For the Good of the Game

by Bud Selig

  I had a little office where I killed time when I wasn’t moving between the two rooms, looking for an inch of common ground. I knew it was there, but I sure wasn’t selling anyone in either of the groups. At one point George W. Bush crossed sides. He had been in the small-market caucus but someone persuaded him that he belonged in the other room. After all, he had a new stadium opening next season, one he had skillfully campaigned for against well-organized opposition. Eventually George realized he had no business with the big markets, but he stood alongside them through the meeting, which I hadn’t seen coming.

  The vitriol between the two groups was stunning.

  Harrington got really heated a number of times, in loud arguments with small-market owners. Steinbrenner said we were all turning into socialists. Beeston said we were asking for too much.

  These meetings went on into the night, with only breaks to stop by the buffet table. There were a lot of reporters there, and they were filing stories that were all over the place. Some of them were accurate, but some of them were way off with their facts. Luckily, we didn’t have news and texts coming into our phones in that era, so we were able to communicate verbally, sometimes even face-to-face. I can’t imagine how crazy it would be with updated technology.

  At one point the small- and medium-market teams started trying to use the only leverage they had. The National League’s television agreement was expiring and some owners threatened not to sign a new one, knowing that if they didn’t, they could prevent teams like the Dodgers, Mets, Cardinals, and Rockies from televising road games. That would hit them in the wallet, as they would make money only for televising home games.

  This wasn’t going to fly with me or anyone else, but it was a stick and they were swinging it, doing everything they could to try to get more cooperation from the more prosperous teams.

  There was some movement on the second day, Thursday, thanks largely to Jerry Reinsdorf. He came up with a plan where the two Chicago teams and the Braves would join the big-market teams in paying into a fund to be shared by the small-market teams. But even with that, we were barely over thirty-five million dollars, and that wasn’t acceptable to the fifteen true small- and medium-market teams, the ones like the Twins, Pirates, and Tigers, who were really hurting.

  As late afternoon turned into evening on Thursday, black vans from a car service started pulling up to a side door at the American Club and groups of owners began to leave. Some owners stayed for hours after the first ones headed to the airport, but there was no breakthrough to be found, only frustration and disappointment.

  I remember pulling Steinbrenner aside and telling him how costly it would be to the sport to not address our problems. “Keep this up, George, and you’re going to get hurt,” I said.

  We were in bad shape, as Dick Ebersol had told us, and we kept making it worse.

  On their way out to the vans, a few owners told their friends on the other side they were sorry for how they’d behaved. But a lot of them went away angry. It was painful to experience, especially knowing that the Players Association and others had been watching this meeting for signs of progress.

  I had some explaining to do, and I knew it.

  “When you’re changing established patterns of life, a certain amount of trauma and a certain amount of time are needed to effect those changes,” I told reporters.

  Those two days in Kohler exposed all the heartache and problems we had. It was not a terrific start for me in my position, and I was bristling when I got into a car with Randy Levine, one of Steinbrenner’s advisers, to drive back to Milwaukee.

  “This can’t go on,” I said. “It can’t go on. All the franchises are going to get hurt.”

  Kohler was a low point, make no mistake about it. We hit bottom there. I spent the next several years digging out from the bottom. Slowly but surely. One small step at a time.

  I was personally shaken by the level of ugliness that erupted among people who usually liked each other and treated each other as friends. We were trying to solve the problem and we went backward. The anger toward each other was brutal. Still, we were going to have to deal with this problem, as painful as it was. It wasn’t going to go away on its own. We had always been divided, but now we were more divided than ever. And I knew that nobody loved it more than Don Fehr and his people at the union. They knew that they could keep getting deals on their terms if we weren’t as unified as they were, and we never were.

  I knew it was going to take a while to put the pieces back together again on revenue sharing. We needed to do something that showed everybody, including us, that we could work together. If we couldn’t agree on change behind the scenes and to our bottom lines, perhaps as a starting point we could find changes that everyone could see—including the fans.

  One of the first things I had done as head of the Executive Council was to appoint a restructuring committee to explore basic changes in the game. We had gone to divisional play in 1969 but still had a system that rewarded only our very best teams for winning divisions. Our playoff structure was far smaller than the ones that were being used in the NFL and the NHL, and fans in too many cities were tuning out in August and September because a powerhouse team was running away with the division title.

  This was happening even though we were in one of the worst eras ever for the Yankees. Despite George’s spending on free agents, they went into decline after losing the 1981 World Series to the Dodgers and wouldn’t get back to the postseason until ’95.

  With Barry Bonds leading the Pirates and Kirby Puckett in Minneapolis, we were still in an era where the little guys had chances to win. After all, from ’83 through ’92 there were eleven National League teams and nine American League teams in the playoffs, but the disparity in payrolls was growing at a staggering rate. Because it was becoming hard for a lot of the smaller-market cities to compete for free agency, we needed to increase the opportunity to play meaningful games in September and had a shot to increase national television revenue if we added to the inventory of games in October.

