Juicing the Game

by Howard Bryant

  At times, Alderson had little tolerance for the press. Reporters covering Sandy Alderson knew to be prepared, for his sarcasm and his lack of regard for conversation he considered unintelligent could be withering. He could also be completely engaging and was always insightful. People who enjoyed the company of creative, decisive thinkers were drawn to him.

  His temper, usually contained by a thin layer of sarcasm, was legendary when it burst. Once, during his final season in Oakland with the A’s, in the midst of a streak of six consecutive losing seasons, Alderson exploded. The A’s would lose ninety-seven games in 1997 and, as prominently as the score (most times a losing one), the A’s minuscule attendance would be displayed in the newspaper. Alderson had had enough. The A’s were for sale at the time and tensions were high. He was coming to the end of nearly two decades of service with the A’s, and the next mention of the A’s inability to draw would be the last. One day in the A’s clubhouse before a game, Alderson absolutely crushed David Bush, a longtime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, with a tirade witnessed by the A’s coaches, staff, and a dozen players and reporters. It was an embarrassing, savage moment. Bush hadn’t written anything that hadn’t been discussed a thousand times over the course of a lost season. Steve Kettmann, not Bush, was the Chronicle’s main beat writer at the time, but it was Bush whom Alderson chose to make an example of. Dave Bush was an easygoing guy, a great friend of the A’s traveling secretary, Mickey Morabito. It was, as was noted at the time, the equivalent of dressing down Bambi. In the macho world of a professional sports clubhouse, an attack demanded a response. The good-natured Bush did nothing, which likely reduced his standing in the room. Alderson had specifically chosen to publicly humiliate the one reporter who would not challenge him. Alderson only vaguely remembered the confrontation, but recalled having grown tired of newspaper story lines that he did not think were legitimate. To Ray Ratto, at the time a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, it was Alderson being a bully. “It was Sandy’s Marine moment,” Ratto recalled. “He saw the weak link in the chain and he attacked.”

  Alderson seethed at his cross-bay rivals, the San Francisco Giants. Oakland, lacking the glamour and cachet of San Francisco, tended to suffer an acute sibling inferiority complex that became part of the A’s collective personality. Part of the reason was what Alderson saw as the Giants’ empty arrogance. The Giants might have arrived in the Bay Area ten years before the A’s, but Oakland was the far more successful franchise. The Giants had never won a World Series in San Francisco, having made the Series only three times since coming west from New York. The A’s, however, won three straight titles from 1972 to 1974 and another in 1989, a four-game destruction of the Giants that was obscured by the devastating Loma Prieta earthquake.

  Yet despite the A’s on-field success, it was the Giants who seemed to constantly attempt to thwart and overshadow Oakland. In 1998, when the A’s sought to move to San Jose, a potentially more lucrative site some forty-five miles south of San Francisco and Oakland, the Giants complained to Bud Selig. They claimed that San Jose was part of their territory, even though they were in the process of building an expensive new stadium in downtown San Francisco, a move that would push them farther away from San Jose (and closer to Oakland, which clearly seemed to have no rights in the matter) than their previous home in Candlestick Park.

  Alderson believed, and not incorrectly, that the Bay Area press favored the Giants. This was especially true of the Chronicle, the largest paper in Northern California. He was always aware of how the two teams were positioned daily, whose successes and failures were portrayed more prominently. Even when the Giants were not involved, Alderson was convinced, also not incorrectly, that A’s losses were played more powerfully than their victories. At times of particular pique, Alderson actually measured the column inches devoted to each team to prove his point, and would be on the phone to the sports editors of the Chronicle and Examiner to complain.

