The Lords of the Realm, page 33
Veeck was getting old. He’d put in four hard years since buying the Sox and was now sixty-five. The game hadn’t necessarily passed him by. He still had the most fertile mind around for game-day promotions. But at a time when other clubs had begun to market season tickets hard—and tap a new revenue stream—the White Sox did little. Veeck was firmly committed to the good old Joe Earlys of the world. He couldn’t abide wooing the corporate crowd that bought the season tickets. (Veeck even balked at son Mike’s idea of converting an old press box into a “party suite,” which they could make available to companies for $1,000 a game. He relented when Mike projected the revenues for a season. “This is an extra $70,000,” he said. “We can pay Chet Lemon with that!”)
At a time, moreover, when some clubs were starting to rake in big money for their TV rights, Veeck had no idea—no interest in, really—how to exploit the nation’s number-two TV market. “Bill wasn’t familiar with what a club should get from TV revenue,” says Jack Gould, one of his investors and later a White Sox executive. “He had WGN and he was getting peanuts.”
Indeed, Veeck spent less time on local TV matters than he did complaining to Bowie Kuhn’s office about national TV. Veeck constantly badgered Kuhn’s broadcast aide, Tom Villante, about how network games hurt his gate. To him, the turnstile count was still the thing.
It was only one way Veeck reestablished himself in baseball as a royal pain. When the Lords locked the players out of spring training camps in 1976, Veeck opened Chicago’s to minor-leaguers and free agents. When Anti-Disco Night exploded, everyone rolled their eyeballs. Ray Grebey, who’d befriended this fellow Kenyon College man, once asked for a moment of silence for Veeck at an ownership meeting. Veeck was undergoing surgery that day and Grebey thought it would be a nice gesture. He then discovered the extent of anti-Veeck feeling. After the meeting, one of the owners approached him. “If you ever pay a public compliment to that guy again, you’re fired,” Grebey was told.
Veeck’s health was failing. He had chronic emphysema, resulting from his four-pack-a-day cigarette habit. He had chronic infections in his leg stub, requiring annual operations. He was going deaf and his hearing aid sometimes whistled. “The good news is that with a little deft fingerwork on the adjustment, I can play a fair approximation of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy,’ ” Veeck said. “The bad news is that I can no longer creep up on mine enemies, unawares.”
He was troubled by worsening health and deepening gloom. As Chicago’s losses widened, he could have gone back to the well for more capital from his partners: deep-pocket types like industrialist Lester Crown. But it was a point of pride with him: he’d never turned to them for a bailout and he’d always turned them a profit. “He simply wouldn’t go back to his investors for more money,” says Andy McKenna, who was one of them.
So Veeck started looking to sell. He put out feelers to Denver, but that was still Finley country. He dickered with Edward DeBartolo, the big shopping-center developer. In August 1980, Veeck agreed to sell him the club for $20 million, but American League owners, encouraged by Kuhn, refused to approve the transaction. They voted down DeBartolo twice, for two stated reasons: he wasn’t local and he owned racetracks. The real reason was that he was reputed to have some unsavory associates—Italian-American, don’t you know. As Bowie Kuhn put it over cocktails while lobbying a baseball executive, “He’s not RP.” Come again? “Right people.”
DeBartolo and his people screamed bloody murder about anti-Italian prejudice. But what’s the use of an antitrust exemption if you can’t use it to control membership in the club?
Veeck wasn’t just disgusted, he was discouraged. As Dave Winfield prepared for his walk down the runway as 1980’s top free agent, he sent out a form letter to seventeen clubs. Reduced to its essence, it said: Forget it. I want to play with a winner in a big market. You are a loser and/or a small market. Don’t bother drafting me. One of these letters went to the White Sox.
“It had a profound impact on Dad; it was deeply disturbing to him,” says Mike Veeck. “It said, ‘You’re off the track before you could ever get on.’ It didn’t even give you a chance to structure a deal.”
If Bill Veeck couldn’t deal his way out of a corner, he didn’t want to be in baseball. One month after the final rejection of DeBartolo, Veeck gladly accepted the next offer that came along. It was from two young men named Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn.
