by Bud Selig
I was left to walk around the White House feeling completely betrayed by my highest elected officials. I was astonished. I was indignant. I was very close to being out of control. I saw Usery and Fishgold. They started talking before I could even ask what happened. You could tell Usery was embarrassed.
“Harry S. Truman never did this to me,” he said. “Dwight David Eisenhower never did this to me.” He kept listing presidents, mentioning “JFK . . . LBJ,” and then getting to a line I’d remember as about the only humor on a horrible day.
“Even that son of a bitch Richard Milhous Nixon never did this to me,” Usery said.
Leon Panetta, who was Clinton’s chief of staff, approached, asking me to come with him. He said the president wanted to see me.
Good, I thought. I want to see him, too.
Panetta took me into a side room that had the longest, most yellow couch I’ve ever seen.
“Look,” President Clinton said. “I’m sorry about this, but the union is angry.”
Well, I knew he was right—and later I’d hear the union guys had called Usery a “senile son of a bitch” to his face. But why did the union being upset change anything?
I was steaming, but I was respectful to Clinton. He was the president of the United States, after all. Clinton told me he and Gore were willing to come to every city and explain to fans what had happened. I don’t know what that offer meant, and I didn’t care. I was barely containing my fury.
“Mr. President, sir, you gave me your word on October 14,” I said. “I have twenty-eight clubs. You know this. You talked to David Glass. This is not what we agreed on. What if I had been the one who didn’t agree?”
The door opened and Gore, Stephanopoulos, Panetta, and Reich walked in. Clinton had to be relieved to have reinforcements, because he wasn’t doing well in this conversation. Clinton said he knew he’d given me his word. I told him I’d been raised in a world where when a man gives you his word, that’s it. He went quiet.
But Gore jumped in, nasty from the start.
“I’m tired of the little guys,” he said, and I knew he meant the small-market clubs. “All these demands. Complaining about everything.”
Well, that explained a lot.
He was uttering the union’s talking points.
It was the wrong thing to say to me. Rage came pouring out of me. I exploded in his face.
“What did you just fucking say to me?” I snapped at the VP. “You’re tired? You’re tired? You guys gave me your word! You’re tired? Because they didn’t like this?”
I was just getting started.
“Well, there are a thousand fucking newspaper guys out there, and I’m going to go and tell them that, by God, this thing got worse because we agreed to this process and you backed out,” I said. “Now what the fuck do you say?”
Gore turned red. And mute.
Everybody was scrambling. I got the feeling nobody stands up to these guys, no matter what they say. He did not explain himself. Nobody did. They just headed out the door, on to the next bit of business.
I went out and held a press conference, but before it started I forced myself to regroup, to get my wits about me. I tried to put the best spin possible on a horribly unproductive, disappointing process. I bit my tongue about my feelings toward Clinton and Gore.
Then I went back and tried to explain to our guys what had just happened. It was awful, truly awful. I was fuming, and maybe a little embarrassed. I had lost my temper with the leaders of the free world. But they had it coming. They had gone back on their word, and that is never okay. These guys hadn’t just betrayed baseball’s acting commissioner and the twenty-eight teams. They had betrayed a nation of baseball fans.
I saw President Clinton a lot after that, but we never discussed what had happened. He was there when Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s iron-man record and also when we retired Jackie Robinson’s number, 42, as well as at Henry Aaron’s sixty-fifth birthday party.
The night of Henry’s party, Clinton told Sue he spent more time with me than she did. “I like him a lot,” he said.
Oh, really?
I understand that Clinton and the Democrats in office had a lot of union constituents, but baseball players should never be confused for steelworkers. We agreed to mediation in good faith. I probably wouldn’t be so naïve again. I learned the hard way that political pragmatism takes over in the end, not necessarily fairness.
I guess that was the hard lesson for me to learn.
We had just lost four months, and we had accomplished absolutely nothing. Spring training was about to start. We had placed our faith and hope in the president and now a winter was gone, a season was here, and we were about to let down the entire world of baseball. Again.
