Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  By 1991, the senior league had shut down, and Henry briefly thought about trying to join a Republican group that would establish a Major League Baseball expansion franchise in Colorado. After Colorado’s Democratic governor, Roy Romer, gave his blessing to a rival bidding group, Henry dropped out, angry that he had been cut out of the process before he’d even been allowed to make his pitch. “Had I known that a beauty pageant was being conducted…perhaps I would have chosen not to participate,” Henry said in a statement at the time. “Isn’t it more important to assist investors in helping to make Denver’s dream of baseball a reality rather than to eliminate them?” Romer responded by calling Henry’s gripes “sour grapes.”

  “I ended up getting into this very public thing with the governor,” Henry says. “That was really my first experience with the media; it was the first time I was on the front page of a major newspaper. It wasn’t that pleasant, but I learned something.” Henry finally got a stake in a baseball franchise later that year, when he bought a Florida neighbor’s 1 percent share of the New York Yankees. Being a part of the Yankees, Henry says, was a lot of fun. He would occasionally fly some of the partners to playoff games on his private plane (affectionately dubbed TWH, or Trans World Henry). Yankees principal owner George Steinbrenner was always solicitous of Henry’s mother. “The partners were all very close, and I had a great relationship with George. I didn’t have any desire to be out front. I didn’t have any desire to stick my nose out. I was a small partner, and I was happy with that.”

  Nevertheless, when Wayne Huizenga announced in 1998 that he was going to sell the Miami-based Florida Marlins, Henry was intrigued. The Marlins were by this time his hometown team: He owned a palatial lake-front mansion in an exclusive gated community in Boca Raton and Henry wanted to ensure the team stayed in South Florida. The team had won a World Series faster than any expansion team in history: In 1997, only four years after the team’s inaugural season, the Marlins beat the Cleveland Indians in an exciting seven-game series. The next year, after claiming he had lost more than $30 million during the ’97 season, Huizenga completely dismantled the team,* shedding payroll and embittering fans around the region. By the middle of the ’98 season, Marlins president Don Smiley was searching for wealthy backers with whom he could purchase the club.

  “I had just taken delivery on my boat,” Henry says, referring modestly to his 164-foot yacht, the Iroquois.† “I was in the south of France, and Smiley called and asked me if I would come and be the lead general partner.” Henry, who had been vacationing with the actor Michael Douglas and Miami Heat coach Pat Riley, immediately flew back to the States. By late August, with Smiley no longer part of the deal, Henry’s negotiations with Huizenga had begun in earnest.

  For Henry, any deal to buy the Marlins would have to include a plan to build a new stadium. The Marlins had played throughout their existence in Pro Player Stadium, the cavernous (and charmless) home to the National Football League’s Miami Dolphins. Besides being located away from any urban center, Pro Player does not have a retractable roof, and the summer is Florida’s rainy hurricane season. “Every afternoon all summer, at just the time people are thinking about going to a game, rains come in and soak the region,” Henry says. Even though the nights were generally dry, “Of course no one’s going to decide to go to a game when it looks like you’ll be sitting in a rainstorm.” At the time, Henry made clear the Marlins would need public support for a stadium if the team wanted to be competitive. “Anyone who purchases the Marlins has to do so with the understanding they may have to privately finance a stadium,” he told the local press. “But the team would not be able to compete in the National League East for the next 30 years.” Henry, whose company was continuing to do exceedingly well, also said he wouldn’t buy the team with the intention of adding to his wealth. “I don’t expect to make money,” he said, tellingly wearing a 1996 Yankees World Series ring he’d won as a partner in the team. “My interest is in having a competitive baseball team.”

