The Lords of the Realm, page 49
“Get me out of here,” he told Tom Reich, his agent. “I’ll go anywhere.”
Reich, on reflex, picked up the phone and called George Steinbrenner.
“Jack Clark has broken off negotiations with St. Louis,” he said. “Are you interested?”
He was. Profoundly. After making a strong run at the pennant in 1986, the Yankees had slid back to fourth in 1987. Steinbrenner had already hired Billy Martin for the fifth time in the off-season, and he was determined to recover in 1988.
“I’d love to have Jack Clark,” said Steinbrenner. “But I’m not going to be able to be in a negotiation involving money.”
The Boss meant he wouldn’t exceed the Cardinals’ offer, but he matched it precisely: two years at $1.5 million per, plus $500,000 in incentives. He did not, however, immediately inform the Information Bank.
Tom Reich, however, did let drop to the Cardinals’ Lou Susman the fact that Clark was talking to someone else. He screamed at the PRC to find out who it was. John Westhoff, a young lawyer there, started calling around to see who it was. California, Oakland, Toronto, and Philadelphia all denied it was them. So did Yankee GM Bob Quinn.
“That would make no sense,” he scoffed at Westhoff, and he wasn’t lying. Steinbrenner hadn’t told his “baseball people” what he was doing.
Only after Clark had already accepted the Yankees’ offer did Steinbrenner call Westhoff. He had an information “deposit” to make. He laid out the terms offered and said Clark had until noon the next day to make a decision. It was, of course, a lie. Steinbrenner neglected to mention something else: a side letter promising a third year on the contract or, if things didn’t work out in New York, a trade.
Steinbrenner didn’t make the call until 11:00 P.M., but Westhoff immediately relayed word to St. Louis. Just as quickly, Lou Susman was all over Tom Reich. They’d drop the $250,000 repayment demand; they’d sweeten the terms; what did they have to do?
“It’s too late,” said Reich, with satisfaction. “I’ve given my hand.”
Clark was in pinstripes and his experience was indicative of what was going on. “The blocks had started to loosen,” said Reich.
The Yankees also tried to hoodwink the Angels out of Mike Witt by not reporting their true bid to the Information Bank. The Dodgers, in a similar vein, tried to trick the Twins out of Gary Gaetti. The Lords were reverting to form.
By the end of the Information Bank’s first winter, in 1988, the Lords had lost all sense of urgency. The industry’s operating profits would rise to $121 million that year and nearly double to $214 million the next. Almost everybody was making money. Almost nobody believed they could keep this going much longer. In August 1988, arbitrator Nicolau ruled on the second year of collusion: again, guilty as charged.
Nicolau and Tom Roberts, the first arbitrator, made a total of twenty-one players “second-look” free agents, able to test the market again. One of them was Kirk Gibson, who was signed by the Dodgers in early 1988. That year, he hit 25 homers, batted .290, led L.A. to the pennant, and was named National League MVP.
Then, in October, he hit one of the most dramatic home runs in World Series history. Though hobbled by hamstring and knee injuries, he managed to limp to the plate in the ninth inning of the first game to pinch-hit. Facing Oakland relief ace Dennis Eckersley with two outs, one on, and the Dodgers trailing 4–3, Gibson smashed a game-winning homer. He never played again in the Series, but the A’s never recovered from that homer. The Dodgers—by far the weaker team—won in five games.
That, some thought, was the moment collusion really ended. Nobody who witnessed that scene—a fist-pumping Gibson rounding the bases, his teammates mobbing him at home, Dodger fans filling the night with a roar—could ever again say that no free agent was worth it.
As it all came crashing down around him, Ueberroth took no blame and professed only bewilderment.
“I never did anything wrong,” he insisted over lunch one day with Lou Hoynes at the Racket Club. “I never said anything wrong.”
“Technically you didn’t,” Hoynes told him. “The clubs heard your words, but they also heard the music, and it was martial music. They all fell into the beat.”
18
PETER UEBERROTH WAS on his way out. His term was up in 1989 and he had places to go, things to do. He would not stand for reelection as commissioner. The master of PR could trumpet his achievements in putting the profit back in baseball and getting the drugs out. The chickens hadn’t yet come home to roost on collusion, for damages hadn’t yet been assessed. It was time to declare victory and get the hell out.
