by Bud Selig
I watched from George Steinbrenner’s box upstairs and got such chills that I had to hold on to something. It was overpowering.
I’ve watched too much baseball to believe in karma and intangibles, but there was no way the Yankees were not going to win that game 3. When Brosius got a hit to put the Yankees ahead, there was an unbelievable roar. It was the same thing when Arizona was batting in the ninth—a huge roar for every out Mariano Rivera produced. The great old ballpark just rocked and rocked.
The Yankees won all three games in New York, putting them within one victory of what would have been their fourth consecutive championship. But it wasn’t a fait accompli, not with the Diamondbacks’ duo of Johnson and Schilling set for the last two games.
Arizona pounded the Yankees in game 6, forcing a game 7. I’m biased, but I don’t think there’s anything better in sports than game 7 of the World Series. I was delighted that this great series was going the distance, but I couldn’t show it the next day, a Sunday. Sue and I had Steinbrenner over to our house for lunch.
He wasn’t happy. He let me have it for our guys getting the Yankees’ clubhouse ready for a possible celebration once they went out on the field to start the game. He thought we’d jinxed the Yankees. That’s George.
George had become a Tampa Bay Bucs fan living in Tampa. We watched the Bucs play the Packers while we had lunch. He was very quiet during that lunch, no doubt worrying about game 7.
It turned out he had something to worry about, all right. The Diamondbacks pitched both Schilling and Johnson in a game 7 that was worthy of a great World Series.
Rivera was a future Hall of Famer and arguably the greatest postseason relief pitcher there ever will be. When he retired at age forty-three, after the 2013 season, the quiet man from Panama had somehow pitched in ninety-six playoff games, including twenty-four in the World Series. He had piled up forty-two postseason saves, including eleven in the World Series.
But in game 7 he was handed a 2–1 lead in the eighth inning and it got away. The Diamondbacks scored twice in the ninth inning, when an exhausted Rivera faced six batters and retired only one of them, on a bunt.
It was a surprise ending and without question the greatest game ever played on November 4. It was a dramatic manifestation of how good baseball can be.
Had baseball solved all the world’s problems? Of course not.
But had baseball helped this great country begin to heal?
I think it did, and that makes me proud.
19
NOTHING I EVER did in baseball would have been a success if the labor negotiations in 2002 had gone sideways. Everything I had done led to this point in time, toward getting a peacefully negotiated—if also extremely tense and contentious—labor deal. It was my most crucial work as commissioner.
I don’t like to deal in hypotheticals, so don’t ask me what would have happened if we had failed. But I knew that failure wasn’t an option for me and the thirty clubs at that point in time. It just wasn’t. We had to get a deal that would help us in every area.
And as always, we knew we’d have to do it without the support of the media. The union had great relationships with the press, especially Murray Chass of the New York Times. He was very influential in those years and he was no friend of owners, for whatever reason.
I had a good relationship with him, but it didn’t matter. He would echo what the union said to him. He trusted them, he didn’t trust us.
He would say, “The union never lies to me; the owners always lie to me.” We talked a lot. We argued a lot. He had my number at home and he used it so much that Sue recognized his voice. He’d say, “Hello, Sue,” and she’d say, “Hi, Murray.”
One day I asked him a question.
“Murray, when did I ever lie to you? I want you to tell me.”
Of course, he couldn’t.
“Well, I don’t mean you,” he said. “I mean the owners.”
I thought that was so funny. When he wanted to he’d see me as the commissioner. Other times I was just the guy from Milwaukee who owned the Brewers. Whatever fit the narrative.
Whenever we talked about being in tough financial shape, Don Fehr would say there’s nothing older than owners telling you they’re losing money. Except we were losing money. We were losing a lot of money, and we were piling up huge debts with the banks. Huge.
I remember asking Don how he’d like to run the Brewers franchise and compete with the Yankees. He didn’t have an answer, but he’d say disparity wasn’t a problem. The union didn’t want us to do anything that would affect the teams that were spending the most on players. He was all in favor of disparity if the Yankees and Red Sox were winning with huge payrolls. He would tell you the industry was just fine as it was, but it was anything but fine.
In the period since our labor agreement in 1996 and these negotiations, we were losing at least $175 million a year and we were projecting to lose $500 million in 2002 because player payrolls were taking up nearly two-thirds of our total revenue.
Pete Rozelle had been so good at telling the NFL’s story. We needed to get aggressive about telling our story. I got some of our people on board to go around and talk to editorial boards—Larry Lucchino, Sandy Alderson, Andy MacPhail, some others. I wanted some from big markets and some from small markets. We got some favorable editorials as a result, and more important than that, we showed that we weren’t trying to hide anything.
We acknowledged that we had made mistake after mistake to get in this position, all the way back to Curt Flood and the reserve clause. We said we all knew how badly our labor history had hurt us and that all we wanted was a chance to make a mutually beneficial deal with the union. But we needed change and we needed it soon.
