The Lords of the Realm, page 34
Sundberg readily—eagerly—accepted the deal laid before him, but Corbett’s own executive board overruled it. Sundberg had to settle for a straight six-year contract as a player for a total of $3 million. Still, a pretty handsome arrangement.
And the trades. Oh, the trades. Corbett’s baseball men tried to save him from folly. (“I was Brad’s no-man,” said Dan O’Brien. “ ‘No, don’t do that! No, not him!’ ”) It did no good. Wily executives on other clubs employed the same tactic as wily agents: go around the GM and get right to the owner.
Early in the 1977 season, for instance, the Toronto Blue Jays wanted to trade for Rangers third baseman Roy Howell. He was a promising young player, and Eddie Robinson, another Corbettera GM, insisted on value in return: say, pitcher Jim Clancy and some prospects. Toronto GM Pat Gillick balked and the talks foundered until Gillick mentioned something to his club’s president, Peter Bavasi.
“You know,” said Gillick. “Brad Corbett loves Jim Mason.”
Mason was a shortstop of such modest talent he couldn’t crack Toronto’s lineup. And this was a club that would lose 108 games that year. But, Gillick explained to Bavasi, Mason did play one thing regularly: golf, with Corbett, in the off-season.
Bavasi chuckled evilly. He checked the Rangers’ schedule. They should be en route to Detroit. He called Eddie Robinson’s office. Was he in? No, said his secretary, he was traveling with the team. He’d be out of contact for six hours or so. The coast was clear. Bavasi called Corbett in Fort Worth.
“Hey, Brad, we’re trying to conclude the Roy Howell deal with Eddie,” he said.
“Oh.”
“You know we’re damned close, but he wants this player that I don’t want to give up.”
“Doesn’t he want some of your farm prospects?”
“No, he wants Jim Mason.”
“Oh, I like Mason. He’s a real good friend.”
“Well, he’s quite a player, too: real competitive, great leadership skills, I’d hate to give him up,” Bavasi lied. “But I’d like to conclude this deal. Owner to owner, now, if I give you Mason can we do this deal?”
“Oh, I’d better not. It sounds good to me, but I’ve got to talk to Eddie.”
“Brad, I can’t wait, and frankly I’m surprised. Back in the old days the top guys used to make these decisions themselves. Aren’t you the owner? Isn’t Eddie your employee? Look, I’ll throw in Steve Hargan [a broken-down pitcher] and two hundred thousand dollars with Mason.”
“Oh, son of a bitch—I’ll make the deal.”
Bavasi quickly announced it so Robinson wouldn’t have a chance to reverse it. Howell hit .316 that year for the Jays, leading the team in batting average. He went on to a fine major league career. Mason hit .218 and played 36 games for the Rangers that year. He was out of baseball by 1979.
Corbett himself was out of baseball by 1980. He sold the Rangers for a mere $4 million—but then, the buyer was also taking on $21 million in deferred salary obligations.
A man named Eddie Chiles led the buying group. He was a Fort Worth oilman who had also gained some regional renown as a conservative radio commentator. His broadcasts always started with the words, “I’m mad.”
Before long, he would be mad at baseball.
Al Hrabosky was the made-for-TV relief pitcher. He wore a menacing Fu Manchu mustache. He stood behind the mound between hitters, facing the center-field camera and visibly psyching himself up for his next opponent. Then he’d whirl and purposefully stalk back up the mound. He was a great act and an okay reliever, and he was known as “The Mad Hungarian.”
Naturally, Ted Turner had to have him. He’d coveted Hrabosky for some time. In 1976, it will be recalled, he’d gotten in trouble for exhorting Hrabosky, “Don’t sign!” Turner was eventually suspended as a repeated tampering offender and Hrabosky ended up staying with the Cardinals in 1976. He was traded to Kansas City in 1977, and came up for free agency again after the 1979 season. Along the way, he’d also lost a yard off his fastball. Turner didn’t care. Hrabosky was great TV, and Turner was less in the baseball than the TV business.
As a team, the Braves were terrible. In Turner’s first three years, they finished last in the National League West each time. But as programming, they were hot. The SuperStation, launched in early 1977, was soon adding 200,000 cable subscribers a month. It spread like wildfire across the vast rural areas of the country with no local TV stations or home baseball teams. Starved for alternatives to network shows, Turner proved people would watch Beverly Hillbillies reruns. He also proved that, starved for baseball beyond the Game of the Week, people would watch bad baseball.
