GEORGE STEINBRENNER IS in his 14th-floor suite at the Regency, the Manhattan luxury hotel on 61st and Park, where he’s lived for the past 25 years when he’s not in Tampa. He’s sitting at a small table, his diamond-studded 1978 World Series ring flashing on his right hand, a lunch of club sandwiches and skim milk between him and a New York Times business writer. It’s October 24, 1992, two years and 86 days since Fay Vincent banned him from running the New York Yankees.
Steinbrenner is pleased the Times sent over a business writer instead of a sportswriter. It’s a sign of respect for his business skills—respect he feels Vincent never showed him. Not even this past July, when Vincent told George he could return to baseball but made him wait until March 1, 1993.
But now Vincent’s gone.
“I’ve never accepted March 1 as the date,” he tells Times writer Douglas Martin. “Fay made a unilateral decision. Bud knows that.”
“When will you ask Selig to change the date?” Martin says.
“Oh, I haven’t wanted to bother him,” Steinbrenner answers. “He’s my friend, and I respect the pressures he’s under. But I will. I think I could be a help with the labor negotiations.”
Especially since the other owners are going after his money. Again. No, George is not going to talk about that with Martin. Steinbrenner hasn’t forgotten that Orioles President Larry Lucchino led the revenue sharing charge to grab the Yankees’ cable money the minute George was suspended. Nor will he forget that plenty of owners were thrilled when Fay banned him for paying two-bit gambler Howie Spira to get damaging information about his star Dave Winfield.
Fucking hypocrites. The Executive Council knew all about Spira for years and never said a word. And it’s not like Steinbrenner was the first owner who paid to get leverage against one of his players. The players union’s first leader, Marvin Miller, made that clear when he defended George on the editorial pages of the New York Times. Miller wrote about the Yankees’ threats to tell Mickey Mantle’s wife about the other women in Mickey’s life if the star didn’t agree to a pay cut.
Of course, this wasn’t the first time George was kicked out of baseball. Bowie Kuhn banned him in 1974, when Steinbrenner was caught making illegal campaign contributions and obstructing justice in the Watergate mess. The government fined him $35,000, took away his right to vote—he was a convicted felon—and Bowie sentenced him to 15 months. Ronald Reagan was kind enough to pardon George as he was leaving office, a favor for his friend and fellow former Hollywood actor, Angels owner Gene Autry.
George takes a sip of his skim milk and listens to Martin’s questions. Why did you pump cash into your troubled shipbuilding business this summer instead of declaring bankruptcy? “Bankruptcy signifies failure,” he says.
People say you used Yankees money. “Absolutely not!”
Will you be voting for President Bush next month? “I haven’t decided yet.”
What about hosting Saturday Night Live last week? “Loved it,” says George, remembering when he walked into rehearsal and everyone ignored him. SNL’s executive producer Lorne Michaels put his staff up to that, eager to see how Steinbrenner would react. George burst out laughing as soon as he caught on.
Steinbrenner shifts the conversation to his hobbies—playing piano, watching wrestling, driving harness horses. “Driving that thing was the scariest feeling I’ve ever had,” he says. Martin pokes at his sandwich, then asks about the story floating around last March, the one about Steinbrenner selling the Yankees to Paramount Communications.
It was Paramount that gave him the $486 million, 12-year deal for the Yankees’ TV rights in 1988, the record-breaking contract that showed baseball what local broadcast rights would be worth in the new world of cable television. “I listened to them,” he says about Paramount, “but the deal was aborted.”
Martin brings up life in exile again. Vincent hadn’t allowed Steinbrenner to set foot inside Yankee Stadium—or any other stadium in baseball—though the Boss was permitted to attend the team’s quarterly meetings. Steinbrenner insists he had to learn about player trades in the newspapers. And he still can’t believe his employees were forced to sign pledges saying they did not speak with him and submit the documents to Vincent every six months.
It was so bad, he says, that he couldn’t even talk about the team to his son-in-law Joe Molloy—the last of his three replacements—at the dinner table last Christmas.
“We sat like two mummies,” he says, waving his arms.
Steinbrenner smiles to himself. Of course any decision of consequence flowed through him—George wasn’t about to let general manager Gene “Stick” Michael sign free agents or make trades without his approval. And he kept a pretty tight lid on spending during his banishment—he’s still fuming about his shouting match with Michael over the $1.5 million signing bonus they gave No. 1 pick Brien Taylor in the summer of ’91, then the highest in baseball history. Stick stood his ground, yelling that Steinbrenner drove up the price by talking about the deal to the media.
