Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  By the new millennium, it was becoming more and more of a reality. In October 2000, Boston’s homegrown corporate base was basically limited to Gillette, the bank FleetBoston (the result of a takeover of BankBoston by the Providence-based Fleet Bank), the insurance company John Hancock, and the city’s daily tabloid, the Boston Herald. * The city’s once-thriving newspaper culture had withered away, and in 1993, the city’s proud broadsheet, the Globe, had been bought by The New York Times Company. The region still had a robust bio-tech industry and the most impressive collection of universities in the country—Harvard, MIT, Brandeis, Wellesley, Boston University, Boston College, Northeastern, U-Mass Boston, and Tufts, among many others, are all located within a few miles of each other—but compared to the glitz and glamour of Los Angeles, the power of Washington, the sheer breadth of Chicago, and, of course, the omnipotence of New York City, Boston had a hard time stacking up.

  But none of those other cities could boast the Red Sox. The Sox weren’t baseball’s most storied or successful franchise, but they were its most interesting, and certainly had the most intimate and intense connection with their fans. Beginning with the Impossible Dream season of 1967 and escalating in the mid-1970s, they’d grown into America’s most popular baseball team. The Yankees’ dominance stretched through the years—they’d been baseball’s best team for at least several years during every decade since the 1920s except the 1980s—and for much of their history were either beloved or grudgingly admired in the rest of the country. That began to change on January 3, 1973, when Cleveland shipbuilder George Steinbrenner led a group of investors in buying the Yankees from CBS for $8.7 million. Soon, Steinbrenner began to throw unheard-of amounts of money at players, even as his temper tantrums and capricious hiring and firing of front-office personnel generated overheated tabloid headlines. In 1974, he paid former A’s pitcher Catfish Hunter, who’d been released from his contract, around $3.5 million for five years. (At the time, baseball’s highest-paid player was making $250,000 a year, and Tom Seaver, the game’s highest paid pitcher, was making $175,000.) Two years later, when players and owners agreed to put an end to the reserve clause that had been in effect since the nineteenth century by negotiating a system of free agency,* it was Steinbrenner who bid exorbitant amounts for newly available stars such as Reggie Jackson.

  Steinbrenner’s spending sprees brought the Yankees success, but it also turned the team into an emblem of all that was wrong with baseball, and for that matter, America. In an era in which fans were just getting used to players being allowed to switch teams freely, the Yankees were seen as being all too willing to use their money to create an unfair advantage. The Red Sox, as New York’s perennially struggling rivals, became the team the rest of the country could root for. They were steeped in romance and tradition, and their losses were proof of life’s tragic nature. When the Globe’s Peter Gammons ascended to a national stage, first at Sports Illustrated and then on ESPN, where he became the country’s best-known baseball analyst, he helped bring the gospel of the Sox to an even wider, and ever-more receptive, audience.

  By the end of the century, Boston might not have been a world-class city, but the Red Sox were considered a world-class team, and one that was discussed in sacrosanct terms. (As Boston personality Mike Barnicle once said, “Baseball is not a life and death matter, but the Red Sox are.”) When John Harrington announced he was putting the team up for sale, hopeful speculation on who the buyer might be immediately coalesced around a number of well-heeled—and exceedingly well-connected—local businessmen. Harrington had barely made his announcement before David Mugar, an heir to the Star Market supermarket fortune and the man who produced Boston’s legendary Fourth of July celebrations on the banks of the Charles River, all but proclaimed his interest in purchasing the team. “Like all Red Sox fans,” he said in a statement, “I have a passion for the team and their place in this city. I am willing to do whatever I can to help ensure the team will flourish in the coming years and someday soon reward its loyal fans with a world championship.” Joe O’Donnell, a Boston concessionaire, and Steve Karp, a local developer, were also mentioned publicly, along with a whole host of national figures ranging from Nebraska-based investment guru Warren Buffett and media magnate Sumner Redstone to Cablevision’s Charles Dolan and bestselling author (and lifelong Red Sox fan) Stephen King.

  For the incendiary Boston sports media, the prospect of a sale represented a bonanza. Immediately, they began questioning whether a new owner, especially one not born and raised in New England, would be tempted to move the team out of town, despite the fact that virtually no one seemed to think this was a realistic worry. Before any bids had even been entered—indeed, before the specifics of what was for sale had even been discussed—some of the heaviest hitters in the Boston media began advocating for the prospective local suitors with the most connections. “I’m in favor of Steve Karp, David Mugar, and Joe O’Donnell,” Dan Shaughnessy announced in his October 7 Boston Globe column, completely ignoring the fact that the three men hadn’t formed any kind of coalition, or even said whether they were interested in the team. No worries: Karp, Mugar, and O’Donnell, Shaughnessy assured his readers, were “three guys who love Boston, love baseball, and have money.”