At one point, an Atlanta Constitution columnist wrote that he doubted anybody was watching the wretched Braves on the SuperStation. Play-by-play announcer Skip Caray mentioned this on the air and invited viewers to call the newspaper. Their calls swamped the Constitution’s switchboard.
A lot of calls were coming into Bowie Kuhn’s office too, but not from devoted viewers. “What the hell is this?” yowled George Steinbrenner from Tampa. “I’m getting Braves games here!”
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” growled Dick Wagner of the Reds, as the Braves came into Cincinnati for a series. “I’m not going to let him plug in his equipment here.”
Lou Hoynes and Sandy Hadden had to talk him out of it. Yes, he was right to be offended at Braves games being beamed into Reds territory night after night. Yes, the SuperStation was a burr under everyone’s saddle. But this wasn’t the way to solve it. They had to thwart Turner in Washington.
They tried. Time after time, baseball got bills into the hopper to amend broadcast laws and, in effect, scrap “Super-stations.” Time after time, Bowie Kuhn and Ted Turner would square off in congressional hearings. Kuhn talked about how WTBS, as it was now called, usurped and devalued clubs’ local broadcast rights. Turner talked about how he stood for viewer choice and against the networks’ monopolistic power.
Forget the merits. The starchy Kuhn was no match for the colorful Turner. He was a self-styled populist hero. “I break the monopoly,” he told the congressmen. “I give people a way out of the school bus attacked by truck drivers wearing bikinis. You give people a choice between watching garbage or maybe a fine classic movie, and many people will watch the movie. With the superstation, and the other cable channels you can get with the satellite, everybody can watch different things if they want. Free choice! That scares the networks to death, let me tell you.”
Baseball’s amendments never got to first base and the SuperStation rolled on. When it began reaping national advertising in 1978, it became a money machine. By the early eighties, it had 20 million subscribers. Much of the credit went to the Braves, now audaciously called by Turner “America’s team.” They filled hundreds of hours of TV time through the summer and drew viewers from as far away as Valdez, Alaska, where a local bar was renamed “The Braves Lounge,” and Storm Lake, Iowa, where a billboard read: THE ATLANTA BRAVES: IOWA’S TEAM.
For Turner, signing a few marquee players was just a modest programming investment. Thus did Al Hrabosky, his made-for-TV reliever, get a $2.2 million contract in 1979: a signing bonus of $250,000, a salary of $390,000 per annum for five years, and deferred payments through the year 2009. It was pretty good money for a guy whose eleven saves were one third the total of league leader Mike Marshall. Still, Hrabosky insisted on one other clause as the clincher: a post-career shot at broadcasting.
Turner’s hot temper and big mouth did make some negotiations an adventure. In 1979, he wanted to cut Bob Homer’s contract the maximum 20 percent. The ensuing battle with his agent, Bucky Woy, got so ugly that an arbitrator had to settle the matter. In the midst of hostilities, Braves GM Bill Lucas died of a stroke. Turner accused Woy of killing him.
Turner also bristled at the ubiquitous Jerry Kapstein. “I’ll tell you the way Kapstein conducts his business and the reason I don’t like him,” he once said. “After all, you should have some reason to dislike a guy besides the fact that he wears a full-length fur coat and is a Jew.”
Since Turner said this at a sportswriters’ banquet, word got out rather fast. Turner hastily apologized to howling Jewish groups. He also apologized to Kapstein, sort of. Turner signed his letter to the agent, “Yours in Christ.”
But Turner was generally easy pickings for agents because, as a negotiator, he was never one to sweat the details. He was once finishing up a contract with Rick Camp when the reliever’s agent, Dick Moss, threw in one final request.
Camp was a farmer on the side, in his native Trion, Georgia. In addition to a guaranteed three years’ worth of salary, Moss said, his client would like a tractor.
Turner waved his hand at this trifle.
“Whatever he wants,” he said casually.
