SUE SELIG HAS always known her husband’s life revolves around baseball. She knew it when he was “Bud from the West Side” in their high school days, growing up together in Milwaukee in the early ’50s. She knew it when Bud’s first wife Donna stood up in divorce court in 1976 and said Selig was “married to baseball.” And she started living it when she and Bud were married a year later.
Sue jokes with friends about her husband’s obsession, telling them when she kisses Bud good night before going to sleep, Bud turns over, dials Jerry Reinsdorf, and starts talking baseball all over again.
But Sue knows her husband well enough to know that this really isn’t a joke.
Especially now.
Sue Selig has never seen baseball take over Bud’s life—their life—the way it has since he became Acting Commissioner in St. Louis five months ago. It’s been baseball all day every day, at home and, more often than not, on the road. She’s helped him pack for one owners meeting after another—in Chicago, St. Louis, Louisville, Dallas, Phoenix—and for several trips to baseball headquarters in New York. She’s listened to the phone ring nonstop, overheard heated conversations, and witnessed calls that stretch more than an hour at a time.
Bud told her he’d only be Acting Commissioner for six months, not the “two or three months” he told everyone else, but that time is just about up. And she knows he’ll never leave the job now, no matter how many times he says he doesn’t want it. She’s known that all along.
Why should he give it up? Bud’s been the unofficial Commissioner for years, as far as she could see. When the other owners had a problem, they turned to Bud first, not the Commissioner. And they always came running to Bud when they wanted someone to talk some sense into George Steinbrenner.
Sue’s been Bud’s sounding board through all of it, Selig’s kitchen cabinet alongside his daughter Wendy and Reinsdorf. They all have their roles to play, but it’s Sue who usually hears things first. And she’s the one with the hair trigger, firing off an opinion almost the moment her husband stops talking. Bud is the one who takes forever to make a decision, mulling over every problem, slowly pushing everyone toward his position while rarely telling anyone what he really thinks.
The two of them have talked often the last few months about how to convince Steinbrenner and the rest of the big market teams to share their revenue with less profitable franchises like the Brewers. George is one of Sue’s favorites, has been since Steinbrenner and Selig were the young turks of baseball back in the ’70s. So it pains her when George and Bud go at it over business. When Bud asks her, “Why doesn’t George understand it’s the only way some of us can survive?” she really doesn’t know what to tell him.
She knows Bud will be looking for an answer today. It’s February 17, and he’s asked the owners to fly out to Arizona, where he has a winter home, for their second meeting of 1993. It’s their sixth meeting in the past six months, but this time Selig has put revenue sharing on the agenda. Which must mean he’s confident he’ll get the answer he wants. Like everyone else, Sue knows her husband never puts anything to a vote until he has enough owners behind him to ensure victory.
Revenue sharing is not the only thing on Bud Selig’s mind as he drives toward Phoenix this late winter morning.
Support has grown for making the postseason field larger, so there’ll be plenty of discussion about a three-division format for each league and another round of playoffs, one worth millions in TV rights fees. Bud wasn’t a big supporter of the idea, but he’s come around. Interleague play, an idea proposed by the American League back in the ’70s, is also on the table. Bud’s dropped his opposition to this as well.
The search committee for a new Commissioner is finally scheduled to hold its first meeting. A host of names have been floated the last few months, including media darlings Colin Powell, George Mitchell, and George Bush. The first two were never in the conversation, but Selig and a few others continue to tell Bush they will back him when the time is right.
After five months and several talks with Vincent, Bush is beginning to understand “the right time” may never come. Selig has the patience to wait for a problem to solve itself, and that strategy appears to be working now with Bush. Karl Rove and many influential Texas Republicans are pushing hard for Bush to run for governor against popular incumbent Ann Richards. The former President’s son can’t put off that decision too much longer.
Selig’s also getting help from his friend in Minnesota, Carl Pohlad, who is leading a group of small market owners determined to put off selecting a new Commissioner until after a new labor deal is done. Given that negotiations with Fehr and the union have yet to even begin, a new deal won’t happen until early next year, and Bush can’t put off his decision nearly that long.
At least Selig won’t have to think about Marge Schott for a while. Two weeks ago, the Executive Council recommended a one-year suspension to discipline Schott for her racially insensitive behavior, and Selig quickly made the ban official. But his difficulties with racial issues are far from over. He was embarrassed three days ago when a Milwaukee Journal report showed the Brewers lagging behind most of baseball in hiring minorities and women. And now Jesse Jackson is talking about staging protests on Opening Day in cities around the country—including Milwaukee—if baseball doesn’t take concrete steps to improve its lackluster record on minority hiring.