  Shaughnessy had, by this time, become one of the best-known sports columnists in the city. His tight, red curls and ever-present half-smile were recognizable in much of the state, and if he wasn’t as well known as Peter Gammons, he was a close second in New England. Ever since the success of The Curse of the Bambino, he’d been associated with the relentless negativism that defined so much of the local press’s relationship with the Red Sox, and was known as being a reporter who wasn’t afraid to get into it with ballplayers.* In many ways, Shaughnessy seemed like a replica of a Boston archetype that had been set more than a century earlier, when the city’s sportswriters had decided that they, in alliance with the Royal Rooters, represented the best interests of the Boston Beaneaters. Shaughnessy’s fluid writing style, his perch at the Globe, and his ability to define a story made him a force to be reckoned with, and if he was coming out for Karp, Mugar, and O’Donnell, it was safe to assume they’d be front-runners should they decide to enter the bidding.

  Les Otten, needless to say, didn’t have the backing of any local columnists. To the extent he was a subject of discussion in Boston business circles, it was because he had become an object of derision or scorn. However, Otten has never been someone who doubted his own ability to get things done, and he had had his eye on the Red Sox for several years. Dan Duquette was a personal friend; in fact, Otten had asked Duquette to serve on the American Skiing Company’s board of directors several years earlier. Otten knew John Harrington as well, and had indicated to Harrington almost a year earlier that, if and when the team eventually was put up for sale, he would be interested. Soon after Harrington’s announcement, Les Otten put $50,000 in a bank account, $25,000 of which went to the application fee, and filed papers to incorporate Longball LLC.

  “Out of everyone in the mix, I had to be the furthest out there,” says Otten. “I was up against Joe O’Donnell, Charles Dolan, these kind of guys, and we launched forward without a real plan as to where the money was going to come from.” Speculation on the value of the Yawkey Trust’s 53 percent stake in the team ran anywhere from $250 million to close to $500 million. Even at the low end of that scale, Otten didn’t have access to anywhere close to that amount of money. What’s more, the new stadium that everyone seemed to agree the team needed would cost another $350 million or so, to augment more than $300 million in public funds that Harrington had secured.

  Desperate for an angle, Otten decided to center his bid on the emotional appeal of Fenway Park, John Updike’s “lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.” It was a smart move: Fenway has a deeply romantic hold on baseball fans. To be sure, Fenway offered plenty to complain about. It seated only 34,218 at a time when most stadiums seated a minimum of 40,000, and some, like New York’s Yankee Stad
ium, had room for more than 57,000. The corridors that snaked through the stands were woefully narrow, and the bottlenecks that occurred before games could send a claustrophobe into a panic attack. Shockingly, many of Fenway’s seats didn’t even face home plate; fans along the first and third baselines found themselves aimed more or less at the outfield, and the steel trusses that supported the upper deck meant that a handful of seats in baseball’s smallest ballpark wouldn’t be able to see much of anything at all.* Since Harrington and Duquette had been arguing that the team desperately needed a new stadium, necessary improvements—everything from new paint to mark the seating sections to better drainage so the team’s dugout didn’t flood every time it rained—had been ignored.

  Indeed, Fenway Park in 2001 looked much the same as it did after Tom Yawkey’s renovations following the fire of 1934. In 1936, a 23.5 foot tall screen was added to the top of the left field wall in order to protect the windows on adjoining Lansdowne Street from balls hit out of the park, and in 1947, the Wall’s advertisements were covered with green paint, giving it a new nickname: the Green Monster. There were some other changes made over the years—in 1940, the Sox built bullpens in front of the right-field bleachers in order to create a more hospitable hitting environment for the left-handed-hitting Ted Williams—but not much else had changed in the old park. At the time it was built, Fenway was seen as an ultramodern marvel, with comfortable seats and the nicest press box in the country. Almost 90 years later, Fenway’s narrow seats proved far too small for most patrons, and the absence of legroom all but necessitated a day at the chiropractor following a night at the ballpark.

  Despite all that, Fenway Park was, inarguably, a gorgeous monument to American baseball. It still used a manual scoreboard, and scoreboard operators could sometimes be glimpsed peeking out from behind the numbers to catch the action on the field. The very same steel beams that blocked some patrons’ views allowed the second deck to be built almost directly on top of the infield grandstand, creating an intensely intimate setting. Unlike most stadiums, Fenway didn’t have an upper deck, and first-time visitors could not help but be struck by how Fenway allowed fans to gaze out onto the Boston skyline, with the Prudential and the John Hancock buildings rising behind right-center field and the famous Citgo sign blinking over the Wall in left. The odd triangle of grass that was delineated by the end of the Red Sox bullpen and Fenway’s center-field wall was an inexplicable a patch of outfield territory as exists in baseball, and a point of stubborn pride. The Green Monster rose majestically over the outfield grass, where it turned screaming line drive shots into harmless singles and transformed breezy pop flies into home runs. It was here that Carlton Fisk had willed his walk-off home run in the sixth game of the 1975 World Series. It was this field that Babe Ruth and Ted Williams once roamed. “The ballpark is the star,” Globe columnist Marty Nolan wrote in 1999, trying to explain the Red Sox’s—and Fenway’s—sway over New England. “A crazy-quilt violation of city planning principles, an irregular pile of architecture, a menace to marketing consultants, Fenway Park works. It works as a symbol of New England’s pride, as a repository of evergreen hopes, as a tabernacle of lost innocence.” Baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti compared Fenway to “Mount Olympus, the Pyramid at Giza, the nation’s Capitol, the czar’s Winter Palace, and the Louvre—except, of course, that it was better than all those inconsequential places.” Pitching great Tom Seaver said simply, “Fenway is the essence of baseball.”