  The restructuring committee suggested dividing teams into three divisions per league and letting the runner-up with the best record reach the postseason as a wild card. We’d double the number of teams in the postseason, from four to eight, and as a result add an additional best-three-of-five series before the championship series. The format was similar to the one in the NFL and, tradition aside, it was a no-brainer.

  We had gone from sixteen teams in 1961 to twenty-eight through all the rounds of expansion, so now you had twenty-four teams that missed the playoffs every season. Purists could argue that it showed the extreme value of the 162-game season—and they wouldn’t be wrong—but that was a joyless argument unless your team happened to come out on top.

  Given our troubles in Kohler, the timing couldn’t have been better for this discussion. I switched the focus off revenue sharing and onto this restructuring as quickly as I could, adding it as an agenda item for our September meetings, which were to be held in Boston. I needed for baseball to do something that brought the clubs together, sort of as a guidepost to what needed to be done in the future. We needed to give hope and faith to more teams, not just in February and March but in July and August. We were essentially handing September over to the NFL, and why do that? It’s not like Paul Tagliabue ever did anything for us.

  When word got out about the wild card, there was initially a lot of negative reaction in the media and from the fans who called talk radio. I know about talk radio because I’m guilty. I listen to it. I always have and probably always will. I get stations from Chicago and the national shows, too, not just Milwaukee. It’s a guilty pleasure, I guess, although in 1993 there was nothing really pleasurable about it for me.

  Bob Costas led the charge for the old school. I thought he was going to have me arrested. I knew I had taken about as unpopular a position as I could have, but there was no choice. Baseball was going to be hurt badly if it didn’t wake up and start moving forward.

&
nbsp; When we went to Boston for the meeting, I was sure the votes were there to pass the changes. But for the second time that year it turned out that I didn’t know the owners as well as I thought I knew them. The National League voted first and unanimously approved the concept, 14–0. Then we went to the American League, and while I was confident, I did not think we’d get another unanimous vote.

  I knew George W. Bush was against it. He is a genuine traditionalist, very conservative about matters he considered sacred in baseball, like only the very best teams advancing at the end of the 162-game season. But George had told me he’d give me his vote if we really needed it. I didn’t think we would, because even Steinbrenner was in our corner on this one. He was my biggest supporter, perhaps because the Yankees were so hungry to get back to the postseason.

  We took the vote and it didn’t pass. It was 8–6 in favor, which was three less than we needed to pass it. I was stunned. I was furious. I called a time-out. I walked to the back of the room and used some of the worst language I’ve ever used. I let ’em have it, telling them that if we couldn’t pass something as easy as this, we’d never get anywhere with the big issues. Never. And I wasn’t even sure I wanted to keep trying if this was what it was going to be like.

  “I’m not leaving here until you guys vote the right way,” I said. “It is so obvious what we should do.”

  We took the vote again and it passed, 13–1. Only George W. Bush voted no, and that was fine with me.

  While it received far less attention than the addition of the wild card, we dealt with one other order of business in Boston. We approved our new rights deal from ESPN, and it was one of those mileposts that told everyone we had hit bottom as a sport.

  The ESPN deal was $255 million over six years, down from a previous deal that paid us $403 million for four years. They were reducing the games they carried from 175 per year to about seventy-five, no doubt making room for more NBA and NHL games and more of the endless hype about the NFL.

  There was no getting around it—1993 was a horrible year, and the really hard work was still ahead of us.

  15

  YOU COULDN’T FIND two guys less alike on the outside than George Steinbrenner and me. But through the years we would have been an interesting study in business dynamics.

  George was gigantic, bombastic New York, in all its pushy glory, and I was proud little Milwaukee, always yearning for a chance to play with the big boys. He was the towering power of the biggest franchise in baseball, and I was the head of the smallest. We argued about everything. We didn’t agree on anything. Yet somehow we were the best of friends, from the start and pretty much always.

  I was still a young man, only thirty-eight, in my fourth year of ownership, when George M. Steinbrenner III came barreling into baseball.

  He had been a hurdler on the track team at Williams College, sports editor of the school paper, and piano player in the band. He got talked into going out for the football team in his senior year and wound up as a halfback. He went into the air force after college and then served as a graduate assistant coach for Woody Hayes at Ohio State in a season when the Buckeyes were undefeated national champions. He coached football for a while, at Northwestern and Purdue, but, like me, wound up in his family business.

  George built his great-grandfather’s shipping business into a giant, eventually buying American Shipbuilding Company. He never lost the passion he felt for sports, which is why he purchased the American Basketball League’s Cleveland Pipers in 1960—he hired John McClendon, the first African American coach in professional basketball—and the Yankees in 1973, with a group of minority partners that included Nelson Bunker Hunt and John DeLorean.

  John McMullen, who would later buy the Astros, was the partner who uttered a famous line, “There’s nothing in life quite so limited as being a limited partner of George Steinbrenner.” I’m sure he was right.