We had to decide what to do about spring training. While there was a lot of reluctance from some clubs, we decided to go forward with the idea of fielding replacement teams.
A lot of us weren’t crazy about it, but we were trying to figure out how we could move the sport ahead. Using replacement players was one of our options. I’ll admit to you, in retrospect, that I wasn’t too happy about it. But what was the choice? To have a bunch of empty fields in Arizona and Florida? To cave to the union once again, as we’d always done?
In general, the idea of using replacements went over like a lead balloon, which wasn’t a surprise. Our fans were still very angry about the strike ending the 1994 season early, and this was like salt in the wound. It created chaos but was the first real standoff in the history of baseball bargaining.
But then, to the relief of almost everyone, it all ended. The Players Association had filed an unfair labor practice motion against us, and on April 1 a ruling by Sonia Sotomayor, the future Supreme Court justice who was then a federal judge in district court in Manhattan, sent the big league players back onto the field. Sotomayor did not order the players to end their strike, but she imposed an injunction that effectively killed the replacement player concept and ordered negotiations to resume in earnest, under the terms of the previous contract. The players offered to end their strike, and while we still had the right to lock them out, there was no way we were going to do that, not after the 232-day strike.
We had made the point to the Players Association that our owners were as together as their players, and everyone felt it was great to get back on the field. When Justice Sotomayor was named to the Supreme Court by Barack Obama, Fehr pointed out to the New York Times that while Sotomayor’s ruling was limited, it came at a critical point in time for baseball.
“Her ruling did not produce an agreement, but it gave the parties time to get on with normal business and get back to the bargaining table and produce an agreement,” Fehr told the Times. “If it hadn’t ended when she ended it, it would have gone on for some time and it would have gotten uglier and uglier.”
I’m sure Donald was right about that. We would take a break to let players have an abbreviated spring training and then begin a 144-game season on April 26. It would take another twenty months to negotiate a new contract.
We hired Randy Levine, who had been New York City’s labor commissioner, to replace Chuck O’Connor as our lead negotiator. He had to work hard to get us a new deal that included a luxury tax (35 percent on payrolls above fifty-one million dollars, beginning in ’97) and a little bit of revenue sharing.
That deal wasn’t what we needed. It was helpful in a small way, but it didn’t address our issues. Our problems were just getting worse, with no end in sight. In 1994 and ’95, the pain definitely wasn’t worth the gain.
16
IN THE AFTERMATH of the strike, everyone enthusiastically returned to the game we all loved so dearly. One thing, though, was clear from the start: things were no longer the same. It’s not so much that the game was permanently scarred, though there was some short-term damage done, for sure. It was more that for the first time the owners started to see that they could not rely on a union-based solution to fix the financial realities of the game. If t
he economics of baseball were going to be transformed, it was not going to happen through a magically elusive deal with the union; instead the owners had to pull the levers that they were in control of. The owners and the league had to look beyond the players and union for ways to increase revenue and ensure their teams’ solvency. And so, that’s exactly what we set about doing—and we started with stadiums.
Memorial Stadium in Baltimore was popular with Orioles fans. They loved the neighborhood feeling around the park and the history of the place, which in addition to six World Series had hosted the NFL championship game in 1959.
But while Memorial Stadium was a great home for the Orioles in the 1960s and ’70s, it was a ballpark that was built for football as much as baseball. Edward Bennett Williams became interested in building a baseball-only stadium that would include suites and lots of fan amenities, allowing it to generate revenue streams that Memorial Stadium couldn’t.
When Eli Jacobs bought the team from Williams’s estate in 1988, he made a new stadium his top priority. In one of the most inspired series of decisions any owner ever made, he put his partner Larry Lucchino in charge of the stadium. Lucchino reached out to architect Janet Marie Smith to design the park.