Steinbrenner put his foot down this past June, paying only half as much for the high school shortstop they drafted, a kid named Derek Jeter. Steinbrenner is still mad as hell at Michael, but he respects his GM for standing up to him. Not many in his organization have the balls to do that.
Certainly not Hank, who was Steinbrenner’s first choice to run the team when he was banished. But when Vincent made a fuss about handing off to a family member, George’s older son took the opening to cut and run instead of insisting the job should be his. Typical Hank. If he thinks I’m tough, he should have lived with my father. George is 62, and still remembers being unable to please Henry Steinbrenner, a man who struck fear in even the toughest hands in their shipyard.
Steinbrenner went through two Yankees minority partners before installing Molloy, a former schoolteacher who married his younger daughter, Jessica, in 1987. Joe’s done a good job, and George plans to keep him involved—as involved as anyone is when George is running the show. He also thinks highly of his other son-in-law, Steve Swindal—who’s married to Jennifer Steinbrenner—but Swindal is busy running the family’s tugboat company in Tampa.
The man Steinbrenner is really grooming is his younger son, Hal, who just graduated from Williams College—George’s alma mater—last spring. “He’s going to run the Yankees one day,” he told the team’s chief operating officer David Sussman at last spring’s quarterly meeting. “Teach him everything you know.”
Steinbrenner and Martin continue talking sports and business over lunch until it’s just about time to end the interview. Just one more thing, Martin says. “Will we see a new Boss?”
Steinbrenner leans back in his chair. He is not a stupid man. He still remembers how the fans in Yankee Stadium cheered the night his suspension was announced. He knows he has to tone down the act, if not what he really does behind the scenes. And he still has to persuade Selig to move up the date of his return.
But he’s a winner, damn it, and the free agent market is loaded. Barry Bonds. David Cone. Greg Maddux. Jimmy Key. He’s going after every one of them. This, however, is not the time to lay out his plans.
“I’m not sure yet what my role will be,” says Steinbrenner, who talks instead about the younger men in his family. “I’m very blessed at having four good men to step forward.
“And at least now I will have something to say about how they spend my money.”
The Boca Raton Resort and Club sits on a 324-acre stretch along one of Florida’s most exclusive coastlines, with a private beach, a championship golf course, tennis courts, and six swimming pools, three of which sit along the beachfront. The lobbies have soaring archways, rows of palms trees, and grand, sweeping stairways that lead guests to world-class restaurants and opulent rooms with ocean views.
It’s December 1, 1992, and it’s here that Don Fehr will spend the next four days mapping out battle plans for the war he has been fighting with baseball’s owners since 1985. This is the union’s annual Executive Board meeting, and 47 players—including rising stars like Tom Glavine and Larry Walker and veterans like Tim Raines and Scott Sanderson—sit at tables arranged as a horseshoe, ready to hear Fehr’s take on the changes rippling through their game.
“Thank you all for coming,” says Fehr, dressed in his usual button-down shirt, jeans, and sneakers. “Before I start, I want to remind everyone here that this is your meeting. The decisions made here are yours, not the staff’s.”
The owners like to paint Fehr as a pied piper, leading the game’s players over the cliff to the ruination of baseball. But the players here think otherwise. Fehr lays out their options, gives his opinion, and they make the decisions. As always, Fehr has good news and bad news for them. The good news: the amount of money pouring into the game has never been greater. A decade ago, baseball was a $300 million business. This season it will bring in $1.6 billion. And the projection for next season is $1.75 billion.
Attendance, at record levels the last several years, dipped slightly with the recession this past season. But union economists think it will rebound nicely, especially with new teams in Colorado and Florida for the ’93 season. “With all this good news,” says Fehr, “why are the owners so unhappy?”
One answer lies in the packet of information the players are thumbing through: the average player salary hit $1 million this season, up from $371,000 in 1985.
Fehr is famous for speaking in long, dense paragraphs, and some players poke fun by keeping a running total of the esoteric terms he uses, then showing him their lists. Many turn to union lawyers Lauren Rich and Michael Weiner for translation. But Fehr speaks with more clarity as the situation becomes more dire, and right now he cannot be more clear.
The game and the owners are in turmoil, Fehr tells them, and ticks off the self-inflicted wounds: The Vincent mess. The botched realignment. The aborted Giants sale. For all the change Selig promised after he took over, Fehr says, baseball’s central office simply “doesn’t work.”