  I welcomed George into the game. He could talk to me, and George liked to talk. But I could talk to him, too, and sometimes he even listened. Through the years, George and I would bicker and we would battle, but always about the issues. He was extremely loyal in terms of his personal life and was a very good-natured friend.

  One Tuesday morning he called me at home before I headed to work. It’s one hour earlier in Milwaukee, so he was in the office, but I was still at home. We were talking, and I asked him to hold on because my wife, Sue, was asking me if I had remembered to take the trash out. The trash collectors came on Tuesdays.

  “Yes,” I told Sue, as George listened in.

  George howled at my compliance. Then he started calling me every Tuesday morning to ask if I had taken out the trash.

  George would come to Milwaukee a lot when the Yankees were playing at County Stadium, and he loved that my secretary Lori had worked for Vince Lombardi. George loved Lombardi and by extension adored Lori. She could give him a harder time than just about anybody.

  One time Sue and I were in New York, visiting George at Yankee Stadium, and as we walked in a woman was on her way out, sobbing. I asked George what was wrong.

  “Oh, that was my assistant,” he said. “I ordered a tuna sandwich and she brought me egg salad. I fired her!”

  Sue was astonished. She jumped into the middle of George’s business.

  “You did what?” she asked, her voice rising.

  “What, you think that’s wrong?”

  “George, that’s so wrong on so many levels,” Sue said. “Go fix that.”

  Sheepishly, George got up and went to stop the woman from cleaning out her desk. Don’t underestimate Sue.

  George’s first reaction wasn’t always the one that mattered the most. If you gave him a little time, he’d see things more clearly than he did in the moment. That was true about revenue sharing, and of course it was good for an owner to think about the game as a whole, not just his own franchise’s interest.

  I understood George’s opposition to revenue sharing at Kohler, but I knew the sport needed it. He did, too. That’s why when we took our next revenue sharing vote, at a meeting in Fort Lauderdale in January ’94, it passed 28–0.

  Revenue sharing was still an unpopular concept with many people, including George. But we were making our push for a salary cap with revenue sharing and eventually all the owners would see they would shoot themselves in the foot if they didn’t sign off on it. The total that would move between teams was estimated at fifty-eight million dollars, with no team paying more than five million and none receiving more than nine million—not as much as I wanted, but it was a start.

  What did George think? His immediate response was to stalk past reporters who were asking him why he’d gone along with it.

  It took a long time for the media to realize that George had turned over a new leaf. Later on that season, with the Yankees running away with the AL East behind Red Sox turncoat Wade Boggs, headed toward their first playoff appearance in thirteen years, it had become clear that the players might go on strike rather than agree to the salary cap and our other terms.

  But George Steinbrenner, bless him, had started thinking about the greater gain for our sport, not his immediate gratification.

  He made that clear when reporters cornered him at Yankee Stadium on August 12, the day that the union had set for its strike.

  George had made a trip into the clubhouse earlier that day, accompanied by Buck Showalter, his young manager. He asked the players not to take the dispute personally, to stay in shape in case there was a settlement, and to understand this was business.

  He didn’t lament the Yankees’ unfortunate situation talking to reporters. “I do not intend to show any split in this group,” George said. “Bud Selig is leading this ship, and I’m tired of the harpooning and hits he’s taking. My interests are being represented.”

  For once, George was prepared to make a huge sacrifice. I’m not sure if we could have held the owners together in 1990, when Fay Vincent ordered camps to open after the spring training lockout, but by th
e time we got deep into ’94 I knew that for once the owners were finally as united as the players.

  Unfortunately for Steinbrenner and everyone else, Don Fehr and the Players Association wouldn’t recognize this new solidarity between the owners until 1994 had become a blank space in the glorious history of the World Series. Chalk it up to the stubbornness on both sides—or the resolve among owners, if you want to put it in the best possible light—and the one-sided nature of baseball’s labor negotiations for almost thirty years.

  Yes, owners made a lot of mistakes, especially in the early years. We put the ball on the tee for Marvin Miller and he was happy to kick it through the goalposts for his team. But the Players Association had exploited our weaknesses in one labor deal after another and along the way became blind to the changing economic picture and the need for a partnership. We were still a long ways away from finding any common ground, but the time had come to make our case.

  We had voted to reopen contract negotiations with the union at the winter meetings at the Galt House, back in 1992. But all we were doing then was telling Fehr and Orza what they already knew, that we weren’t happy with the deal we’d had to take in ’90. It would be a long time before we had our act together well enough to put a formal offer on the table.

  That came in the middle of June ’94. We were asking for a salary cap, of course, and proposing an even split with the players. They would get 50 percent of the game’s revenues. The estimated total for salaries would be about a billion dollars, and that amount would grow as the game grew revenue. This was the NBA and NFL model, and it was accompanied by the revenue sharing agreement we’d approved in Fort Lauderdale.