For the Good of the Game

by Bud Selig

  I encouraged Dick to speak bluntly, and he sure did. He said baseball is the best sport on earth and “moves people in a way that no other sport can.” Our guys were smiling at that point. But then he spoke of a “cloud over baseball” that contributed to a negative public perception of the sport. There it was. We all knew it, but it was painful to hear it from someone like Ebersol.

  He said that baseball had always lacked a long-term strategy, the kind that Pete Rozelle and David Stern had used for years in the NFL and NBA. He knew all about the different labor histories in the sports and pointed out that we had to put aside our ugly past and find a way to forge a partnership with the Players Association.

  “There must be joint marketing of baseball,” he said.

  I agreed wholeheartedly and was starting my run as baseball’s top man full of hope for the future. I’d always been good at looking ahead, not back, and this was one of those times.

  We held our famous winter meetings at the Galt House Hotel in Louisville in December. These meetings are one thing Major League Baseball has done well throughout its history—traveling to a warm climate to discuss trades and more mundane business, generally receiving a lot of free publicity from the newspapers that covered teams.

  The scope of the meetings had grown exponentially in my years with the Brewers. Thousands of people attend every year, including a sea of job seekers looking to join the baseball industry. The meetings are part reunion, part carnival, part business conference.

  Louisville was different for us. It was freezing, for one thing. We had an activity or two at Churchill Downs, which was fun, but looking back, these were among the worst meetings we’d ever had.

  For starters, Carl Barger died. He was president of the Marlins and a good man. He suffered an aneurysm and collapsed. Barger had left an owners meeting, apparently headed to the restroom. Bobby Brown, the former Yankees third baseman who had become a cardiologist in Fort Worth, and Rusty Rose, one of the owners of the Rangers, were at his side within seconds. Dr. Brown and Rusty tried chest pressure and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation before the paramedics arrived but had no luck. Carl was already gone.

  I wished I could immediately adjourn the meeting but after a long break to regroup we got back to work. We voted to reopen the collective bargaining agreement.

  Agent Dennis Gilbert was busy closing a deal for free agent prize Barry Bonds, who had effectively priced himself out of Pittsburgh by winning his second MVP Award that season. He was like Robin Yount, a player who could have stabilized his franchise with his presence. But it had gotten tougher and tougher for teams—especially small- and medium-market teams—to keep those players.

  Bonds signed a record deal in Louisville—six years, $43.75 million—with the Giants, eleven million dollars more than Cal Ripken’s contract with the Orioles, which had been the standard for guaranteed money.

  Looking back now, the size of the deal seems almost quaint. But it got my attention then. So too did my first call from Congress. I’d been summoned by Ohio senator Howard Metzenbaum, who chaired the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, to discuss baseball’s antitrust exemption.

  I traveled directly to Washington, D.C., from Louisville, accompanied by Sue and also George W. Bush, the Rangers’ owner. He was on his way to visit his father in the White House but took time to help me manage the hearing. He and Sue were sitting in the back of the room when I testified.

  Congressional hearings never scared me. I was never intimidated. But it was nice to have a friend like George there. Metzenbaum didn’t like having an owner running baseball. He said in his opening remarks that Fay Vincent had used his independent authority to protect the public interest. Well, Fay hadn’t exactly protected baseball. He’d mostly protected Fay, at least in my view. But politicians know how to work a stage, and these guys sure did that.

  I looked around at one point and George W. was giving me this sign, thumbs up. Then, after the hearing, he invited Sue and me to join him at the White House. It was quite a day, I’ve got to admit.

  We spent a lot of time and money on search committees to find a new commissioner, and it wasn’t a charade. I put Bill Bartholomay in charge of the process and he really did a good job. But the timing was never right to go outside and make a hire. Owners did not want to bring in a new commissioner until we had gotten a labor deal that addressed our problems. They always felt I had the best shot to get the deal we needed, and they just didn’t want to do anything that hurt our chances. They’d seen that too often in the past.