All the players here know Fehr’s low regard for the game’s owners—especially Selig—and the reason why. It was 1985 when Fehr, negotiating his first contract as the union’s executive director, ended the players’ two-day strike and agreed to cut salary arbitration eligibility from three years to two. It was a major concession, costing players not yet qualifying for free agency hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the owners told Fehr they were going broke and gave the union a limited look at their books—an industry overview, without team breakouts—to support their case.
The deal brought swift criticism from Marvin Miller, still very much the union’s godfather, both behind closed doors and in the pages of the nation’s newspapers. Miller, who plucked Fehr out of a Kansas City law firm to handle the case that secured free agency in 1975, thought the owners had deceived the new union leader.
It turned out Miller was right. Almost instantly, the owners worked together to shut down the free agent market, an act of collusion that went on for three years until the owners settled the cases for $280 million. An act, the union believes, that was led by Selig and Jerry Reinsdorf.
At the same time, the owners responded to the cocaine scandal involving 13 players in 1985 by inserting drug testing clauses into every player’s contract. It was a clear violation of the collective bargaining agreement, and Fehr quickly filed a complaint. When baseball’s arbitrator Tom Roberts ruled the testing clauses had to be removed, the owners fired him. (He was reinstated a year later.)
Fehr won all three collusion cases and the respect of the players, who from that point forward always thought they had the smartest man in the fight. And Fehr has grown even more cynical about the people on the opposite side of the bargaining table, especially the man leading them now.
Fehr arrived in Boca Raton all but certain that Selig and his allies would soon invoke their option to re-open labor contract negotiations. He tells the players that Selig’s negotiator Richard Ravitch is proposing a revenue sharing plan and a salary cap. Not that he’s heard this directly from Ravitch—the two men have yet to meet. No, Fehr read about it in the New York Times article now sitting in front of each player.
Fehr finishes by laying out the agenda for the next four days. Yes, there will be time for the players and their wives to enjoy the resort. And the annual golf tournament is Wednesday, when Fehr will play in the final foursome to make sure—the players laughingly tell him—his scattershot drives won’t slow down play.
But there’s a lot of work to be done. They’ll all be briefed on attendance figures, television contracts, merchandising money, and a host of other data. They’ll leave with the responsibility for briefing teammates and reporting back with any concerns.
The year ahead could be difficult, Fehr warns them. “Expect the owners to test you,” he says. The Players Association is in good shape, but the owners are making a mess of their game. And that isn’t good for anyone.
Our job, he tells the players, “is to save the owners from themselves.”
It’s December 9, and Selig is sitting at the head table in Louisville’s Galt House Hotel ballroom, where the final session of baseball’s Winter Meetings has started. Selig has been coming to these meetings for 22 years, but never has he endured anything as chaotic or troubling as this.
The game’s Acting Commissioner opened the meetings three days ago by preaching the need to be fiscally responsible, but clearly no one was listening. Just yesterday, 16 free agents signed big new contracts, making it the busiest day in the 17-year history of free agency. Toronto gave four-time 20-game winner Dave Stewart a two-year, $8.5 million deal. Royals owner Ewing Kauffman, fighting a losing battle with bone cancer, handed David Cone a record $9 million bonus—payable at the end of this month—as part of a three-year, $18 million contract.
And word is out that the Braves will make the Cubs’ Greg Maddux the game’s highest-paid pitcher later tonight, when they offer him a five-year, $28 million deal.
In the past three days, more than 30 free agents signed contracts worth $225 million, bringing the total for this year’s signing period to $365 million. That doesn’t include the four-year, $24 million contract extension Seattle gave Ken Griffey Jr.—and he’s still two years from free agency.
It does include the six-year, $43.75 million contract San Francisco bestowed upon Barry Bonds, making him the game’s highest-paid player. The deal is causing Selig all sorts of headaches: supermarket magnate Peter Magowan has not yet been approved as the new owner of the Giants, prompting outgoing Giants owner Bob Lurie to loudly tell the Acting Commissioner he has no intention of honoring the Bonds deal if Magowan is not approved by the owners. And given the hostile reception the Bonds deal received—Magowan raised the salary bar right after promising not to increase the Giants’ payroll—who knows? That just might happen. Selig blessed the deal only after getting Magowan to promise to pay Bonds even if the owners vote to block his bid to buy the Giants.