  What Sandy Alderson truly understood, some baseball officials believed, better than any other executive of his generation, was power. Frank Blackman, who covered Oakland during the A’s glory years (and a fair number of inglorious ones, too) for the Examiner, remembered what he called Alderson’s infuriating practice of “managing the news.” Traditionally, if a reporter had an exclusive story and needed to call the club for comment, the general manager would respect the exclusive. Those were the rules. The GM didn’t have to confirm the scoop, but he was not supposed to impede the story. Alderson did the opposite. Often, when presented with exclusive information, Alderson would make a press announcement. From the club’s perspective, it was a brilliant strategy. The team appeared to be in control of the information surrounding it, and Alderson had effectively chopped two or more days off the news cycle of a given item, as after an exclusive, the competing papers were usually forced to follow the story. There was a psychological effect as well, for nothing poured cold water on a hot story like a press release from the team. To the writers covering the A’s, it was more than an infuriating practice. It was a code-breaker. It was a sign that the usual relationship between writer and team did not exist in Alderson’s world. That meant he could not be trusted. “It’s because he had an unhealthy disrespect for beat writers, I think. He could like them on an individual basis, but he - didn’t like their jobs,” Ray Ratto thought. “For whatever reason, he never wanted anyone to get too far in front on any story. This was his way of putting a stop to that. He didn’t like surprises. Part of it was he didn’t want to be a source for anything, and he cheerfully would rat everybody out when they had a scoop, or even a perceived one. He figured that the only way to control a story was to make sure nobody had it exclusively.”

  Alderson was tough. During spring training, he played pickup basketball with the writers and clubhouse kids for Oakland, Anaheim, Milwaukee, and the Giants, the other clubs that trained in close proximity to the A’s in Phoenix, gaining a reputation for being a hard-nosed re-bounder and defender. During one particularly heated game in 1995, Mike DiGiovanna, the Angels writer for the Los Angeles Times, was being guarded aggressively by Alderson. It was DiGiovanna’s first year covering baseball. He had not yet introduced himself to Alderson, and he knew nothing of Alderson’s military background, or his temperament. Near the end of a closely contested game, there was a stoppage in play, as Pedro Gomez, a reporter for the Sacramento Bee, tied his shoe. Alderson apparently did not notice the game had been halted and continued to aggressively deny DiGiovanna position, at which DiGiovanna said to Alderson, “At ease, soldier.”

  It was the worst thing he could have said. For the rest of the night, Alderson brutalized DiGiovanna on the court, setting one exceptionally hard pick that sent DiGiovanna to the floor.

  “I had no idea he was in Vietnam or any of the military stuff,” DiGiovanna recalled. “It was just me being goofy, trying to lighten the mood. I mean, he was guarding me like it was the NCAA Tournament. But his point was clear. No matter what, Sandy Alderson never lets up. I apologized, but even years later whenever I called him for something, he would always be very cool with me. It wasn’t the best way to start a career.”

  After Alderson moved to the commissioner’s office, Billy Beane would sit in the A’s clubhouse, eating a sandwich and laughing with the players. It was a comfort Alderson would never have, but there was a reason: Sandy Alderson never played major league baseball. Billy Beane did. Alderson understood the greatest dividing line in baseball was between those who had, in the words of his team’s former manager Tony LaRussa, “worn the uniform” and those who had not.

  What baseball people did not quite realize, however, was that it worked both ways. Alderson knew that the players as well as the manager, who in most cases was a former player, had never been in the executive environs in which he had made his living. They did not have the business and negotiating background. They had never had to run a franchise and all of its facets. Thus Alderson began a reshaping of the executive wing of baseball�
�s front office to better exploit the assets of bright nonbaseball minds. In a sense, it was the type of power play that balanced the scales. Alderson consolidated the power of baseball’s front office, creating a solid hierarchy within a baseball club that began with the people who signed the players and the checks, not the ones who wrote out the lineup card. Part of the reason was the enormous, multimillion-dollar salaries now being paid out to players, but the point was nonetheless the same: If increased offense was the signature of baseball on the field during the decade, then the transformation of the front office from a secondary element of the baseball world to a primary one was the greatest single change off the field. Whereas the field manager had been the face of team management for a century, the general manager would take over that role in the new millennium. Billy Beane, Alderson’s disciple, became the central figure of the Oakland A’s, above his managers, and often even above his players. It was Sandy Alderson who engineered that change. “Sandy pioneered so much about the game. He was never afraid to think outside the box,” recalled J. P. Ricciardi, who worked in the A’s player development system before becoming general manager in Toronto in 2002. “This was a nonbaseball guy put into a baseball situation and used his intelligence and common sense to ask why. He questioned baseball in a lot of areas. We think that just because we signed a pro contract or played in the major leagues that we had all the answers, and we didn’t.”