Moss was a bit more careful. He made the contract specify not just any old tractor but a 1983 Ford TW20 tractor. It was equipped with electric windows, air-conditioning, and a six-speaker stereo, making Rich Camp the envy of Trion and sending Ted Turner into sticker shock. It cost $83,000.
With each crazy contract, with each new SuperStation incursion, the Lords screamed bloody murder. Yet Turner was tolerated by most of them. He was the entertainment at otherwise boring ownership meetings. “They’d watch in fascination and some affection,” recalls Bowie Kuhn. “He was sort of an enchanting kid.”
Sometimes Turner offered stream-of-consciousness monologues, concluding with, “A strong letter will follow.” Sometimes Turner cut right to the heart of the matter. “Gentlemen,” he once said, “we have the only legal monopoly in the country and we’re fucking it up.”
And then sometimes he brought proceedings to a dead halt. An ownership meeting was once getting started and the Braves’ seats were conspiciously empty. Suddenly the door swung open and Turner walked in, a trench coat slung over his shoulder and a woman in spiked heels and a leopardskin dress on his arm. “Hi, everybody,” he grinned. “I just got in from Paris and this is my friend Fifi LaVoom.”
That wasn’t really her name, but then nobody could really remember it. The meeting never did quite recover.
Jaws also dropped on November 15, 1980, but for a different reason. On that date—less than twenty-four hours after the reentry draft—Turner signed Claudell Washington to a five-year contract. This was the same Claudell Washington who’d averaged ten homers and fifty-nine RBIs in his six full big-league seasons. It was the same guy whose indifferent outfield play caused fans near his Comiskey Park station to hang a banner: WASHINGTON SLEPT HERE. He’d bounced around between four teams the past five years, most recently traded even-up for a minor-leaguer.
Turner’s contract with Claudell Washington amounted to an astonishing $3.5 million.
Ruly Carpenter nearly gagged on his Saturday-morning coffee when he saw the headline. It was as if a hand grenade had been tossed into his sports section. Seven hundred thousand a year for Claudell Washington? He wouldn’t believe it until he called up Chub Feeney in San Francisco—woke him up, actually—and got a mumbled confirmation. The baseball world had gone quite mad.
Carpenter’s family had owned the Phillies since 1943, when Ruly’s grandfather bought the club as a present for Ruly’s father, Bob. The Carpenters enjoyed the camaraderie of the Lords. They reveled in bringing Philadelphia its first-ever championship in 1980. They loved the game itself, and none more than Ruly.
Ruly Carpenter could have turned out a rich-kid dilettante. He was Du Pont money, heir to a family fortune estimated at $330 million. But in 1964, at age twenty-four, he rolled up his sleeves and went to work in the guts of the Phillies organization. He spent a year in the treasurer’s department, then moved over to die farm system.
That was Ruly Carpenter’s true love: player development. He came to feel almost a religious fervor for it. When he became president of the Phillies in 1973, he elevated scouting director Paul Owens to general manager. They hired more minor league coaches. They hired away top scouts from other clubs. They put more scouts in Latin America.
The Phillies, doormats through most of the sixties and early seventies, perked up. Players who had come through their revamped development system reached the majors: Mike Schmidt, Bob Boone, Greg Luzinski, Garry Maddox, and others. They took the National League East in 1976, the year Andy Messersmith won free agency.
Ruly Carpenter hated the Messersmith decision. He didn’t just like developing players; he liked palling around with them, nurturing a family feeling. “He was one of the boys,” says Tim McCarver, a Phillies catcher then. “He would sit by your locker and have a good time. He was the closest owner there was to the players.”
Messersmith smashed all notions of family. “Free agency was like a dagger in his heart,” says Steve Mann, a Philadelphian and baseball-business consultant. “It was a betrayal of everything Ruly loved about baseball. Money was the name of the game.”
The worst part, thought Carpenter, was what happened with owners. As the money grew, the sense of fraternity shrunk. Money splintered interests. Money spawned duplicity. Money replaced the concept of “What’s best for baseball?” with “What’s in it for me?”
He was hardly the only old-liner to be appalled at the new ways. Bowie Kuhn once asked a gathering of baseball men what they saw as the biggest changes of recent years. Veteran GM Gabe Paul spoke up: “To me, it’s that someone’s word is no longer any good. You’d better get it in writing.”