As if Bud doesn’t have enough problems on his hands already.
And then there’s Howard Metzenbaum. The Ohio Senator, who owned a small piece of the Cleveland Indians back in the ’70s, said he will again go after baseball’s antitrust exemption if a new Commissioner isn’t named soon. That damn exemption. Some owners have openly wondered why they just don’t give up the exemption and avoid these headaches altogether.
But that’s just not going to happen. Certainly not as long as Bud needs leverage for replacing County Stadium, one of the oldest and least profitable venues in the game. Reinsdorf keeps telling Selig he should threaten to leave town, just as Jerry did when he flirted with Tampa five years ago to get a sweetheart deal in Chicago. But Selig prefers to be less direct, telling the media he can’t survive in Milwaukee without a new stadium while letting others spread rumors about interest from other cities.
Either way, it will be the taxpayers who will foot the bill. But Wisconsin politicians have told Selig they want baseball to get its financial house in order before spending political capital to help his Brewers, leaving Bud’s stadium plans in limbo.
No one wants—or needs—a labor deal more than Selig, and this time he’s determined to get it right. No disasters like 1990. He’s repeatedly told the large market teams they will have to share their fast-growing local television revenues—something Fehr has been telling baseball, too. But unlike Fehr, Selig insists the large market owners will get these revenue sharing dollars back—and then some—with the money they’ll save on players’ salaries once a salary cap is in place. And they all know franchise values will rise at least 10 percent, maybe more, with the cost certainty a cap provides, just as they did in the NFL and NBA.
Selig simply turns a deaf ear when big market owners point out the obvious: a salary cap kills their advantage to spend whatever it takes to sign a player. But truth be told, that’s Bud’s hope and dream. He wants to stop the likes of Steinbrenner from poaching the best players from the less wealthy teams, just as the Blue Jays did when they swooped in and signed Molitor.
Selig knows the union will fight a salary cap, just as they’ve done successfully in each of the last two labor negotiations. But that’s a battle for another day. All he wants today is for the owners to accept the concept of linking revenue sharing and a salary cap, and Selig is determined not to leave this meeting at the Ritz-Carlton without that agreement.
He’s convinced the future of Milwaukee and other small market franchises may hang in the balance.
Selig’s labor negotiator walks into the hotel’s conference room, a briefcase full of memos and charts under one arm, ready to give yet another presentation to baseball’s 28 owners. Dick Ravitch gave them an in-depth proposal on revenue sharing late last fall, and all he’s heard since then are complaints. You’re asking us to share too much money. You’re not asking Steinbrenner to share enough money. Who the hell are you to tell us what to do with our money?
And the owners wonder why they can’t beat the union at the bargaining table. Ravitch can hardly believe it’s only been 16 months since he signed on as the owners’ chief labor negotiator. Some days it feels more like 16 years.
It’s not like Ravitch hasn’t tackled big jobs before. He ran his family’s construction business in the rough-and-tumble New York City real estate market, developing prominent housing projects for low- and middle-income families. He rescued the Urban Development Corporation from insolvency, building tens of thousands of apartments and houses. He turned around a broken-down Metropolitan Transportation Authority, getting the trains to run on time. And he put the Bowery Savings Bank back on its feet before selling it and making an unsuccessful run for mayor of New York.
In the fall of 1991, Ravitch was 58 and mulling over his next move when a headhunter came calling. Baseball is interested in hiring him to change the game’s economic system, the headhunter said. Would Ravitch be interested? So he met with Selig, Reinsdorf, and a few others, and they all told him the same thing: their business was broken.
The more he listened, the more interested he became. He bought their idea that a salary cap and revenue sharing would make the sport more competitive and more profitable. And he saw the logic in forging a partnership with the game’s players. Yes, a cap meant the players would get a smaller piece of the pie, but increased competition would make the pie bigger, making them all better off. That’s the way it works in the NFL and NBA, and both sports were booming.
Ravitch asked what Vincent’s role was in all this. “Oh, the Commissioner has agreed to stay out of labor,” said Selig, and Ravitch bought that, too.
That was his first mistake.
“Don’t think you are going to be able to accomplish anything,” Vincent told Ravitch soon after he was hired. “In the end, I’m going to have to come in and settle it.”