  UPON JOINING baseball’s leadership, Alderson’s first big project was to reform the strike zone. That meant taking on baseball’s umpires. It had been perceived that one of the main reasons Bud Selig had tapped Alderson to join him in the first place was Alderson’s tenacity and toughness, two traits that could be of special use when it came time to take on the umpires and the combative Richie Phillips, under whose leadership they had refused to properly enforce the strike zone. A nuclear showdown was inevitable.

  Phillips had been head of the Major League Umpires Association since 1978, and had become the symbol, if not the reason, for the umpires’ inflexibility. Phillips was known as a tough man, a Philadelphia lawyer who had won significant gains for the umpires over his twenty years, especially in the area of benefits, but with those gains came arrogance. Left to themselves for the better part of thirty years, the umpires had come to believe they were omnipotent. The flashpoint moment came during the 1997 Championship Series between Atlanta and Florida. Home plate umpire Eric Gregg created a furor on national television by calling pitches thrown by Florida’s Livan Hernandez strikes that television replays showed were laughably (except to the Braves) out of the strike zone. As much as it appeared that Gregg had committed the most egregious of umpiring sins by getting caught up in the game, he became the spark.

  In 1999, Alderson’s first year in the commissioner’s office, Phillips and Alderson were negotiating a new collective-bargaining agreement. There was particular hostility in the air. Phillips and the umpires sensed a newfound aggression on the part of baseball, in no small part due to the presence of Alderson. Phillips recognized that Alderson had been brought in specifically to take him down. For his part, Alderson was not shy about it, telling Phillips that the game expected a higher degree of accountability and efficiency from the umpires. Alderson was especially motivated by a secret survey conducted by baseball of players, coaches, and managers in which they rated each umpire. The results were brutal in their honesty, revealing in detail what baseball people had long suspected: The umpires were no longer the game’s invisible, impartial arbiters, but a force to be factored into each game plan, no different from the opposition’s cleanup hitter or left-handed relief specialists. They had, in short, become an intrusion. “I got worried when I found out that players were more concerned with who was umpiring the next day than they were about who was pitching,” Alderson recalled.

  Sandy Alderson’s going after the umpires in his typically tenacious style did something that seemed practically impossible: It brought the owners and players together. Finally, baseball had someone who could go nose-to-nose with Richie Phillips. The owners were emboldened. The Cubs’ Andy MacPhail was elated. “When I knew Sandy was doing the strike zone, I felt we had a chance,” he said. Bob Welch, who won twenty-seven games for Alderson’s world champion A’s club in 1989, gave his old boss his blessing. “It got to the point where the strike zone was the size of a gnat’s behind,” said Welch, “and Sandy is doing something about it.”

  When Phillips heard that Alderson wanted to implement a grading mechanism for his umpires, tension increased. Phillips, however, had his own problems. The Umpires Association was splintering, both under the weight of change and because of serious rifts within the union. In February 1999, Phillips was the subject of an unsuccessful coup. Splits formed along league lines. Two prominent AL umpires, Joe Brinkman and John Hirschbeck, openly questioned the direction of the MLUA. On June 30, still at an impasse with baseball, the umpires agreed to authorize a strike vote, an option they were forbidden from pursuing. From there, a group of union dissenters, mostly from the American League, led by Brinkman and Hirschbeck, rose in strength, weakening the union’s collective power and Phillips’s base especially. On July 14, the umpires were prepared to vote on a strike.