  The next two months were strikingly contentious. On September 1, Henry and Huizenga came to a handshake deal for $150 million. Soon, however, Huizenga was demanding another $8 million—ostensibly for stadium improvements for Pro Player Stadium, which Huizenga owned—which Henry said put the deal in jeopardy. Huizenga responded by saying Henry was “chickening out” of the deal, “just like with the ten other teams he’s tried to buy.” By October 21, the two men had come to terms again. And by November 4, the deal was back off. “The deal kept changing,” Henry said at the time. “It’s been two months of a lot of hard work and thought and expense for nothing.” Adding to the carnival-like atmosphere, Huizenga announced that if he weren’t able to find a buyer, he’d establish an eight-member board of directors, consisting of sports editors from local papers and county commissioners from Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade counties, to run the team. Finally, on November 6, 1998, Henry agreed to buy the Marlins for $150 million, plus the $8 million Huizenga was insisting on for stadium improvements.

  Almost immediately, Henry set about trying to find some trusted lieutenants to help him run the Marlins. As soon as his purchase of the team was finalized, he approached Lucinda Treat, a 28-year-old mergers and acquisitions lawyer at New York’s Shearman & Sterling, the law firm that represented Henry. Treat, along with Shearman & Sterling’s Creighton Condon, had been instrumental in guiding Henry’s bid for the team. At the time, she was comfortably ensconced in a brownstone in Brooklyn’s Park Slope with her husband and two young children. She’d just decided to leave private practice, and had accepted a job as an in-house counsel at the media company Reuters.

  “I have a better idea,” Henry said. “Why don’t you come down to Florida and work with me?” Within a week, Treat had told Reuters something else had come up and signed on as the Marlins director of legal affairs. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” says Treat. “I’d gotten to know John, and I knew he had a good sense of values. It was just so unusual to be offered that kind of job—how could I say no?” Treat’s whole family relocated to Florida.

  “When I started out with the Marlins, I was just so thrilled,” says Henry. “I was excited about the people I was working with, and I was excited to get a chance to help build up baseball in southern Florida after what had happened with the dismantling of the World Series team.” The Marlins also afforded Henry a chance to explore some new aspects of his personality. After a career filled with dizzying successes, John Henry had become close friends with sports owners, rock stars, and politicians. Despite this, he had rarely been in the public eye. A naturally shy person, Henry, with his soft voice, translucent skin, and watery eyes, appeared frail to many people.

  Now, he was taking over a beleaguered franchise that was regularly covered by three major metropolitan dailies—The Miami Herald, Fort Lauderdale’s Sun Sentinel, and The Palm Beach Post. Instead of avoiding the spotlight, Henry decided to challenge himself, and made a particular point of opening up and being available to the public. He held regular meetings with the beat writers covering the team and actively sought these reporters’ input on how best to manage the team, a welcome change from the openly combative relationship Huizenga had had with much of the local press. He anointed himself the Marlins fan ambassador, frequently greeting ticket holders as they walked into and out of the ballpark. During games, he would sometimes wander the stands, thanking patrons for their support. Over time, he came to know many of the team’s season-ticket holders by name.

  Henry’s connection with and ownership of the Marlins was a stark contrast to the prevailing trend in baseball. While baseball teams were once seen as investments or vanity acquisitions for rich, swashbuckling men—witness Tom Yawkey, George Steinbrenner, and Ted Turner—clubs were increasingly being bought by corporations that were drawn to baseball’s synergistic or marketing possibilities. Time Warner controlled the Braves, The Walt Disney Company ran the Anaheim Angels, and the News Corporation owned the Los Angeles Dodgers. Henry
wasn’t looking to the Marlins to pad his fortune, and the team’s marketing or media potential certainly wasn’t a draw; instead, he was propelled by his boyhood love of the game. For him, owning the Marlins was a way both to connect with his past and to explore neglected aspects of his own personality.

  “I had spent my life in a very insular business,” Henry says. “And I had a great reticence in public speaking, or even in being a public figure. But doing that with the Marlins seemed to give me tremendous energy and reinvigorate my life. It made my life a lot richer. I connected with the fans, I became friends with the reporters, and I went from a very insular existence to one that was very community oriented. It was one of the most unexpectedly wonderful things that ever happened to me.”