There had always been a certain amount of swindling and sleight-of-hand in the business. It was as accepted as stealing signs from the dugout. But there was also a certain code of honor. A handshake sealed a deal. Duplicity only went so far. That didn’t apply with those growing numbers of people who, as Gabe Paul put it, “weren’t brought up in the game.”
There was one other thing about money that offended an old-guard scouting-and-development man like Ruly Carpenter. The new boys thought it would buy pennants. What’s worse, they were right, at least initially. Steinbrenner’s Yankees won it all in 1977 and 1978, the first two post-Messersmith years. “He bought instant success,” Carpenter would reflect years later. “If he’d failed, I don’t think you’d see what you do today.”
As it was, however, Steinbrenner only encouraged the other new boys to binge too. And the only thing worse than their duplicity was their stupidity. Ruly Carpenter was horrified as he watched the Turners and Corbetts operate. He blanched at the thought of a future with business partners like them.
Still, Carpenter had the competitive drive and the cash on hand to play the new money game. He signed Mike Schmidt to one of the first mega-contracts in 1977: $560,000 a year for six years, a total of $3.36 million.
The following year he took the plunge on his first major free agent. The Phillies were so close to a pennant Carpenter could taste it. They’d won the NL East three straight years, 1976–78, but lost each LCS to the West champ. One more player—just the right sort of player—might put them over the top. That was Pete Rose.
“Charlie Hustle” played the off-field game the same as between the lines: hard, harder, and hardest. As a young player with the Reds, his goal was to be the first singles hitter to make $100,000. He made it in 1970. When the Reds balked at giving him a $5,000 raise the next year, he held out through two weeks of spring training. As the self-proclaimed “most famous white athlete in America,” Rose aggressively sought endorsements and got a $600,000 deal with Mizuno, the Japanese sporting-goods company.
And, as the post-Messersmith era dawned and salaries took off, Rose was fiercely competitive about pay. He wanted to be far-and-away the top salary stud on the Big Red Machine. He openly blasted teammates like Dave Concepción, who simply wanted to ride his coattails. Said Rose of Conception’s three-year, $1 million contract demand: “That’s a lot of money for a shortstop.”
Rose got a two-year contract averaging an annual $365,000. But he also got his nose permanently out of joint with Reds president Dick Wagner. When the term was up at the end of 1978, he spurned Wagner’s $470,000-a-year offer, turned free agent, and took his show on the road.
Agent Reuben Katz put together a twenty-five-minute highlights video, a five-city itinerary, and declared the Pete Rose auction open. He and Rose were off to:
Atlanta. Ever the eager stalking-horse, Ted Turner opened bidding by offering $1 million a year for five years and $100,000 a year for life after that. Or whatever the hell Rose wanted. “Join me for two years at a million a year,” Turner told Rose. “By then, Dick Wagner will be fired and you can go back to your hometown.”
Kansas City. The Royals had never gone after big-name free agents, but after losing the LCS to New York three straight years, Kauffman felt like Carpenter. “My buddy over in New York wins the pennant every year in the free-agent draft,” he told Rose. “I gotta try to do the same thing.” Kauffman’s offer not only matched Turner’s $1 million per annum but included pharmaceutical and oil investments.
St. Louis. Rose and Katz visited Gussie Busch in the hospital, where he was preparing for hernia surgery. “I probably would have had a hernia too,” cracked Rose when he left, “if I had to carry all the money he was offering me.” Besides salary, Busch was offering a lifetime’s largesse from Anheuser-Busch. Would Rose care to be Bud’s spokesman? How about a distributorship? Rose didn’t drink beer, but that didn’t bother Gussie Busch.
Pittsburgh. The Pirates’ owners, John and Dan Galbreath, owned something else that intrigued Rose: thoroughbreds. The Galbreaths knew this. (Who, then, would have guessed that his compulsive betting on horses—and other sports—would eventually bring him down?) They tailored their offer to that interest: a top salary, of course, but also a top-notch broodmare. With its championship bloodlines, it could produce great horses and great income. Rose was goggle-eyed. “I know people with millions who can’t get into a syndicate of a Triple Crown winner,” he’d later say, “but I could have.”