I borrowed another idea from Rozelle. He had always done a big interview with the press the week of the Super Bowl. It began to get bigger and bigger coverage and was very popular with the writers. I talked to my friends with the baseball writers association about finding a time to do something similar, and we agreed on the day before the All-Star Game.
That’s when the writers held one of their annual meetings, and I began attending and doing a wide-open interview, every year. I loved the newspaper writers. I always had, starting with the years I’d walk into the County Stadium press box to give Bud Lea grief about the Packers. I think it was a good idea to be open to them in a setting like their All-Star Game meeting, and I do think it was productive.
I’d read Sports Illustrated through the years, of course, and got a kick out of when the magazine chose to write about me. Ron Fimrite had come to Milwaukee in 1979 for a story about George Bamberger, and the magazine put it on the cover. It was a thrill to read that story.
But in 2002, I was the focus of a long story in the magazine. I spent a lot of time with Frank Deford, one of my absolute favorite writers. When the story came out, I was almost afraid to read it. Just the headline scared me: SUICIDE SQUEEZE—BUD SELIG HAS PUT HIS LEGACY ON THE LINE BY TIGHTENING THE SCREWS ON THE PLAYERS UNION. IF THERE’S A STRIKE THIS SEASON, HE’LL BE THE ONE TO TAKE THE FALL.
Well, I knew Frank was right. That was exactly the pressure I was feeling. I had spent the last decade bringing the owners together. I had studied past negotiations and tried to help the owners understand why we hadn’t been successful with the union. I had worked with Rob Manfred, Frank Coonelly (initially outside counsel from Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, we hired him full-time in 1998 to assist Manfred; he would leave to become president of the Pirates), and other lawyers to try to find ways to build off the deal we had wound up with in 1996, after the horrible strike that wiped out the World Series.
Whether the press was on our side or not, we needed economic relief, we needed to address the growing disparity between clubs that was leading to problems with competitive balance, and we absolutely had to have a testing program for performance-enhancing drugs. We were the only major sport that couldn’t test our players, and the integrity of our competition—and our records—was an
open question.
These were crucial times for baseball, and while I rarely stepped back to look at my own situation, they were vital for me, too. Still, there was one thing I knew would not be in a new deal—a salary cap. I’d heard too many diatribes about the free market and seen how the union wanted to keep the teams with the most money—the Yankees, mainly—free to sign players for whatever amount they wanted, the rest of the teams be damned. I knew that we were never going to get a salary cap and had been explaining that to owners for years.
We had to solve our problems, but we had to be ingenious as hell in the way we did it.
One small step toward solving our problems came, once again, by pulling the levers of change that we had at our disposal that did not require help from the Players Association. A couple of years earlier, we did one such thing that would put baseball at the forefront of innovation and ahead of all the other sports—including, for once, the NFL. We tapped the power of the Internet in a major way, building a new division within MLB called Baseball Advanced Media, or BAM.
There’s an obvious irony here. I’m not exactly a technological innovator myself. The truth is I still don’t do anything online—not e-mails, not banking, not even setting up a DVR to record the Brewers or the Packers. I just never bothered to have a hands-on relationship with the digital world, if that’s the right way to describe it. Now, my personal assistants and the staff around me? They’re very technologically savvy. But I never have been, and somehow I’ve survived.
Maybe BAM was a makeup call for us, after we had the opportunity to buy controlling interest in ESPN in the early eighties and Bowie Kuhn passed. It was one of the best ideas we’ve had.
It was the result of a dinner in New York between Jerry Reinsdorf, Paul Beeston, and Bob DuPuy.
Al Gore had been in the news talking about the Internet as the information superhighway. Not many people knew what he was really talking about, including Reinsdorf, Beeston, and DuPuy, but they came to the conclusion that it had the potential to be something really big.
After that dinner, those guys came to me. They said we had to capture this.
They said that we could create a bigger pie by having the league run all the teams’ Web sites instead of every team having its own. They also had the idea that however big we could grow the pie, we could cut it up equally among the teams, so it would be a form of revenue sharing. It was a brilliant concept, especially from a bunch of men who didn’t understand technology.
I jumped on it, creating a committee to explore how to start it, how to staff it, and how to draw up the contractual language we needed to make it work.
Arizona’s Jerry Colangelo was in that group. He and DuPuy were the guys who recommended Bob Bowman to run it for us. We had headhunters bring us some candidates with the skills to make it successful, and DuPuy was really the one who believed in Bowman. That would prove to be another great choice.
Teams each agreed to contribute one million dollars a year for four years—$120 million total—for the start-up costs. Almost everybody was enthusiastic from the start, but it took some work to get Steinbrenner and the Yankees to sign off on it.
Sue and I went to dinner with George the night before we were going to take a vote. I was studying the menu when Sue got right to business.
“So, George, how are you going to vote tomorrow?” she asked, smiling because she knew the answer was going to be good. I braced myself.
“You know, these damned socialists, they would have done well under Stalin!” George bellowed. “These little guys. . . . It’s communism! Besides, Buddy, you got all those nitwits in line; what do you need me for?”