  Henry’s early efforts to forge a connection with the community would prove crucial during the three years he owned the Marlins. Instead of concentrating solely on building up a competitive team, much of Henry’s (and the entire Marlins organization’s) efforts during that time were devoted to trying to find a way to build a retractable roof stadium. Within months of signing on to join Henry in Florida, Lucinda Treat found that the assorted stadium plans and negotiations would take up an enormous amount of her daily work. Jonathan Mariner, the team’s executive vice president, joined Treat in working virtually around the clock on various stadium deals. When Mariner quit the team in August 2000, David Ginsberg, a former Wall Street investment banker and London portfolio manager who had known Henry through his commodities business, took over. If Henry thought owning a baseball team would transport him to the romantic relationship he had with the game as a child, he was about to discover how wrong he was.

  By the end of the 1999 season, as a Marlins team still decimated by Huizenga’s 1998 fire sale sputtered through their first year under Henry’s stewardship, Henry, Treat, and Mariner decided to focus their energy on gaining support for a stadium in a downtown bayfront park next to the Miami Heat’s new arena. The planned ballpark, to be designed by the same architectural firm that built Camden Yards, would seat approximately 38,000 people. Initially, Henry said he hoped to have the stadium completed before the 2003 season and wanted to raise approximately $300 million of the estimated $400 million needed for the park from public funds; that way, he said, he could use his own money to go after the kind of high-priced talent the team would need to be competitive. “I had no reason to think at that time that we couldn’t be successful,” he says.

  Indeed, Henry’s advisors had come up with a plan that would seemingly cost Florida taxpayers next to nothing, since the park was to be funded by a proposed tax on passengers who took luxury cruises that departed from Florida. Henry even assured both lawmakers and the public that he wouldn’t personally lard his coffers with revenue from the new stadium: He promised to return 90 percent of the team’s profits to the Miami area and said he’d invest a minimum of $1 million a year on community projects. “It seemed like such a slam-dunk,” he says. “We’d help revitalize a part of downtown that was in dire need of attention. Coupled with the Heat, we’d create a kind of sports complex that would have brought in new business. And Florida taxpayers wouldn’t have had to pay.”

  As Henry was about to discover, however, nothing is ever simple when it comes to Florida politics. Despite preliminary indications of support from the state legislature, Governor Jeb Bush said he’d veto a bill that did nothing more than set a date for the state’s residents to vote on whether they wanted to approve the proposed cruise tax. (Bush called the proposed tax “bad public policy” and argued it would drive the cruise industry to other states’ port cities.)

  With the cruise tax seemingly moribund, Treat and David Ginsberg next spent the rest of 2000 hammering out a completely new funding plan with Miami-Dade County mayor Alex Penelas. Now, funding for the stadium would come from a nightly county tax on Miami’s hotel visitors, a city parking surcharge, and state money from a sales tax rebate. Before long, the state pulled out, and that plan fell apart as well. Soon, so did the promise of the land next to the Heat’s arena. Finally, in a last-ditch effort, Henry agreed to build a stadium on a polluted 60-acre site along the Miami River. On May 4, 2001, Florida’s House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a measure that would have allowed for public financing of the proposed $385 million stadium. That same day, the state Senate president adjourned early, without even allowing the bill to come up for a vote, essentially killing it without any debate.

  Henry, defeated and frustrated, was ready to give up. “I’m not going to comment or speculate on what happens at this point,” he said at the time. “We have spent the last two-and-a-half years expecting to be successful. At some point, we just can’t continue. It doesn’t make sense.” He acknowledged that he had the money to build a new ballpark himself, but if he wanted to limit his overall losses, that would drain much needed resources from the team’s payroll. “We could probably build our own ballpark, but we wouldn’t be competitive,” he said. “We could do that, but it would make no sense to field minor leaguers, and everybody would write about what jerks we are for the next 30 years.” Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, speaking out publicly about the situation, said that without a new stadium the team would likely be forced to move or would be selected for contraction.

  The memories of this period still haunt Henry. “I lost $25 million over the first two years [of owning the Marlins],” he says. “And I knew I was going to lose—I was going to have to reduce payroll in 2002 just to keep my losses to $25 million [per year]. You have to have some idea about how you’re gonna eventually be able to break even. If there’s no hope at the end of the day, it just becomes ridiculous, and that was the point I reached in 2001.” He pauses. “You know, I really thought we were going to be successful. I was sure I would spend the rest of my life in Miami.”