* * *
Philadelphia. The road show’s last stop was the Carpenter estate in Delaware. Ruly Carpenter and Bill Giles greeted Rose and Katz warmly, but they had hardly settled into the hunting-box living room when signing prospects vanished.
And the trades. Oh, the trades. Corbett’s baseball men tried to save him from folly. (“I was Brad’s no-man,” said Dan O’Brien. “ ‘No, don’t do that! No, not him!’ ”) It did no good. Wily executives on other clubs employed the same tactic as wily agents: go around the GM and get right to the owner.
Early in the 1977 season, for instance, the Toronto Blue Jays wanted to trade for Rangers third baseman Roy Howell. He was a promising young player, and Eddie Robinson, another Corbettera GM, insisted on value in return: say, pitcher Jim Clancy and some prospects. Toronto GM Pat Gillick balked and the talks foundered until Gillick mentioned something to his club’s president, Peter Bavasi.
“You know,” said Gillick. “Brad Corbett loves Jim Mason.”
Mason was a shortstop of such modest talent he couldn’t crack Toronto’s lineup. And this was a club that would lose 108 games that year. But, Gillick explained to Bavasi, Mason did play one thing regularly: golf, with Corbett, in the off-season.
Bavasi chuckled evilly. He checked the Rangers’ schedule. They should be en route to Detroit. He called Eddie Robinson’s office. Was he in? No, said his secretary, he was traveling with the team. He’d be out of contact for six hours or so. The coast was clear. Bavasi called Corbett in Fort Worth.
“Hey, Brad, we’re trying to conclude the Roy Howell deal with Eddie,” he said.
“Oh.”
“You know we’re damned close, but he wants this player that I don’t want to give up.”
“Doesn’t he want some of your farm prospects?”
“No, he wants Jim Mason.”
“Oh, I like Mason. He’s a real good friend.”
“Well, he’s quite a player, too: real competitive, great leadership skills, I’d hate to give him up,” Bavasi lied. “But I’d like to conclude this deal. Owner to owner, now, if I give you Mason can we do this deal?”
“Oh, I’d better not. It sounds good to me, but I’ve got to talk to Eddie.”
“Brad, I can’t wait, and frankly I’m surprised. Back in the old days the top guys used to make these decisions themselves. Aren’t you the owner? Isn’t Eddie your employee? Look, I’ll throw in Steve Hargan [a broken-down pitcher] and two hundred thousand dollars with Mason.”
“Oh, son of a bitch—I’ll make the deal.”
Bavasi quickly announced it so Robinson wouldn’t have a chance to reverse it. Howell hit .316 that year for the Jays, leading the team in batting average. He went on to a fine major league career. Mason hit .218 and played 36 games for the Rangers that year. He was out of baseball by 1979.
Corbett himself was out of baseball by 1980. He sold the Rangers for a mere $4 million—but then, the buyer was also taking on $21 million in deferred salary obligations.
A man named Eddie Chiles led the buying group. He was a Fort Worth oilman who had also gained some regional renown as a conservative radio commentator. His broadcasts always started with the words, “I’m mad.”
Before long, he would be mad at baseball.
Al Hrabosky was the made-for-TV relief pitcher. He wore a menacing Fu Manchu mustache. He stood behind the mound between hitters, facing the center-field camera and visibly psyching himself up for his next opponent. Then he’d whirl and purposefully stalk back up the mound. He was a great act and an okay reliever, and he was known as “The Mad Hungarian.”
Naturally, Ted Turner had to have him. He’d coveted Hrabosky for some time. In 1976, it will be recalled, he’d gotten in trouble for exhorting Hrabosky, “Don’t sign!” Turner was eventually suspended as a repeated tampering offender and Hrabosky ended up staying with the Cardinals in 1976. He was traded to Kansas City in 1977, and came up for free agency again after the 1979 season. Along the way, he’d also lost a yard off his fastball. Turner didn’t care. Hrabosky was great TV, and Turner was less in the baseball than the TV business.
As a team, the Braves were terrible. In Turner’s first three years, they finished last in the National League West each time. But as programming, they were hot. The SuperStation, launched in early 1977, was soon adding 200,000 cable subscribers a month. It spread like wildfire across the vast rural areas of the country with no local TV stations or home baseball teams. Starved for alternatives to network shows, Turner proved people would watch Beverly Hillbillies reruns. He also proved that, starved for baseball beyond the Game of the Week, people would watch bad baseball.