  Bartholomay told owners that more than one hundred people had expressed interest in the job and that he had personally interviewed more than forty-six of them. George Steinbrenner had pushed for Harvey Schiller, the head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and Stanton Cook had made a strong case for Arnold Weber, the retiring president of Northwestern University. But Bartholomay never made his recommendation. He was handed a letter signed by eleven low- and medium-revenue clubs stating they wouldn’t vote for a new commissioner until a new collective bargaining agreement had been signed. Those eleven clubs weren’t the only ones who held that view, which became clear at an owners meeting early in 1994, in Fort Lauderdale.

  So I was named acting commissioner, and four years later, on July 9, 1998, officially named baseball’s ninth commissioner. It was the honor of a lifetime and, while I never set out to be commissioner, in many ways the realization of a little boy’s dream.

  Timing is everything in life, and George W. Bush’s career is a good example. Had things been different, he could have been the ninth commissioner, not me.

  George was intrigued by the possibility of being commissioner. He and I talked about it. I told him at the time that I didn’t want to be commissioner, and I really didn’t. It wasn’t until I had been in charge for a while that I began to sense that being commissioner was a real possibilitiy, and even then I had my doubts.

  George would have done a great job. He had a great personality and he loved the game. He had come in as an owner with the Rangers in the mid-eighties, in a group that Reinsdorf, who was head of our ownership committee, had put together to buy out Eddie Chiles. George loves the game to this day and he was an insider.

  But owners didn’t want to bring anybody in until we had a labor deal, and while this was going on George had to make a decision about running for governor of Texas against Ann Richards. He ultimately chose politics instead of baseball and wound up becoming the forty-third president of the United States.

  I didn’t know that he had that kind of ambition, but I could tell he was bothered when his father lost his bid for reelection. I think that motivated him. But had times been different he definitely could have been commissioner. He would have been a good one, too. Sometimes people who didn’t like George’s politics would say it was my fault he became president. History is funny like that sometimes.

  Early in my tenure I put into practice something that I’ve long believed critical to any leadership role: I talked to everyone. But there was something else, too. I listened.

  I used to sit on the phone by the endless hour. Talking to owners, trying to convince them, persuade them. It’s one thing to come to strong opinions and be right, but you have to convince your constituents that you’re right. I worked hard to not interrupt the person on the other end of the phone. I know it sounds simple, but it’s not. Try it sometime.

  Part of being a good politician, a good leader, is the ability to listen to people. I understood my constituents. I understood what previous commissioners hadn’t understood. You have to have a great majority of your constituents in your corner, and it’s your job to convince them to join you there. I took them through a lot of painful subjects, a lot of change. One thing I tried to teach the owners was to learn to disagree without becoming mortal enemies, because that was the way it had been for so long and it was so unhealthy. I had only just taken over for Fay, but I had already begun to realize that in this job you can’t win, so you might as well do what you think
is right.

  Jerome Holtzman, the great baseball historian who worked for the Chicago Tribune, loved to write about the Great Lakes Gang. That was the owners from the Midwest—me, Jerry Reinsdorf, Bill Bartholomay, Stanton Cook, and Carl Pohlad, mostly, sometimes some others.

  But over the years there’s no question that I spent a lot of time on the phone with other members of the Great Lakes Gang, Reinsdorf in particular.

  In my early years in charge, there was this widely held perception that Jerry was very influential, even that he was controlling baseball through me. That was a bunch of garbage, and I can tell you exactly where it came from. It came from the union.

  Don Fehr and Gene Orza talked to writers all the time, a few in particular, and I always suspected this was an idea they were selling. That something nefarious was going on in ownership because of Selig and Reinsdorf.

  That was the way they worked, Orza especially. Anything they could do to cause a breach among owners, they tried. Unfortunately for them, the other owners understood what I was doing and my style of leadership—talk to everyone.