But there was one more important piece of business. Baseball’s network TV contract was up in 1989, and a new one was to be negotiated. Ueberroth wanted it to be the glorious final movement to the symphony of his commissionership. The owners needed it to be. TV money had become the Lords’ lifeblood, the great equalizer in the baseball economy. One comparative statistic said it all. From 1971 to 1990, the average player salary grew 1,741 percent. In the same span, the revenue from national TV contracts grew 1,742 percent.
Baseball had come a long way from the days when TV was the enemy. It was certainly considered that in the 1950s. TV was blamed, at first, for slaying the minors. In 1949, when less than 4 million American homes had TV sets, 42 million people attended minor league games. By 1959, 80 percent of American homes had TV sets and 70 percent of minor league attendance had evaporated. Whole leagues disappeared, and old baseball men mourned.
Major league attendance also plummeted in TV’s early years. From an all-time high of 20 million in 1948 it was down to 14.4 million in 1953. “The greatest fear I have about baseball is that we’ll become a studio game,” National League president Warren Giles wrote to his owners back then. “We’ll be playing with only 500 people in the stands and everybody else watching on TV.”
The Lords were fixated on gate receipts. Broadcasts amounted to “giving the game away.” Before they were anti-TV, they were anti-radio. Larry MacPhail, it will be recalled, enraged his fellow New York owners in 1938 by refusing to renew an anti-radio compact among the three clubs. They wanted no games on the air, while the Dodgers’ president wanted to broadcast them all. He considered radio a grand promotional tool.
While the Yankees and Giants stewed, MacPhail lined up 50,000-watt WOR to broadcast the games and General Mills, Mobil Oil, and Procter and Gamble to sponsor them. The other two clubs were forced to capitulate and put their games on WABC. Still, the way rights fees were arrived at for radio and early TV revealed the prevailing attitude in baseball toward those media. Clubs didn’t try to calculate their games’ value to the stations and then bargain aggressively. They tried to figure out how much attendance broadcasts were costing them and then charged just enough to replace lost ticket revenues.
Only a few teams saw TV’s potential. The Brooklyn Dodgers telecast more than a hundred games a year in the fifties, and Walter O’Malley was exploring pay TV. The Cubs televised heavily from 1948 on, eventually putting all home games on TV. Phil Wrigley sold the rights for peanuts, reasoning that he was creating fans—housewives who watched while ironing, kids who flipped on the Cubs after school. Eventually, they’d get hooked and come out to the ballpark. “He said we should provide them with continuity,” recalled Cubs business manager E. R. “Salty” Saltwell.
But as of the late fifties, five of the eight National League teams televised no home games at all. The franchise-hopping of that decade was driven far more by the promise of new stadiums than by the lure of vast TV markets. Milwaukee, Baltimore, and Kansas City were small cities, but they had big new ballparks. TV just wasn’t a significant part of the revenue mix. Broadcast rights accounted for just 17 percent of baseball’s total revenues in 1956.
Even in 1965, only four teams topped $1 million in local annual broadcast revenues: the Yankees, Mets, Dodgers, and Astros. (Houston was tops at $1.8 million. Roy Hofheinz made part of his fortune in radio and was an aggressive seller of rights. He even put together a Spanish-language radio network.) The Senators were on the low end, at $300,000 while the Twins, Cardinals, Cubs, and Reds represented the average, at $500,000.
It was in that year that baseball first started trying to harness its TV power. The Lords had granted Game of the Week rights, in various forms, since 1953. One year (1960) all three networks had a version. But the owners forbid their telecast in big-league cities, and the networks paid teams on a per-appearance basis. Thus, the 1964 Yankees reaped five times more than any other team: $550,000, compared to $100,000 for the runner-up Cardinals and Phillies.
John Fetzer changed all that. The Tigers’ owner made his fortune in TV and radio stations, and he understood both baseball and broadcasting. He pushed the Lords to improve the packaging and distribution of their “product.” “Mr. Fetzer got everybody together, and for the first time sold the rights to baseball as an industry,” said Detroit GM Jim Campbell.