  What Phillips had kept secret from his membership for months was that he had planned a bold strategy. During the July 14 meeting, in the midst of what he hoped would be an energized, united atmosphere, Phillips dropped an atomic bomb: He told his membership they would all resign from the MLUA, en masse, on September 2. Without umpires, baseball would be brought to its knees, Phillips told a skeptical and not particularly pleased audience. What happened next stunned the umpires. Phillips and his deputy, umpire Jerry Crawford, passed resignation letters around the room. There was talk that Phillips had been working to unionize the minor league umpires as well, with the intention of leaving baseball with no option but to negotiate with the resigned umpires. After the umpires walked from the MLUA, Phillips told his union, they would immediately form a new, independent company that would offer its services to the newly umpireless Major League Baseball. In essence, Phillips planned for the umpires to free themselves from baseball’s umbrella control and work as an outsourced umpiring association. On its face, the plan made a modicum of sense. If baseball’s umpires walked with a month left in the season and the playoffs looming just weeks away, baseball would be forced to negotiate with increased flexibility. The MLUA would not have violated its agreement by striking, yet by mass resignation would have accomplished the same goal. Then, baseball, and Phillips’s new shell company, Umpires, Inc., could negotiate new, more favorable terms.

  Yet Phillips’s plan was totally bizarre, fraught with risk, and, many baseball people believed, symbolic of the umpires’ institutional arrogance. At his home in Manhattan, Marvin Miller followed the story with horror. Phillips’s power play, he knew, played directly into baseball’s hands and he couldn’t believe it. “The union has literally handed the leagues the perfect tool to get rid of some umpires, namely, the umpires’ resignations,” he said. At the baseball offices on Park Avenue, Sandy Alderson couldn’t believe it, either. What the deeply self-centered Phillips did not realize was that Miller was right. Baseball now had the golden opportunity to get rid of whatever deadwood umpires it wanted. It had the results of the secret survey and knew just which umpires were considered incompetent by the people who played, coached, and managed the game. For Sandy Alderson, the best part was that because the umpires had quit, he didn’t even have to go through the ugly and public process of firing them. The umpires, considered to a large degree to be the problem in the first place, had now fatally isolated themselves. Upon hearing of the Phillips strategy, Alderson offered the most memorable line of his career. “It is either a threat to be ignored,” he said, “or an offer to be accepted.”

  Alderson pounced, accepting the resignations of the fifty-seven of baseball’s sixty-six umpires who turned them in. Chaos ensued as the umpires’ union collapsed around Phillips. The umpi
res, now unprotected by their contracts because they had quit their jobs, scrambled. Seizing the chance to clean out the umpiring ranks, Alderson was not magnanimous, but instead tightened the screws. Ten days later, he announced the hiring of twenty-five minor league umpires effective September 2, the day the umpires had agreed to quit. By July 27, with the insanity of the strategy clear and Phillips having lost both the fight and his membership, he urged all the umpires to rescind their resignations, but it was too late. Alderson, delivering the finishing blow, declared that baseball only had a limited number of umpiring openings left. Twenty-two umpires, including Eric Gregg, lost their jobs under Phillips’s strategy.

  The months that followed represented nothing less than a total triumph for Sandy Alderson. If the Bay Area had first witnessed his strength and acumen, his ability to clean up the game’s umpiring problem had introduced him as a major force in the game. Business Week referred to him as “baseball’s tough guy to watch.” The MLUA decertified, ousting Richie Phillips, while the dissenters who led his ouster formed a new union, the World Umpires Association. John Hirschbeck, a Phillips nemesis who was one of the nine umpires who did not issue his resignation, was named president of the new union. There would be no litigation against baseball over the disaster. Alderson had toppled a monolith.