  Jerry and I were indeed close. We still are. Jerry and I were never in lockstep, but in the beginning we agreed about the major issues. We knew this archaic economic system needed to be changed. He knew early on that we needed to change a lot of things. We had several disagreements, but I always knew where he was coming from. We worked together, but we did it my way.

  14

  MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL almost ruptured permanently in Kohler, Wisconsin, and the funny thing was, the players union wasn’t even there.

  The town is an hour north of Milwaukee, or about halfway to Green Bay from my perspective, and I’d brought all the owners there to the American Club, a sprawling resort and conference facility. But I wasn’t trying to treat baseball owners to a good time on the golf course when I scheduled an August 1993 summit meeting. I was looking for a site with great conference facilities that was a little bit out of the way. I knew this was going to be a very sensitive meeting. I wanted both privacy and the full attention of owners so that Richard Ravitch and I could forge some consensus on revenue sharing with them. Ravitch, whom we had hired as our chief labor negotiator two years earlier, was well respected for his work running New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and really dug in on revenue sharing issues.

  This was a step toward getting the next labor deals with the Players Association. Ravitch and I had declared at an owners meeting in February that the continued pursuit of a salary cap was tied to revenue sharing. The cap would not work without revenue sharing because the small markets couldn’t afford the minimum payroll required in a cap system.

  We were demonstrating to the union that we were taking steps within our ranks to solve our problems, showing them that we’d been listening when they said through the years that we should solve our own problems before coming to them for economic changes. But now we needed to convince the teams with the greatest revenue to share some of it with the teams that were hurting, like the Pirates and the Brewers.

  Barry Bonds wasn’t the only free agent to move from his own small-market team to a bigger club the previous off-season. Paul Molitor had left Milwaukee for Toronto, lured away as much by a bigger offer from the Blue Jays (three years, thirteen million dollars) as by the chance to try to help Toronto win a second consecutive World Series.

  It was painful to see Paul leave Milwaukee after fifteen seasons. We had found ways to keep Robin Yount throughout his career and would have loved to have done the same with Paul. But there was no way we could generate the kind of revenue at County Stadium that the Blue Jays could with SkyDome, their fabulous stadium with the retractable roof, under the shadow of the CN Tower. We couldn’t match the offer from Toronto. It was the same situation the Pirates were in with Bonds, except that Paul was thirty-five while Barry was only twenty-seven. Either way, whether with a franchise player in his prime or a cornerstone veteran late in his career, it was becoming impossible for a lot of teams to prevent the big clubs from picking their rosters clean through free agency.

  Losing that kind of player was a dramatic manifestation of our problems. I had tried to explain it to Paul before he left and would do it again when he came to Milwaukee with the Blue Jays in late June. It was important to me that Paul understood, not just because of our personal relationship but because he was an influential member of the Players Association.

  He had met with me back in 1990 during the spring training lockout, before Fay Vincent essentially opened the camps, and I knew he’d taken my messages to Don Fehr and Gene Orza. I wanted to make sure he knew why we hadn’t been able to do whatever it took to keep him in Milwaukee this time, with another round of bargaining approaching.

  Paul had been candid about the downside of playing for the Brewers when he signed with the Blue Jays, saying “it doesn’t breed confidence” for a player when there’s uncertainty about a team’s stadium and future. I knew exactly how he felt, of course. These were tough times for small-market clubs.

  We talked about that in late June, before Molitor and Yount played on different teams for the first time, and Paul seemed to fully grasp the change in the game’s economics and the need for revenue sharing.

  The roster of owners seemed to be constantly changing, too. There was some good in that, as younger owners were more open-minded about making changes for the good of the game. But a lot of my favorite guys had left the sport.

  Heading into the meeting at Kohler, I knew that we had a lot of problems. I knew that the divisions were serious. I also knew we needed revenue sharing to solve the problems.