They settled on a location adjacent to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, which, as a lucky coincidence, was very near Babe Ruth’s birthplace. It was the perfect place for Smith to execute Lucchino’s vision of a retro ballpark, bringing back touches like a brick façade on the outside and straight-line walls in the outfield, the first for a major league stadium since the Dodgers abandoned Ebbets Field. They lowered the outfield fence from the traditional ten feet to only eight in left field, which allowed athletic outfielders to show their skills night after night on ESPN.
Even with these touches, it was with some sadness that they said good-bye to Memorial Stadium. When the Orioles moved to their new stadium, Rick Dempsey, the catcher, wrote a poem as an ode to Memorial Stadium. He called it the Old Gray Lady of Thirty-third Street. Frank Robinson, the Hall of Famer, was the only player who had ever hit the ball completely out of the park. It was the home field for some of the most popular players in the Orioles’ history, most notably Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer, Eddie Murray, Boog Powell, Cal Ripken Jr., and Frank.
Despite the wistfulness, Camden Yards was a home run for Baltimore. The area where it was built was soon bursting to the seams with hotels, restaurants, and tourists. Camden Yards became the blueprint for baseball’s modern ballparks in many ways, and in the aftermath of the players’ strike, it showed many of the owners how a new stadium could lift up the franchise.
In truth, we were once again following the NFL’s lead to a degree. The NFL made it easier for football teams to build new stadiums with a measure Paul Tagliabue put through. It is called G-3, after the resolution that owners passed, and in essence it provided teams a $150 million grant toward the funding of a stadium. Technically, these were loans, but they were paid back in large part from seat licensing fees passed on to the public. It was a sweet deal, and it was no surprise that the NFL was a step ahead of us.
But in our 2002 labor negotiations we may have gotten something approved that is of even more benefit to teams building new stadiums. It is complicated—what isn’t?—but essentially allows teams to protect local money from revenue sharing by allowing construction costs to be directly deducted against shared revenues.
Depending on the specifics of a stadium deal, this could be a bigger benefit to a team than a $150 million grant. It was a significant step in helping teams sustain the building boom that had begun with Camden Yards in 1992.
That boom would include the creation of twenty new stadiums. I’m just as proud of the work we did to help some of the greatest old parks—Fenway, Wrigley, Dodger Stadium—remain viable for future generations as I am of having played even a little role in helping Pittsburgh add the civic gem that is PNC Park or San Francisco make the absolutely vital transition from Candlestick Park to AT&T Park, where ball hawks float in kayaks in McCovey Cove.
As much as changes to the economic system and drug testing, the string of gorgeous, neighborhood-changing ballparks that opened between Camden Yards in 1992 and Atlanta’s SunTrust Park in 2017 turned Major League Baseball into a vibrant enterprise, one that has pushed the NFL for dominance in the marketplace.
As much as I love Milwaukee’s County Stadium and applaud the vision of our civic leaders, it was a lot like the multisport stadiums that were popular after World War II. County Stadium and Municipal Stadium in Cleveland were built out of steel, with crisscrossing ramps and girders everywhere. They felt more like stadiums to me than the ones that were built with more concrete in the design, like Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, and Busch Stadium in St. Louis. All of those parks were outfitted with Astroturf, which was another strike against them. Monsanto had developed the first version of their artificial turf for the Astrodome, after it was learned the hard way that you couldn’t grow grass there, but soon it became the rage all around sports. It was a better game for hitters because the ball shot through the infield, but the turf was hard on players’ knees. Just ask Andre Dawson or other guys who played regularly on the turf in Montreal.
But it wasn’t just the turf that was bad at those parks. Those cookie-cutter stadiums were deadly. They had no character. I do think they hurt us. I used to joke that if you had too much to drink the night before and you wound up in a ballpark in Philly, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, or Cincinnati, you wouldn’t know where the hell you were. All the parks looked the same.