Reinsdorf, forty-four, was the Brooklyn-born son of a peddler of used sewing machines. As an IRS lawyer in the sixties, he’d learned all about tax shelters. As cofounder of Balcor Company in the early seventies, he constructed them. Balcor would raise $650 million from investors for real estate partnerships. If Reinsdorf played a little fast and loose—and what syndicator didn’t?—he was also a forerunner of the 1980s man. When one baseball executive asked Reinsdorf his business, he replied, “OPM.” Pardon? “Other people’s money,” he smiled.
Einhorn, also forty-four, was a law-school classmate of Reinsdorf and a syndicator of another kind. In the 1960s, he bought the TV rights to the basketball games of several Midwest colleges—Notre Dame, Marquette, and some others—and packaged them up to sell to local TV stations. “Fast Eddie,” as the hyperactive Einhorn was known, went national in 1968, when he landed the big UCLA-Houston game. Hoops fans remember it as the game when Houston broke UCLA’s forty-seven-game winning streak. TV people remember it as the game when Fast Eddie was screaming into the phone at halftime: “We’ve got avails [commercial time available] in the second half! We’ve got avails in the second half!”
Both men loved baseball. Reinsdorf’s office resembled a Brooklyn Dodgers memorabilia museum. Einhorn, according to his partner, “would drive two hundred miles to see two high school teams play.” But both were primarily business creatures. Reinsdorf put together an OPM deal to buy the club. He wanted to make a baseball syndicate pay off as surely as a real estate one. He just thought it would be more fun. Einhorn saw the White Sox as ripe for pay TV. He would pull most of their games off free TV and put them on a subscription service, to be called SportsVision.
They were sharpies in a wholly different way than Veeck, who instantly recognized this fact. In ceremonies to close the sale, he handed over the keys to Comiskey Park.
“Now Calvin is the last of the dinosaurs,” he said.
Change swept Comiskey instantly. The old seat-of-the-pants operation was now harnessed by accounting and budgeting systems. The exploding scoreboard was replaced by a Diamond-Vision screen. The Bard’s Room was converted into office space, and the old owner was treated rather shabbily. “We’re going to make this a first-class operation,” announced Eddie Einhorn.
Bill Veeck would never again set foot in Comiskey Park. He would see out his days across the city, in the bleachers of Wrigley Field. The Cubs had changed hands too—bought from Bill Wrigley in 1981 by the Tribune Company, whose superstation, WGN, carried the Cubs. Like Ted Turner, this media conglomerate saw the value of baseball as programming. Owning the Cubs would make this a nice, vertically integrated operation. But Wrigley Field was as much a throwback as ever, the place where, as a boy, Veeck had planted the outfield walls’ vines. It gave some comfort to Veeck, who’d spent a lifetime jousting with the old-line Lords but left more bitter at the new boys.
By 1981, more than one third of the clubs had owners with less than five years in baseball. They had very different means and markets. But they had common traits: ego, involvement, and ignorance.
First of all: ego. They wanted to win and they wanted to preen. They were creatures of the dawning eighties. For decades, baseball had been an old-money business. Owners held their teams partly as a hobby, partly as a civic trust. Now new money was coursing in, with a “see me” mentality. Seagram’s heir Charles Bronfman, the Expos’ owner, figured he heard it summed up perfectly once. He ran into a fellow who mentioned he was trying to buy a pro sports team. Bronfman, himself struggling to make a go of the Expos, asked him why. Said he, “I’m rich but nobody knows it.”
Then there was the question of involvement. The old-line Lords let the GMs run their clubs. But, drawn by die spotlight, the new boys waded right in. They were entrepreneurs, used to hands-on action. They were also quite inexperienced.
Which brings us to ignorance. Baseball men knew success was built on good scouting, good drafting, good farm systems. It took time and cultivation. The new boys didn’t know it and didn’t want to know it. “Patience is for losers,” said George Argyros, the Mariners’ new boy.
Seattle, Texas, and Houston—new boys’ clubs all—formed a “combine” to pool scouting information. They also leaned heavily on the Major League Scouting Bureau, created in baseball by 1974 to augment individual clubs’ scouts. All this enabled them to slash their own scouting staffs.