  That, Otten decided, was a sentiment he could use. “We needed to have a hook,” he says. “For me, the most important part of the Boston Red Sox, other than the fact that they hadn’t won the World Series in 82 years, was Fenway Park. Fenway Park is bigger than the Statue of Liberty; it’s bigger than the Empire State Building. People would put their parents’ ashes in the outfield. When I began to understand how important Fenway Park is to the people of New England, I realized that if I had a way to keep Fenway, then maybe I might have something special that no one else had.”

  At first, Otten’s plan to keep the Red Sox in Fenway seemed like the same sort of hare-brained idea that led to the collapse of his ski empire. The team had already paid for an engineering study that concluded that Fenway was in danger of falling apart; the oldest park in the game had, after all, been built on swampland. When Otten tried to hire his own engineering team to conduct a study, Harrington denied him access to the stadium. “Nobody wanted to be told they could stay at Fenway,” Otten says. “But I was determined to find a way.”

  *Otten resigned as the American Skiing Company’s CEO in 2001; press reports at the time implied that he’d been pushed out. ASC shareholders eventually lost more than $250 million.

  *This trend continued in the first years of the new millennium: In October 2003, the North Carolina–based Bank of America acquired FleetBoston. In April 2004, the Canadian company Manulife Financial acquired John Hancock. In January 2005, Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble acquired Gillette. In April 2005, one of Boston’s last remaining nationally circulating magazines, The Atlantic, announced that it was moving to Washington. For the last year, the struggling Herald has been the subject of persistent sale rumors.

  *The 1976 collective bargaining agreement dictated that players would be controlled by the clubs that initially signed them for their first six years of major league play. After six years, players not under contract became free agents and were allowed to sign with whichever club they chose. In 1978, the salary arbitration system was effected, whereby players with three to six years of service, plus the most senior 17 percent of players with two to three years of service, can elect to have their salaries decided by an arbitrator.

  *The Red Sox’s Carl Everett had once yelled at the Globe’s Gordon Edes to leave the Red Sox clubhouse and told Edes to take Shaughnessy, whom Everett referred to as Edes’s “curly haired boyfriend,” with him. While Everett was a known loose cannon, other Red Sox stars, from Nomar Garciaparra to Curt Schilling, have complained about Shaughnessy’s columns, and in 2005, Terry Francona loudly berated Shaughnessy in view of other reporters, saying, “After reading what you wrote, I lost all respect for you.”

  *In all, around 1,000 seats at Fenway have some obstructed view because of the park’s steel trusses.

  Chapter 7

  The Producer

  THE PATH THAT LED to that way first presented itself on a cold night in January 2001, when Otten was relaxing after a day on the slopes at his house in Greenwood, Maine, with Tom Werner and Werner’s then girlfriend, the Today show’s Katie Couric. Werner, whose father was a lawyer, grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was educated at Connecticut’s tony Hotchkiss School and Harvard, where he joined the Harvard Lampoon, a semisecret social organization that occasionally published a purported humor magazine. He’d lived for most of his adult life in Southern California, where he’d moved soon after beginning his professional career as a researcher at ABC television in New York. When he finally left ABC in 1981, he was a senior vice president for prime-time programming, a high-ranking and well-paying position that all but ensured Werner a comfortable life. Instead of continuing to climb his way up the corporate ladder, Werner set off with his former boss, Marcy Carsey, and formed Carsey-Werner Productions, whose first headquarters was in an unair-conditioned office space above a sneaker store. The duo hit it big in 1984 with The Cosby Show, and later produced Roseanne, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and That ’70s Show.

  That night, after a day on the slopes, the conversation turned to what Otten was planning to do next. (In a typical Otten yarn, Otten remembers the trio being on their second or third bottle of wine at this point of the conversation. Werner says he’s pretty sure there wasn’t a lot, if any, wine consumed that night.) “I’m going to try to buy the Boston Red Sox,” Otten said. “Whattaya think?”

  Werner was intrigued. As a student at Harvard in the 1960s, he’d made a documentary about Fenway Park, and fondly remembered skipping science classes to buy bleacher seats for day gam
es. But Werner’s more recent memories of baseball were considerably more painful. From 1990 until 1994, Werner was the principal owner of the San Diego Padres, a period that was marked by fan disgust and on-field failure.

  His tenure was controversial almost from the get-go. On July 25, 1990, several months into Werner’s first season as owner, Roseanne Arnold, the star of one of Werner’s biggest television shows, was tapped to sing the national anthem before a Padres home game. Her screechily off-key rendition prompted a chorus of boos from the stands. While walking off the field, Arnold grabbed at her crotch and spit on the field, an act, she said later, which was meant as an homage to ballplayers everywhere. The rest of the country, from President Bush on down, interpreted it more literally.