  My hope was that an honest discussion, both philosophical and pragmatic, would put us on a road to solving the problem. I hoped that once issues were out there, we would begin to structure a solution to what appeared to be problems that had existed for decades and had just gotten worse, exacerbated by the growth of local television contracts and the rising cost of salaries.

  Owners on both sides of the issue were busy digging in before the meeting. Nobody said it to me, but clearly the big-market clubs were talking with each other, designing strategies to keep the small markets in their place. I had good intelligence on all sides. I had also had very good relationships with all the owners, damn good relationships. George Steinbrenner and I were close. I lifted the suspension that Fay Vincent had hit him with about the Howard Spira/Dave Winfield affair, and he was happy to be back in baseball’s good graces. He and I had been close through the years, even if we were sometimes on different sides of an issue. We were certainly on different sides with this one, but we had mutual respect and I never stopped listening to George. We had very good dialogue, at least when he wasn’t screaming.

  In the days before the meeting I was on the phone nonstop. Much of my time was spent talking to the dissenters. Please think about the industry, not just your team. Remember what John Fetzer said, that what was good for baseball was good for the Detroit baseball club.

  But I would have been naïve to expect us to make s’mores around the campfire and sing “Kumbaya” in Kohler. As an unnamed National League owner said to the Los Angeles Times, “We should be meeting in Madison Square Garden,” because he expected a heavyweight fight over the issue.

  Of course, I went in spreading hope and faith. That was my mantra for fixing the sport. We had to make changes so that fans in every city could have faith in their team and hope that it could make the postseason. I was going to sell the clubs on the relatively low amount of revenue sharing that we were trying to generate in our first deal. Less than fifty million dollars. In reality, I would have settled for quite a bit less than fifty million if we could get twenty-one of the twenty-eight owners to vote for a compromise. We needed three-quarters approval, which I could tell going in would be tough to get. The idea was to get the ball rolling.

  I was preaching change, and I know that’s not a popular topic anywhere. People hate change. They hate it in everything in life. They just hate c
hange. In baseball it’s particularly true. If you don’t want to change, you just point to the game’s great tradition. It sounds good, but it doesn’t fix problems. We had problems we had to fix.

  I talked about the need to find common ground. Then I turned the meeting over to Ravitch, who with his staff had spent months working on specific proposals to move money from the big-revenue clubs to the ones that needed it. While Ravitch was speaking, owners began to leave the room. One by one, the big-market owners walked out the door, trailed by their lawyers and accountants, with everyone’s eyes on them.

  Steinbrenner, of course. The Red Sox’s John Harrington, sure. The Blue Jays’ Paul Beeston, too. Then my friend Fred Wilpon, representing the Mets. And a lot of others. It’s one of the ugliest spectacles I’ve seen, so disrespectful to me, Ravitch, and the other owners seated in the room.

  If they wanted to make a point, they had sure made it. I knew we were in trouble. A lot of trouble.

  For the rest of the day, the big-market clubs met in a conference room in one building and the small-market clubs stayed together in a meeting room in another building. The big-market group included the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Dodgers, Blue Jays, Cardinals, and Orioles (who were loving their great new park, Camden Yards). No problem there—well, unless you believed what Peter O’Malley had told the Los Angeles Times. He had said he was in favor of revenue sharing tied to a salary cap, but in the end the Dodgers did what was best for the Dodgers, as they’d done under Walter O’Malley.

  With the perspective of history, it’s surprising how some teams picked sides. The two newest National League teams, Miami and Colorado, also lined up on Steinbrenner’s side. I’m not sure I saw that coming, but there it was. I guess Wayne Huizenga and Jerry McMorris were optimists. Both Chicago teams, the White Sox and the Cubs, and the Atlanta Braves declared themselves medium-market teams. They spent their time with the teams seeking revenue sharing. The Cubs and the Braves were playing politics because they knew the owners could adjust the size of the so-called superstation tax they paid to send their games into other teams’ markets.