know how it will feel to be the one who has to deal with them. There was no way I could have known then that I’d be the man in charge until January 24, 2015. That’s 8,174 days, and very few of them were smooth days. I remember saying at the end of that first day to my secretary, Lori Keck (who had worked for Vince Lombardi before me), “Well, this is some mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, isn’t it?”
But never did I doubt what I was doing or why I was doing it. The sport I had fallen in love with when I was a boy dreaming about being the next Joe DiMaggio needed to change if we were going to survive, much less thrive as we had in the old days.
I was in a unique position, and I knew there was a lot of criticism early on about an owner running the sport, much less actually becoming commissioner. I got pounded quite a bit, but a lot of people didn’t understand that the commissioner’s office had changed. This was no longer Kenesaw Mountain Landis. This was an era that had been changed by the Players Association. One thing that Marvin used to say over and over, and Bowie had a hard time reconciling himself to—he didn’t believe it; and the public didn’t understand it then and there are still some people who don’t understand it today—was that the union, and not management, controlled the players
. I didn’t often agree with Marvin Miller, but he was 100 percent right.
When I took over, it wasn’t, in my mind, so much a case of an owner becoming a commissioner as much as that I knew I had received great training for more than two decades from people like Mr. Fetzer and Dan Galbreath, among others. I knew what the office was about, and that my experience helped me and it helped the sport. Bringing in an outsider often led to disaster.
Nobody loved the game more than I did. Nobody also understood the history of the commissioner’s office, and had studied it, the way I had. I understood the game, the culture, the history, what went wrong, what needed to be done. I knew the people on both sides, on every side. All those years being an owner—and nobody was as active as I was—really helped me.
The world had changed, and the commissioner’s job had changed with it. There was a real metamorphosis going on, and there was a lack of understanding about it. Our revenue sharing hadn’t changed since the 1930s, really. Somehow the public didn’t understand it, and even the parties involved didn’t seem to understand it.
I did, but in those first days I didn’t know how my role would evolve. I know how this sounds now, but it was true then. There was no grand plan for me to eventually become commissioner. If there was one, nobody had told me.
National television money was a great thing for everyone in baseball. Unlike the cable deals that every team had—the ones that could be huge for some teams and mean much less for teams from smaller markets—the national deals were shared evenly, so those contracts are always of huge interest to teams.
Because the NFL was running rings around us, networks had begun to take a dim view of baseball. I wanted someone to put those cards on the table and fully explain it for all the owners—another way to include everyone in our business—so I invited Dick Ebersol, the president of NBC, to speak at an owners meeting in November.