It also made the new boys pigeons for sharp players’ agents. Preferring instant gratification to player development, they made loopy deal after loopy deal. If Ray Kroc wasn’t signing Oscar Gamble for $2.85 million, Brad Corbett was matching the sum with Richie Zisk. If Ted Turner wasn’t signing Al Hrabosky for $2.2 million, John McMullen was signing Nolan Ryan for $4.5 million.
It was the Ryan contract, signed with the Astros in late 1979, that broke the $1 million barrier and finally broke Bill Veeck’s spirit. Nolan Ryan wouldn’t attain national monument status until years later. At the time he was considered just a hard-throwing underachiever. Said Mike Veeck: “It was the high price of mediocrity that bothered Dad.”
Price was no object to John J. McMullen. He’d entered baseball under George Steinbrenner, the dean of the new boys and a fellow player in the maritime business. McMullen had parlayed a Ph.D. in engineering—he preferred to be called Doctor McMullen—into a thriving mini-conglomerate that included naval architecture, real estate, cable TV, and more. When Steinbrenner bought the Yankees, McMullen was a limited partner, an experience he once summed up famously: “There’s nothing quite so limited as being a limited partner of George Steinbrenner’s.”
But he’d gotten a whiff of what majority ownership brought: fame, status, and, if your team won, acclaim. John McMullen was a household name only in the McMullen household, and he was determined to change that. He bought the Astros in 1979 from the Ford Credit Company, which had seized them from the physically and fiscally ailing Judge Roy Hofheinz.
McMullen had known little about baseball before becoming an owner. “What’s an RBI?” he asked, early on. On another occasion, he was leafing through The Sporting News and observed, “Hey, this has a lot of good baseball stories.”
But in a short while he came to consider himself a world-class expert. Ace reliever Dave Smith gave up just one home run in 1980, but it came in a game at Shea Stadium, with McMullen watching. “Get rid of that guy,” the owner barked.
The Astros were an aggressive, running club, its players schooled in taking the extra base. But when one of them was thrown out, McMullen would “go ballistic,” recalls Tal Smith, then Houston’s GM. At one point, McMullen demanded that third base coach Bob Lillis be fired. Smith quietly transferred Lillis to first base coaching rather than fire him.
Smith had been with the Astros from the start, except for a brief stint with the Yankees. He had been president and GM since 1975, and he ran a tight ship. He believed in keeping base salaries low and loading up contracts with motivating incentives. The Astros had Jose Cruz at a base of just $250,000, Cesar Cedeno at $220,000, and J.R. Richard at $200,000. They ran a strong second to Cincinnati in the NL West in 1979 with the league’s lowest payroll.
The J. R. Richard contract was a good display of Smith’s handiwork. By 1979, James Rodney Richard had blossomed into one of the game’s elite pitchers. He was six feet eight inches of pure heat who had struck out fifteen men in his first big-league game and gone on from there. In 1978, he’d led the league with 303 strikeouts and racked up his third straight season with 18 or more wins. At the conclusion of the 1979 season, he qualified to become a free agent.
If Richard was baseball’s top power pitcher, Tom Reich (pronounced: rich) was its top power agent. He was a brassy, bearded Pittsburgh lawyer who was very good at what he did. He would eventually represent one of every six major-leaguers, with a heavy emphasis on black and Latino players. Reich had been an agent for ten years—starting out before there was a whiff of money in it—and he knew all the tricks. In the case of a star client who was nearing free agency and enjoying a great year, Reich’s gambit was to stall for time and make a GM sweat.
This is precisely what Reich was doing for Richard. J. R. was on a pace to lead the league in strikeouts (he again broke 300) and ERA (he wound up at 2.71) and would again reach 18 wins (18–13). Reich and Tal Smith huddled all over the country throughout that season, meeting to argue the merits of J. R. Richard wherever the Astros happened to be playing.
They finally settled it in Reich’s backyard—in Pittsburgh, during the Pirates-Orioles World Series. Smith had to give ground on the contract length: five years, which was longer than he liked. But he’d managed to keep the base salary at $200,000, with the Astros’ usual Christmas tree of incentives: bonuses for innings pitched, Cy Young Awards, and more. If J. R. Richard shot the moon, the package could max out at $800,000 a year.