At one point, an Atlanta Constitution columnist wrote that he doubted anybody was watching the wretched Braves on the SuperStation. Play-by-play announcer Skip Caray mentioned this on the air and invited viewers to call the newspaper. Their calls swamped the Constitution’s switchboard.
A lot of calls were coming into Bowie Kuhn’s office too, but not from devoted viewers. “What the hell is this?” yowled George Steinbrenner from Tampa. “I’m getting Braves games here!”
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” growled Dick Wagner of the Reds, as the Braves came into Cincinnati for a series. “I’m not going to let him plug in his equipment here.”
Lou Hoynes and Sandy Hadden had to talk him out of it. Yes, he was right to be offended at Braves games being beamed into Reds territory night after night. Yes, the SuperStation was a burr under everyone’s saddle. But this wasn’t the way to solve it. They had to thwart Turner in Washington.
They tried. Time after time, baseball got bills into the hopper to amend broadcast laws and, in effect, scrap “Super-stations.” Time after time, Bowie Kuhn and Ted Turner would square off in congressional hearings. Kuhn talked about how WTBS, as it was now called, usurped and devalued clubs’ local broadcast rights. Turner talked about how he stood for viewer choice and against the networks’ monopolistic power.
Forget the merits. The starchy Kuhn was no match for the colorful Turner. He was a self-styled populist hero. “I break the monopoly,” he told the congressmen. “I give people a way out of the school bus attacked by truck drivers wearing bikinis. You give people a choice between watching garbage or maybe a fine classic movie, and many people will watch the movie. With the superstation, and the other cable channels you can get with the satellite, everybody can watch different things if they want. Free choice! That scares the networks to death, let me tell you.”
Baseball’s amendments never got to first base and the SuperStation rolled on. When it began reaping national advertising in 1978, it became a money machine. By the early eighties, it had 20 million subscribers. Much of the credit went to the Braves, now audaciously called by Turner “America’s team.” They filled hundreds of hours of TV time through the summer and drew viewers from as far away as Valdez, Alaska, where a local bar was renamed “The Braves Lounge,” and Storm Lake, Iowa, where a billboard read: THE ATLANTA BRAVES: IOWA’S TEAM.
For Turner, signing a few marquee players was just a modest programming investment. Thus did Al Hrabosky, his made-for-TV reliever, get a $2.2 million contract in 1979: a signing bonus of $250,000, a salary of $390,000 per annum for five years, and deferred payments through the year 2009. It was pretty good money for a guy whose eleven saves were one third the total of league leader Mike Marshall. Still, Hrabosky insisted on one other clause as the clincher: a post-career shot at broadcasting.
Turner’s hot temper and big mouth did make some negotiations an adventure. In 1979, he wanted to cut Bob Homer’s contract the maximum 20 percent. The ensuing battle with his agent, Bucky Woy, got so ugly that an arbitrator had to settle the matter. In the midst of hostilities, Braves GM Bill Lucas died of a stroke. Turner accused Woy of killing him.
Turner also bristled at the ubiquitous Jerry Kapstein. “I’ll tell you the way Kapstein conducts his business and the reason I don’t like him,” he once said. “After all, you should have some reason to dislike a guy besides the fact that he wears a full-length fur coat and is a Jew.”
Since Turner said this at a sportswriters’ banquet, word got out rather fast. Turner hastily apologized to howling Jewish groups. He also apologized to Kapstein, sort of. Turner signed his letter to the agent, “Yours in Christ.”
But Turner was generally easy pickings for agents because, as a negotiator, he was never one to sweat the details. He was once finishing up a contract with Rick Camp when the reliever’s agent, Dick Moss, threw in one final request.
Camp was a farmer on the side, in his native Trion, Georgia. In addition to a guaranteed three years’ worth of salary, Moss said, his client would like a tractor.
Turner waved his hand at this trifle.
“Whatever he wants,” he said casually.
Moss was a bit more careful. He made the contract specify not just any old tractor but a 1983 Ford TW20 tractor. It was equipped with electric windows, air-conditioning, and a six-speaker stereo, making Rich Camp the envy of Trion and sending Ted Turner into sticker shock. It cost $83,000.