And Vincent had another warning for Ravitch. “They’re going to pull the rug out from under you.”
Ravitch ignored Vincent’s warning—Mistake No. 2—then blundered again when he met with Fehr. In previous lives, Ravitch cozied up to union leaders and cut backroom deals that each man would then sell to his own side. But when he pitched the idea to Fehr over lunch a few months into his new job, his negotiating partner bristled. That’s not the way we do business, said Fehr, who walked away amazed that Ravitch thought the owners would allow him to make any real decisions.
Ravitch began to understand what was really happening soon after Vincent was fired. He was dismayed to learn how often his new employers would lie to him—and to each other. It’s the rare owner who gives an honest account of what his franchise earns. Teams owned by TV networks underprice their rights fees. Teams run by breweries somehow have little or no income to show from beer sales. Teams barter tickets to games for seats on airline flights without reporting the seats as income—at least not to MLB. And the list goes on.
No wonder the owners pushed back so hard when he suggested they share all their financial information.
And now, little more than a year on the job, Ravitch is starting to feel the slight pull on that rug beneath his feet, just as Vincent had predicted. First came the whispers about Selig having talks behind his back soon after Vincent was forced out. Today there’s a story in the Los Angeles Times that Ravitch’s job may be in jeopardy.
But Ravitch and Selig still share a common goal: they both need a path to a deal. So Ravitch arrived in Phoenix telling the media it would be “catastrophic” if the owners could not agree to share revenues, and that’s the message he delivers when Selig turns the meeting over to him.
Their game is in trouble, he tells them, and one major reason is clear: the years of labor wars and owners publicly bashing their players have taken a toll. The game’s national television ratings are dwindling. The demographics are going in the wrong direction—baseball fans are increasingly older and poorer than those following the NFL and the NBA. A recent Gallup poll shows Americans favor the NFL over their game by a 2–1 margin, and Michael Jordan is lifting basketball over baseball in the hearts and minds of the young and hip.
Baseball, once considered the “affordable sport,” is losing that appeal, too, with the cost for a family of four to attend and enjoy a game now $100 or more. And of course the owners’ costs are skyrocketing. Payrolls are taking 55 percent of their revenues. By 1994, Ravitch tells them, 263 players will be making at least $3 million—an average of nine on each team. How many small market teams will be able to afford that?
Simply put, it’s time they changed the way they do business.
“The union has consistently said that the way to solve baseball’s problems is for ownership to get its own house in order,” Ravitch tells the owners. “If you want a salary cap, you have to give them something in return, an act of good faith. You have to give them revenue sharing.”
Ravitch is not a great salesman. Some in this audience find him arrogant and abrasive, his presentations more like demeaning lectures. Few are willing to concede that it’s the message they dislike rather than Ravitch himself.
But the man who hired Ravitch knows how to use his negotiator as a foil, and Selig’s worked the room well enough to finally get the owners to agree—in principle—to tie revenue sharing to a salary cap. The vote is unanimous. Ravitch has already left the hotel when Selig meets with the media to announce the news.
“It’s often been said by the Players Association, ‘Let them solve their own problems first. Let them go to revenue sharing,’ ” Selig says. “We don’t have a specific plan—I’d say it’s more philosophical. But the clubs took a step today to acknowledge there is a direct linkage between revenue sharing and a salary cap.
“One can’t exist without the other. The two are inextricably linked.”
Don Fehr is in his corner office at the players union in Manhattan when the flood of media calls from Phoenix begins. Few of the callers are surprised by his response.
“The real linkage is the big market owners won’t share with small market owners unless the players give them back the money,” Fehr tells Murray Chass of the New York Times. “That’s the only linkage we’ve heard about.”
He has another sharp-tongued comment for Ross Newhan of the Los Angeles Times. “Heck, if Jerry Reinsdorf is such a good friend of Selig’s, why doesn’t he just write him a check? I’m dumbfounded as to who they think they’re impressing.”
Fehr hangs up, knowing he’s just thrown the owners’ plan back in their faces. But he knows something else, too. The union was prepared to go to court to argue that revenue sharing and wages are linked, which, under labor law, makes revenue sharing a mandatory subject of collective bargaining. Selig just saved him the trouble. Now, any change the owners want to make in their revenue sharing plan must also be approved by the union.
The owners don’t realize it yet, but they’ve just given Don Fehr a seat at their table.