Two weeks later, the Astros signed Nolan Ryan for $1 million a year. No incentives, no contingencies, just seven big figures a year for three years, guaranteed. Tal Smith, of course, had nothing to do with it. Dick Moss, Ryan’s agent, had dealt directly with Astros owner McMullen, who gave Ryan the store and in return got the attention he craved. It was baseball’s first million-per-year contract, making headlines not just in Houston but nationwide.
The attention from baseball men was less than adoring. GMs were queued up on Tal Smith’s phone line to ask what the fuck the Astros were thinking. Yes, Ryan had led baseball in strikeouts with the Angels but he’d also led it in walks. Yes, he’d pitched four no-hitters but he’d pitched only .500 ball for his career. Asked how he’d replace Ryan, who’d gone 16–14 in ’79, a nonplussed Buzzie Bavasi said, “I guess I’ll have to sign two 8–7 pitchers.”
Smith too was mortified. He figured four teams would bid on Ryan, tops, and he figured him for $650,000, tops. The top-paid players in baseball were Pete Rose, at $805,000; Rod Carew, $800,000; and Dave Parker, $775,000. Ryan wasn’t the equal of any of them. Nevertheless, with no other offers on the table and the Astros bidding against themselves, he’d landed the first $1 million contract. Others would soon follow. “It broke an enormous psychological barrier,” said Don Fehr of the players’ union.
It also broke Tal Smith’s eardrum when Tom Reich got him on the phone. The moment Reich heard about the Ryan deal, he called Smith, began screaming at him, and didn’t stop until the GM agreed to renegotiate J. R. Richard. A few weeks later, the two met with McMullen and drew up a new contract: a guaranteed $800,000 a year for four years. (The guarantee turned out to be important. In July 1980, Richard suffered a stroke and never pitched again.)
The Astros’ salary structure, constructed so carefully by Smith, was left in shambles, as if a fierce hurricane had blown in off the Gulf. “Ryan completely destroyed all the parameters we’d established with J. R., Cruz, and all these other people,” Smith recalled.
The 1980 Astros were not only richer but better. They won the National League West and very nearly the pennant. (The Phillies took a riveting five-game playoff series, winning the last game in extra innings.) They drew a record 2.3 million fans. And they provided all the instant gratification a new boy could want—except for the credit.
That went to Tal Smith, who was lauded by the Houston press and the baseball world in general. McMullen seethed. They clashed. When the GM got into a crossfire between McMullen and his investor partners, who were feuding, he was gone. He was fired in October, shortly before being named The Sporting News’s Executive of the Year.
That winter McMullen paid big for another free-agent pitcher, Don Sutton: four years, $3.5 million. Sutton, who’d spent his first fifteen years in the bigs with L.A., was asked what had become of his loyalty to Dodger blue. “Loyal?” said Sutton. “I’m the most loyal player money can buy.”
Up the road, in suburban Dallas, Brad Corbett was the first of the new boys to flame out. He’d started out behind the eight ball and never operated from any other position.
Corbett bought the Texas Rangers from Bob Short in 1974 for $9 million, but he hadn’t bought much. His club had no TV revenue. Short, in a typically desperate move, had sold the first ten years’ broadcast rights to the city of Arlington, Texas, for $7.5 million. His club had few premium-priced tickets to sell. Of the 35,000 capacity, 19,000 seats were bleachers. Corbett’s own resources were limited. He was thirty-six years old, and sufficiently full of himself to be a self-described “Fort Worth industrialist,” but he was rich only in relation to Bob Short.
Nonetheless, Corbett spent the late seventies signing big-name players and spending himself into oblivion. He operated, as Bill Veeck put it, “in the desperate hope of coming up with a winner before the train hit him.” Corbett’s GM, Dan O’Brien, put it another way: “We spent money like we had it.”
The Rangers’ Hall of Shame included:
A five-year, $950,000 contract for the thirty-five-year-old shortstop, Bert Campaneris (signed in ’76).
A ten-year, $3 million contract for one-dimensional slugger Richie Zisk (signed in ’77).
A four-year, $1 million deal (signed in ’77) for Doc Medich, certainly a better doctor than a pitcher. The Rangers got a second four years from this M.D., at $50,000 per, as the team’s “medical adviser.”
A $5.1 million contract (signed in ’80) for catcher Jim Sundberg, stunning terms for a middling backstop ($500,000 per season as a player for six years, to be followed by ten years as a broadcaster and promotions man).