The result was a $5.7 million Game of the Week deal with ABC. It was no Rozelle-style masterstroke, but it was a major enhancement of baseball’s TV income. That was because the Lords finally agreed to let the Game be televised in big-league cities, which were the nation’s major TV markets. The deal was also significant in that it shared the proceeds equally. Each club would get $300,000, or at least three times more than any team except New York had seen previously. It was the starting point of the networks’ economic importance to the game of baseball.
ABC got terrible ratings for the Game in 1965. That allowed NBC to swoop in and pick it up on the cheap. It captured baseball in toto from 1966 to 1968—the Game, the World Series, and the All-Star Game—for $11.8 million a year.
But from that unsure start, the network rights would climb geometrically. NBC paid $49.5 million for 1969–71, then $72 million for 1972–75. When bidding for the next contract came around, baseball divided the package between NBC and ABC for a composite deal yielding $92.8 million for 1976–79.
There was some grumbling about the networks’ growing influence. In 1971, baseball started playing World Series games at night—just to appease the network. Viewers scoffed at the sight of Bowie Kuhn sans topcoat, pretending he wasn’t freezing. Purists bemoaned the loss of a snared national experience: pressing ears to transistor radios and relaying scores through schools and offices.
But sponsors didn’t pay for afternoon radio like they did for prime-time TV. And baseball needed prime-time money in the post-Messersmith era. The 1976–79 TV deal generated nearly $1 million per team, a powerful offset to rising payrolls.
Local broadcast rights were jumping too. This was partly because teams were learning the value of television games—even home games. As their marketing and ticket-selling operations got more sophisticated, they discovered that they didn’t necessarily have to sacrifice attendance for TV. Indeed, some felt that if they played their cards—and cameras—right, TV could help attendance. “You could show the excitement of your fans screaming, of families having fun at the ballpark,” said the Phillies’ Bill Giles. “It was the best promotion you could have.”
In addition, more clubs now had front-office specialists whose sole mission in life it was to maximize their TV and radio revenues. In 1975, Gene Kirby of the Red Sox ditched the club’s flagship radio station of thirty years for one that would ante up a record $450,000 for rights.
It came as a blow to purists, for suddenly the Red Sox play-by-play was littered with plugs for sponsors. The new station had to pay the freight somehow. It was the beginning of a massive proliferation of commercial intrusions into baseball broadcasts. (“As the call goes out to the bullpen, how about calling Domino’s?” and “While they’re making a pitching change, Kendall Oil asks, ‘Have you changed your oil lately?’ ”) But in the mid-seventies it was an unpleasant novelty, and Bosox announcers Ned Martin and Jim Woods were openly disdainful. Enormously popular with listeners, though not with sponsors, they were fired in 1978.
But even the fast-growing flow of local broadcast revenue couldn’t keep pace with the gush of network money. In 1965, local TV generated three times more income for baseball than network deals. In 1980, for the first time, network revenue exceeded local TV rights. The 1980–83 deal doubled the old contract, yielding $190 million, or $1.8 million per team per year.
“The cry used to be that the game was too long; it was too slow; it was played in the summer,” said Tom Villante, who negotiated the 1980–83 deal for baseball. “Strangely enough, all those negatives turned out to be positive.”
The most positive of all was the summer part. Long a slack season for TV advertising, it perked up. Football once got all the car ads, as new models were introduced each fall. Now, with fierce import competition, new models came out constantly. So did ads. Chrysler glommed on to baseball, making Joe Garagiola its pitchman. The newly deregulated airlines were also embroiled in fierce competition. They turned to baseball to advertise for the peak summer-travel season. And, most of all, there was beer.
Nothing fueled TV sports like the Beer Wars. The first shot was fired in the early 1970s, when Phillip Morris purchased Miller Brewing. Armed with the tobacco giant’s cash, Miller went after Anheuser-Busch hard. America’s number-one brewer since 1957 was caught back on its heels.
The King of Beers was sent reeling by the introduction of Miller Lite in 1975. This was the first low-calorie beer, and it quickly tapped an enormous market. By 1976, Anheuser-Busch’s market share had dipped from 23.7 to 19.4 percent. Miller had gone from a distant seventh to a strong second—and Gussie Busch had been ousted as chairman.