With each crazy contract, with each new SuperStation incursion, the Lords screamed bloody murder. Yet Turner was tolerated by most of them. He was the entertainment at otherwise boring ownership meetings. “They’d watch in fascination and some affection,” recalls Bowie Kuhn. “He was sort of an enchanting kid.”
Sometimes Turner offered stream-of-consciousness monologues, concluding with, “A strong letter will follow.” Sometimes Turner cut right to the heart of the matter. “Gentlemen,” he once said, “we have the only legal monopoly in the country and we’re fucking it up.”
And then sometimes he brought proceedings to a dead halt. An ownership meeting was once getting started and the Braves’ seats were conspiciously empty. Suddenly the door swung open and Turner walked in, a trench coat slung over his shoulder and a woman in spiked heels and a leopardskin dress on his arm. “Hi, everybody,” he grinned. “I just got in from Paris and this is my friend Fifi LaVoom.”
That wasn’t really her name, but then nobody could really remember it. The meeting never did quite recover.
Jaws also dropped on November 15, 1980, but for a different reason. On that date—less than twenty-four hours after the reentry draft—Turner signed Claudell Washington to a five-year contract. This was the same Claudell Washington who’d averaged ten homers and fifty-nine RBIs in his six full big-league seasons. It was the same guy whose indifferent outfield play caused fans near his Comiskey Park station to hang a banner: WASHINGTON SLEPT HERE. He’d bounced around between four teams the past five years, most recently traded even-up for a minor-leaguer.
Turner’s contract with Claudell Washington amounted to an astonishing $3.5 million.
Ruly Carpenter nearly gagged on his Saturday-morning coffee when he saw the headline. It was as if a hand grenade had been tossed into his sports section. Seven hundred thousand a year for Claudell Washington? He wouldn’t believe it until he called up Chub Feeney in San Francisco—woke him up, actually—and got a mumbled confirmation. The baseball world had gone quite mad.
Carpenter’s family had owned the Phillies since 1943, when Ruly’s grandfather bought the club as a present for Ruly’s father, Bob. The Carpenters enjoyed the camaraderie of the Lords. They reveled in bringing Philadelphia its first-ever championship in 1980. They loved the game itself, and none more than Ruly.
Ruly Carpenter could have turned out a rich-kid dilettante. He was Du Pont money, heir to a family fortune estimated at $330 million. But in 1964, at age twenty-four, he rolled up his sleeves and went to work in the guts of the Phillies organization. He spent a year in the treasurer’s department, then moved over to die farm system.
That was Ruly Carpenter’s true love: player development. He came to feel almost a religious fervor for it. When he became president of the Phillies in 1973, he elevated scouting director Paul Owens to general manager. They hired more minor league coaches. They hired away top scouts from other clubs. They put more scouts in Latin America.
The Phillies, doormats through most of the sixties and early seventies, perked up. Players who had come through their revamped development system reached the majors: Mike Schmidt, Bob Boone, Greg Luzinski, Garry Maddox, and others. They took the National League East in 1976, the year Andy Messersmith won free agency.
Ruly Carpenter hated the Messersmith decision. He didn’t just like developing players; he liked palling around with them, nurturing a family feeling. “He was one of the boys,” says Tim McCarver, a Phillies catcher then. “He would sit by your locker and have a good time. He was the closest owner there was to the players.”
Messersmith smashed all notions of family. “Free agency was like a dagger in his heart,” says Steve Mann, a Philadelphian and baseball-business consultant. “It was a betrayal of everything Ruly loved about baseball. Money was the name of the game.”
The worst part, thought Carpenter, was what happened with owners. As the money grew, the sense of fraternity shrunk. Money splintered interests. Money spawned duplicity. Money replaced the concept of “What’s best for baseball?” with “What’s in it for me?”
He was hardly the only old-liner to be appalled at the new ways. Bowie Kuhn once asked a gathering of baseball men what they saw as the biggest changes of recent years. Veteran GM Gabe Paul spoke up: “To me, it’s that someone’s word is no longer any good. You’d better get it in writing.”
There had always been a certain amount of swindling and sleight-of-hand in the business. It was as accepted as stealing signs from the dugout. But there was also a certain code of honor. A handshake sealed a deal. Duplicity only went so far. That didn’t apply with those growing numbers of people who, as Gabe Paul put it, “weren’t brought up in the game.”