The record signings also included the three-year, $13 million deal Paul Molitor struck with Toronto—the one that gave Selig nothing but heartache. His team had already lost 16-game winner Chris Bosio to Seattle and second baseman Scott Fletcher to Boston. But Molitor’s departure was personal, bringing an end to 15 years of shared experiences—the spectacular play (.303 career average; 412 stolen bases), the countless injuries that cost Molitor more than 500 games, and the support Bud provided when Paul’s cocaine habit became public in the mid-’80s.
Of course, losing Paulie was no surprise. Not when Selig offered him a pay cut—twice—after Molitor hit .320, drove in 89 runs, and stole 31 bases this past season. Not when he refused to offer his best player arbitration until just minutes before Toronto announced the deal, a move that got the Brewers a first-round draft pick as compensation. No, Selig knew the minute he decided to cut his team’s $30 million payroll by $8 million that there wouldn’t be enough money to bring Molitor back.
But that doesn’t mean Selig won’t mourn his loss. Or that Molitor understands. The newest Blue Jay went on the radio in Milwaukee yesterday and shed tears while talking about leaving town, then held a press conference later in the day and told the media he might still be a Brewer had management acted sooner. That stung. Bud told local reporters he was confident his team would be competitive, but he has no idea how that will really happen.
Selig also doesn’t know what to do with Marge Schott. News broke in late November that the Reds owner keeps a swastika armband in her home and has made racist and anti-Semitic remarks around her employees. She showed up unannounced in a near-empty press room today at 8:30 a.m. and read from a short prepared statement that was both apology and challenge. “For any such remarks which were insensitive, I am profoundly sorry and I apologize to anyone I hurt,” Schott said.
“But in fairness to me, I wish to add that while I am not without blame in this matter, I am also not the cause of the problem. Minority issues have been present in baseball long before I came to the game.”
Selig is sure Schott’s comments will make great fodder for the Senate hearing he has to attend tomorrow in Washington. A handful of Senators are once again threatening to revoke the sport’s antitrust exemption, this time demanding that baseball name an independent Commissioner. Baseball is the only pro sport with this exemption, a mistake made by the Supreme Court in 1922 and embodied in the unanimous decision written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who declared that baseball is not interstate commerce and therefore not subject to the Sherman Antitrust Act. The exemption essentially allows baseball to operate as a monopoly, granting it many rights, none more important than control over open markets. Keeping a market open allows teams to use relocation as a threat to get taxpayer financing for new stadiums. It also keeps the best markets available for expansion, which attracts the hundreds of millions of dollars so many men are willing to pay to join this exclusive club.
The courts have since left it to Congress to correct that mistake, but everyone in baseball understands that will never happen. If Congress revoked the sport’s prized exemption, what excuse would lawmakers have to hold hearings that give them invaluable face time on ESPN and headlines in the New York Times? Still, few owners want to take the chance, so they all play along with Washington’s Kabuki theater.
Appearing before Congress is always painful, but nothing can be worse than the secret ballot held two days ago on re-opening the labor deal, a vote that laid bare the internal divisions the Acting Commissioner faces. The big market teams want nothing to do with Selig’s revenue sharing plan and strongly oppose re-opening the contract. The small market teams, led by Selig, Reinsdorf, and Pohlad, insist they won’t survive another season without both a salary cap and revenue sharing. After several hours of rancorous debate, the owners voted to re-open the contract by the slimmest of margins, 15–13, a vote that sparked immediate speculation they would initiate a lockout—literally shutting down their operations—come spring training.
The final meeting of the week has just stretched past its second hour when Marlins President Carl Barger gets up suddenly and walks quickly toward the ballroom doors. A startled Selig can see that Carl is sweating profusely. Just then, Barger collapses. In a blur, AL President Bobby Brown, a cardiologist, is at Barger’s side, performing CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Selig quickly gavels the meeting to a close while others race to call an ambulance.
It’s a visibly shaken Selig who stands outside the ballroom moments later, speaking to the media. He tells them what little he knows about Barger, who is being rushed to the hospital as they speak. “This is another dizzying event of the last 90 days,” he says. Selig tries to focus on business, telling the media that yes, they are discussing realignment, and no, they haven’t decided if they will add any teams to the postseason yet.
Selig answers a few more questions when a reporter asks what he thinks about media stories saying his sport is in chaos.
“Anyone who has been in any of our committee meetings knows that is not true,” Selig says. “This is not an industry wobbling around aimlessly.”
Selig calls an end to questions and rushes off to the car waiting to take him to the airport. The last three months have felt more like three years. Selig won’t learn that Barger died that night from an aortic aneurysm until he reaches his hotel in Washington. But no one would blame him if he is already wondering whether his new role is really worth all this trouble.