Miller used sports skillfully. Its pitchmen were glib ex-jocks, and its aim was to grab every possible TV spot for major sports events. Miller became the exclusive beer sponsor for Monday Night Football, the college football Game of the Week, the 1980 Olympic Games, the Indy 500, and yes, the World Series.
August Busch III, Gussie’s son and successor, came back firing. He believed Anheuser-Busch rightfully owned sports. Certainly his father had positioned it that way, between the Cardinals and a host of sponsorships. Gussie Busch was by now a ceremonial relic, but young Auggie had inherited the fighting spirit, not to mention a calculating business head. If the infidels chose to challenge him on this ground, he’d make them pay dearly.
Anheuser-Busch poured 70 percent of its $400 million broadcast ad budget into sports. It also endeavored, at every turn, to push Miller out. The rival had snuck in to become sole beer sponsor of NBC’s and ABC’s baseball telecasts. It was galling, an Anheuser-Busch delegation told Bowie Kuhn, and they expected him to do something about it. The delegation, led by Gussie Busch’s consigliere, Lou Susman, asked Kuhn to go to bat for them. He had the clout to force the networks to air Anheuser-Busch ads. Pete Rozelle, they pointed out, had gotten them onto Monday Night Football, where Miller was previously the exclusive beer sponsor. Kuhn primly refused. It was a network decision, he said, and he couldn’t intercede in the middle of a contract. Susman gritted his teeth and made up his mind to get Kuhn. He would later lead the coup against Kuhn, using the company’s TV sponsorships as leverage to gain support.
(When Kuhn did fall, his staunch ally, Peter O’Malley, banished Anheuser-Busch from Dodger Stadium and brought in Miller. It slowed the flow of Bud at major league games only slightly, however. Anheuser-Busch had locked up the concession stands at every other stadium but Milwaukee, which went with hometown Miller.)
What a difference a few decades made. Judge Landis refused to allow beer ads on World Series radio broadcasts. Happy Chandler turned down Brooklyn’s Liebman Breweries as a sponsor for the first televised World Series. “It would not be good public relations for baseball to have the Series sponsored by the producer of an alcoholic beverage,” he said.
By the 1980s, beer was the mother’s milk of baseball. Anheuser-Busch, which in 1976 sponsored the telecasts of twelve teams, in 1986 sponsored those of all twenty-six. Its war with Miller was also a huge factor in driving up the value of baseball’s broadcast rights. TV could pay big for baseball rights, knowing Anheuser-Busch and Miller would pay big to advertise. Baseball was summer; summer was beer; and beer was huge money.
There was another reason TV bid up the broadcast value of baseball. The networks had their own imperatives. Their identities were wrapped up in certain sports and their executives’ pride was on the line with each high-profile bid. (Men like ABC’s Roone Arledge had every bit the ego of a Lord.) Sometimes a network needed to win a high-profile sports bid just to make a statement, no matter the cost.
Such was the happy case for baseball as it faced its next TV deal in 1983. NBC was in a shambles in the early eighties. The peacock was pulling up the rear in the Nielsens. It had recruited Grant Tinker as its president, hoping the noted producer could restore the old luster. At this low point in the network’s history, it wasn’t about to lose baseball.
If football was the signature sport of CBS, as the Olympics were at ABC, the national pastime belonged to NBC. It had enjoyed an exclusive lock on baseball from 1966 to 1975, and it televised every World Series from 1947 to 1975. It presented baseball deftly and lovingly. As an executive there once put it, “Baseball is in the walls at NBC.”
The old saw had been that baseball wasn’t well suited to TV. But with innovative camera work and top announcers, NBC made it work for TV. Producer Harry Coyle developed the center-field camera shot that became TV’s standard vantage. He originated the close-up shot—isolating key players’ actions and reactions. When Carlton Fisk’s twelfth-inning homer won game six of the 1975 Series, NBC’s shot of him willing the ball fair, theatrically twisting and turning his body, heightened the drama. A record 76 million viewers tuned in to game seven.
NBC had the advantage of most-favored-network status with Bowie Kuhn. He was a lame-duck commissioner now, but nevertheless a member of baseball’s three-man TV negotiating committee. Kuhn revered NBC’s baseball connections, just as he did Gillette’s. And he liked Arthur Watson, NBC Sports’s genial president.