  By the spring of 2001, even officials in Major League Baseball were urging Henry to explore other options rather than continuing to lose money in South Florida. Since buying the Marlins, Henry had, in many ways, been a model owner. He’d been active in the baseball community, he’d made efforts to connect with his team’s fans, and he’d reached out to other owners around the league. The game, Bud Selig kept telling Henry, needed to keep people like him involved. In May 2001, during a trip Henry made to New York City, Selig dispatched Paul Beeston and Bob DuPuy, two of the league’s top officials, to speak with Henry.

  DuPuy, Beeston, and Henry met on the deck of Henry’s yacht, which was docked in Manhattan’s Chelsea Piers. Baseball, DuPuy said, was looking seriously at the issue of contraction. In all likelihood, two teams would be dissolved following the 2001 season, and the Marlins, with their persistently poor attendance, low revenue, and lack of prospects for improvement, would be at the top of the list. “We cannot allow you to sit down there in the rain for years losing the kind of money you would have to with no assurances on the future of a team down there,” DuPuy said. Then DuPuy and Beeston began to talk about the future.

  “They took the position that I had done a good job [in Florida], so they came to see me about other potential teams,” Henry says. Beeston and DuPuy went over franchises that were for sale. How about the Red Sox? That sale was expected to conclude right after the season ended. No, said Henry: That was more money than he was looking to spend. Besides, he said, “I didn’t want to get into a very public bidding war that had already left the docks, so to speak.” Beeston and DuPuy then brought up The Walt Disney Company–owned Anaheim Angels, which were up for sale as well. That seemed more appealing, thought Henry. He’d owned a house in Orange County for years, and he thought his wife, Peggy, whom he’d met in Florida, would be amenable to living in Southern California.

  Still, Henry said that he’d prefer simply moving the Marlins. Unlike many owners, Henry essentially functioned as the team’s CEO, and was intimately connected with virtually every aspect of the organization. Decades after being too shy to play with his neighbors in his own yard, he’d become close to many of the Marlins p
layers. “He was always coming in to the locker room, talking to us,” says Mark Kotsay, the Oakland A’s center fielder who played for the Marlins from 1997 through 2000. “To me, he’s unparalleled. He treats everybody like his family. When I was in Florida, I got a chance to become his friend, and the stories he shared with me about overcoming adversity early in his ventures to be successful meant a lot to me.” Kotsay and Henry’s friendship was no secret in the Marlins organization; still, Henry gave his general manager permission to trade Kotsay to the San Diego Padres before the 2001 season. It was, Henry says, one of his hardest days as a baseball owner. “When I was traded, he personally called me,” Kotsay says. “It made me feel great, as a person and as a player…. Until you talk to him, it can seem like he’s very shy, but once you start to develop a relationship with him, you see what an amazing guy he is. He’s like a little kid. He loves the game. And he’s just as concerned with wins and losses as anybody, but he just wants you to go out there and do your best. There is one person that I would play for any time of the day and that’s Mr. Henry.”

  DuPuy told Henry that moving a team could potentially be accomplished through the mechanisms of contraction. At the time, Steve Schott and Ken Hoffman, who owned the Oakland A’s, were also looking to sell. DuPuy said he thought the owners of both the Angels and the A’s might be willing simply to have their teams contracted instead of dealing with a public, and potentially messy, sale. What was even more likely, DuPuy and Beeston explained, was that one of the teams—say, the Angels—would be contracted, along with the Marlins. Henry could then buy the A’s, but instead of staying in Oakland, he could move the team to Orange County, where the Angels had been based. Then, rather than moving the A’s infrastructure and players, he would import the Marlins roster. It would be, in essence, a brand-new team with the history of three former major league franchises: the Marlins’ players and personnel, the A’s name, and the Angels’ former territory. If that didn’t work, there was always the somewhat more remote possibility of simply moving the Marlins somewhere else, New Jersey, say, or Charlotte, North Carolina.*