There was one other thing about money that offended an old-guard scouting-and-development man like Ruly Carpenter. The new boys thought it would buy pennants. What’s worse, they were right, at least initially. Steinbrenner’s Yankees won it all in 1977 and 1978, the first two post-Messersmith years. “He bought instant success,” Carpenter would reflect years later. “If he’d failed, I don’t think you’d see what you do today.”
As it was, however, Steinbrenner only encouraged the other new boys to binge too. And the only thing worse than their duplicity was their stupidity. Ruly Carpenter was horrified as he watched the Turners and Corbetts operate. He blanched at the thought of a future with business partners like them.
Still, Carpenter had the competitive drive and the cash on hand to play the new money game. He signed Mike Schmidt to one of the first mega-contracts in 1977: $560,000 a year for six years, a total of $3.36 million.
The following year he took the plunge on his first major free agent. The Phillies were so close to a pennant Carpenter could taste it. They’d won the NL East three straight years, 1976–78, but lost each LCS to the West champ. One more player—just the right sort of player—might put them over the top. That was Pete Rose.
“Charlie Hustle” played the off-field game the same as between the lines: hard, harder, and hardest. As a young player with the Reds, his goal was to be the first singles hitter to make $100,000. He made it in 1970. When the Reds balked at giving him a $5,000 raise the next year, he held out through two weeks of spring training. As the self-proclaimed “most famous white athlete in America,” Rose aggressively sought endorsements and got a $600,000 deal with Mizuno, the Japanese sporting-goods company.
And, as the post-Messersmith era dawned and salaries took off, Rose was fiercely competitive about pay. He wanted to be far-and-away the top salary stud on the Big Red Machine. He openly blasted teammates like Dave Concepción, who simply wanted to ride his coattails. Said Rose of Conception’s three-year, $1 million contract demand: “That’s a lot of money for a shortstop.”
Rose got a two-year contract averaging an annual $365,000. But he also got his nose permanently out of joint with Reds president Dick Wagner. When the term was up at the end of 1978, he spurned Wagner’s $470,000-a-year offer, turned free agent, and took his show on the road.
Agent Reuben Katz put together a twenty-five-minute highlights video, a five-city itinerary, and declared the Pete Rose auction open. He and Rose were off to:
Atlanta. Ever the eager stalking-horse, Ted Turner opened bidding by offering $1 million a year for five years and $100,000 a year for life after that. Or whatever the hell Rose wanted. “Join me for two years at a million a year,” Turner told Rose. “By then, Dick Wagner will be fired and you can go back to your hometown.”
Kansas City. The Royals had never gone after big-name free agents, but after losing the LCS to New York three straight years, Kauffman felt like Carpenter. “My buddy over in New York wins the pennant every year in the free-agent draft,” he told Rose. “I gotta try to do the same thing.” Kauffman’s offer not only matched Turner’s $1 million per annum but included pharmaceutical and oil investments.
St. Louis. Rose and Katz visited Gussie Busch in the hospital, where he was preparing for hernia surgery. “I probably would have had a hernia too,” cracked Rose when he left, “if I had to carry all the money he was offering me.” Besides salary, Busch was offering a lifetime’s largesse from Anheuser-Busch. Would Rose care to be Bud’s spokesman? How about a distributorship? Rose didn’t drink beer, but that didn’t bother Gussie Busch.
Pittsburgh. The Pirates’ owners, John and Dan Galbreath, owned something else that intrigued Rose: thoroughbreds. The Galbreaths knew this. (Who, then, would have guessed that his compulsive betting on horses—and other sports—would eventually bring him down?) They tailored their offer to that interest: a top salary, of course, but also a top-notch broodmare. With its championship bloodlines, it could produce great horses and great income. Rose was goggle-eyed. “I know people with millions who can’t get into a syndicate of a Triple Crown winner,” he’d later say, “but I could have.”
* * *
Philadelphia. The road show’s last stop was the Carpenter estate in Delaware. Ruly Carpenter and Bill Giles greeted Rose and Katz warmly, but they had hardly settled into the hunting-box living room when signing prospects vanished.