That’s why the building of Camden Yards was really one of the most important points in baseball history. It really changed a lot of things. It also pointed out to people like me in Milwaukee why we had to build a new ballpark. It was a crucial moment. It was a good moment for baseball because it set off a wave of wonderful ballparks that represented their areas, with indigenous characteristics—whether it was Coors Field in Denver, PNC Park in Pittsburgh, or our Miller Park in Milwaukee. We went through a great renaissance in baseball, and it had a lot to do with the new ballparks.
At least at the start of the building boom, new stadiums played a major role in revitalizing struggling franchises. They generated badly needed revenues, which went into player salaries and the building of teams, helping them either reach the playoffs or at least become more competitive. Then the success built on itself. Highly competitive teams drew much more interest from fans and the media, which allowed owners to sell more season tickets and grow their franchises. They could add staff for the front offices or spend more to stockpile the minor leagues with prospects.
Once again, in all these areas, the Orioles became the blueprint for this synergy. They had been brutal in their last years at Memorial Stadium. The great Jerry Hoffberger–Hank Peters–Earl Weaver teams had been replaced by bungling ones, even with Hall of Famers like Eddie Murray and Cal Ripken Jr. on the roster. Murray was getting toward the end of his great career but Cal was in the middle of his when they went 54–107 in 1988, starting the season 0–21.
What a horrible year this was for everyone associated with the team. Cal Ripken Sr. began the season as the manager but was fired after the 0–6 start. Frank Robinson took over but would be tested like never before. And, worst of all, Edward Bennett Williams was in the last stages of his long battle with colon cancer.
It was a tribute to the Orioles’ fan base that they drew 1.66 million fans that season. They would bounce back to draw around 2.5 million in the final seasons at Memorial Park, but attendance spiked at Camden Yards.
The Orioles drew almost 3.6 million in that inaugural season and would get to 3.7 million in ’97, when they won the AL East for the first time since ’83. Revenue generated from Camden Yards helped Pat Gillick, their Hall of Fame general manager, surround Cal Jr. and Mike Mussina with proven talents like Roberto Alomar, Harold Baines, Rafael Palmeiro, Jimmy Key, Scott Erickson, and Randy Myers.
The Indians left Clevela
nd Stadium for their glittering new ballpark, which was christened as Jacobs Field, in 1994. Their front office, headed by John Hart, had done a great job gathering up prospects and building a strong farm system. The Indians would have been hard pressed to hang on to their talent if it was still based at its old ballpark. But the move to Jacobs Field was perfectly timed, and the response from Cleveland fans was beyond anyone’s greatest expectations.
Hart signed up many of his best players—including Sandy Alomar Jr., Carlos Baerga, Omar Vizquel, Jim Thome, Albert Belle, and Manny Ramirez—to contracts that saved the Indians money in both arbitration and free agency. Many of those players even made Cleveland their year-round home, which the fans loved.
The reward was the Indians going to the postseason six times in seven years. They just missed ending a long championship drought in the 1997 World Series, when Jose Mesa’s blown save gave the Marlins an unexpected title. The franchise played 455 games before sellout home crowds from 1995 through 2001.
The Rangers won division titles for the first time in their history after moving into the Ballpark in Arlington, capturing the AL West three times in their first five years there. Previously they had built teams that could compete in short stretches but never sustained that success. The move to a beautiful ballpark with retro touches throughout allowed one of our weaker franchises to gain a toehold in NFL country.
Philadelphia experienced a huge boost when the Phillies moved from the very obsolete Veterans Stadium—one of the worst examples of a concrete cookie-cutter design—to Citizens Bank Park in 2004. They hadn’t fielded a playoff team since Lenny Dykstra’s team lost to the Blue Jays in the ’93 World Series, but beginning in their fourth year in the new park they won the NL East five years in a row.
With homegrown stars Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, and Cole Hamels, the Phillies drew three million fans a year to Citizens Bank Park during their run, which included a World Series victory over the Rays in 2008. Philadelphia is hardly a small market, but the Phillies were being left behind at the Vet, a symbol of how baseball got it wrong for so long.