I explained to him I wouldn’t do the deal if it was 29–1. I’d kill it until we could get a unanimous vote. The last thing I wanted was for Steinbrenner to sue baseball. He was always threatening to turn Roy Cohn loose on us, even after Cohn passed away.
George continued to mumble and grumble. “You can’t tell me Kansas City’s Internet site is as valuable as the New York Yankees’,” he said.
I knew what John Fetzer would tell him, so I reminded him. “George, you’ve been in the game a long time,” I told him. “You know that what’s good for baseball will be good for the New York Yankees.”
I really didn’t know if I had George’s vote the next day, when Tom Ostertag, one of our longtime attorneys, began calling out each club’s name. We had nothing but yes votes when we got to the Yankees.
They were normally called last because we went alphabetically, but I told Tom to move the Yankees into the middle of the vote this time because I couldn’t take the suspense.
So Tom surprised everyone when he called for the Yankees vote after somebody like the Marlins or the Mariners. There was silence.
He repeated, “New. York. Yankees!”
More silence.
Then we heard this utterance, a rumbling sound, from Steinbrenner’s direction. It started as a growl and it turned into an agonized concession for the good of the game. “I don’t know why,” George started, then changed directions. “Aw, the hell with it, I’ll vote yes.”
Everyone clapped. We had our 30–0 vote, and it was one of the best ones we ever took.
When I met the media that day, I said I thought this would be as important in baseball history, and sports history, as the day in 1961 when a thirty-three-year-old commissioner got the NFL to share national television revenue. But it was much bigger for us than any of us knew it would be.
Bowman grew BAM beyond our wildest imaginations. We started with Web sites, but we wound up as pioneers of streaming sports through the Internet.
Bowman found innovative tech guys who kept us at the leading edge in being able to provide live content on first computers and then tablets and phones. It made it so much easier for our fans to watch our teams play.
Once it got really established, we were so good at what we did that other people would pay us to provide the technology. HBO became one of our clients in the second year of their show Game of Thrones. It was so popular, HBO couldn’t keep up with the demand. Its computer servers crashed because so many people were trying to access it at the same time.
Bowman’s people thought they could handle it, and it turned out they could. So HBO became a huge client, and so did ESPN and many, many others. We wound up creating a new division of the company called BAM Tech. When I was no longer the commissioner, MLB would sell controlling interest in it to Disney for about $2.6 billion.
Pretty good return for an investment of $4 million per team, if you ask me.
Of course, we wouldn’t reap the profit on that investment for years to come, but it demonstrated that we were willing to innovate with new ideas to try to solve problems ourselves.
Another step the owners took heading into the 2002 negotiations that would prove crucial down the line: the clubs had given me powers that no other commissioner had ever had, strengthening me for the battle ahead.
In a quarterly meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Phoenix in January 2000, the owners approved a measure that gave me discretion to use the best interests power to address problems caused by economic disparity and competitive imbalance. I could reroute money from the central fund (television money, mostly) headed to the Yankees or Red Sox—to name two teams—and send it to the lowest-revenue teams if I deemed a situation dire enough.
You wouldn’t be wrong if you said George Steinbrenner had problems with this, but George knew what we were doing and, believe it or not, had started to understand that he’d have problems if the overall picture of the sport didn’t improve.
I was also given authority to fine a team as much as two million dollars and an executive five hundred thousand dollars if they weren’t acting in the best interests of baseball. This was a bigger hammer than any commissioner had ever had in dealing with clubs, but I didn’t plan on swinging it. I had built strong relationships so I could get the results I needed, with everyone on the same page.
This added authority strengthened
the hand I had to play with the owners during the negotiations in 2002, even if I never ended up having to use it. The challenge of these negotiations was to find a variety of ways to get the changes we needed without forcing a salary cap or another heavy-handed mechanism on the union. We had to find mutually acceptable ways to attack our issues, and there was little common ground in the history of baseball labor relations. We had to find ways to create some out of the animosity and the chaos of the past.
I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. That’s why we started talks privately long before anybody knew we were doing so.
The 1996 agreement ran through the 2001 season, seemingly setting up talks during the season in ’01. There was no doubt this was going to come down to me and my guys—Rob Manfred, Frank Coonelly, Paul Beeston, Bob DuPuy—negotiating with Donald Fehr, Gene Orza, Michael Weiner, and Steve Fehr, Donald’s younger brother who was considered a calm negotiator and steadying influence.
Early in 2000, I assigned Beeston and Manfred to begin having preliminary talks with the union about the collective bargaining agreement. We didn’t announce what we were doing and neither side leaked the meetings to the press. That was a great sign in and of itself. The public nature of our talks had never been good for the sport, with the union essentially authoring the narrative. I was thrilled that Paul and Rob were establishing a strong dialogue with the union out of sight of reporters. The talks quietly ran for more than a year, with Beeston building his relationship with the Fehr brothers and Orza and Manfred gaining more and more respect for Weiner.
We were using the luxury tax system that was included in the ’96 deal—known as the competitive balance tax—as a starting point for these talks. But even then, even without mentioning the dreaded words salary cap, we were getting the familiar pushback from the union.