BUD SELIG IS lying in bed in his room at Sinai Samaritan Medical Center, careful to prop up his bandaged left leg. He’s just had surgery yesterday morning to repair the broken kneecap he suffered in a nasty spill on his icy driveway. It’s December 19, and he’s lost count of the number of times his wife has told him this is exactly why he should leave Milwaukee for their winter home in Scottsdale, just as she does. But Bud hates leaving Milwaukee, no matter what the season.
He turns on the TV to watch yet another cable news show on the story America is still talking about. Just one week ago five Supreme Court justices stopped the recount of votes in Florida, a decision that made George W. Bush the President-elect of the United States. Half the country is overjoyed, the other remains in shock.
It is still hard for Selig to believe. After all, this is the same George Bush who not long ago was pulling practical jokes at quarterly owners meetings. He still remembers Bush’s passion when he told Bud how much he wanted to be Commissioner after Fay Vincent was fired. That same man will soon be the next leader of the free world.
But as stunning as the news is, Bush’s tainted victory isn’t the only thing on Selig’s mind. He’s still trying to digest the latest spending spree by Bush’s former colleagues at the Winter Meetings in Dallas. By then, Steinbrenner had already given Roger Clemens a two-year, $30.9 million extension and signed Orioles free agent pitcher Mike Mussina to a six-year, $88.5 million deal. The four-year, $68 million extension Carlos Delgado signed with Toronto in October made the Blue Jays first baseman the highest-paid player in the game. But not for long. Colorado owner Jerry McMorris—who sat on the Blue Ribbon Panel!—set the stage when he handed Denny Neagle a five-year, $51.5 million deal on December 4. Five days later the Rockies owner signed pitcher Mike Hampton to a staggering eight-year, $123.8 million contract.
On December 11, Texas owner Tom Hicks—another Blue Ribbon Panel member—walked up to the podium at the Wyndham Anatole hotel and announced that he’d signed Alex Rodriguez to a 10-year, $252 million deal. The contract—the highest in all of sports—is $2 million more than Hicks paid for the Rangers, their stadium, and the surrounding land. Just a few hours later, the Red Sox give Manny Ramirez $160 million over eight years to play in Boston.
Selig issued the usual gloom-and-doom pronouncements about the state of the game, but he knows full well there is always a spending binge every time baseball signs a new national TV deal. And the deal he signed with Fox on September 27 was a big one: $2.5 billion for six years, $1.9 billion more than the previous contract. And that’s before ESPN kicks in $175 million in 2003, then $200 million in both 2004 and 2005.
But Selig—who received a $1 million bonus for the Fox deal—has made it clear he wants this kind of spending on players to stop. And he’ll be carrying the Blue Ribbon Panel’s revenue sharing and competitive balance tax proposals into next year’s labor talks to make sure of it. He already took his narrative out for a trial run in November, when Senator Mike DeWine (R-OH) held a hearing on the perils of competitive imbalance in baseball.
Selig told DeWine that he’s “never witnessed the type of despair” baseball owners exhibit today, testifying that at least 16 teams start the season without any hope of reaching the postseason. George Mitchell solemnly agreed. “Before the patient dies, remedial action should be taken,” Mitchell testified. Senator DeWine, a Reds season-ticket holder, was quickly convinced.
“The evidence is overwhelming that baseball has entered an era that is very, very dangerous,” DeWine said.
The Commissioner failed to identify which of the 16 teams lacked hope this past season, which was wise, because teams with the 14th, 17th, 24th, and 26th ranked payrolls all made the playoffs. And two of those teams—the White Sox and the Giants—had the best records in their leagues.
Selig also took great care to avoid any mention of contraction, an idea more and more owners are embracing as the year draws to a close. In October, Selig told the owners he’d instructed Paul Beeston and Bob DuPuy to study the ramifications of shutting down two or more franchises. Expos President David Samson flipped out, demanding to know whether his troubled franchise was a target. (The short answer: yes.) By then, everyone understood Samson’s stepfather Jeff Loria, who’s alienated the fans, media, and politicians in Montreal, bought the team a year ago with the idea of moving it to Washington.
But that’s not going to happen. The Washington market is far too valuable as leverage for owners threatening to move if their cities won’t build them a new stadium. And if baseball moves back to Washington, it will be as an expansion team, so everyone gets a piece of the action.
It’s no coincidence that every team on the contraction list but the Angels—both Florida teams, the A’s, Twins, and Expos—are fighting stadium battles with their local politicians. Patience with these cities is running low among owners, who see a bigger cut of the national pie if two or more teams are eliminated. Problem is, while most owners favor contraction, none want to give up their team. Not even Pohlad, who’s issued more threats to his hometown than any owner on baseball’s hit list.
Selig isn’t enamored with the idea, either. He’s not eager to be remembered as the Commissioner who shrunk the game, though if that’s the consensus, he’ll fall in line. Beeston and DuPuy have already spoken with the owners of the targeted teams, including a midsummer meeting with John Henry when they sat on his 160-foot yacht and discussed teams he might buy should they fold the Marlins. Selig would love to see Henry, a billionaire hedge fund manager, bring his small market sensibilities to the big market Red Sox.
Beeston has also told Don Fehr the owners would increase rosters to compensate for lost jobs, and he’s certain he can convince the union leader not to stand in their way. But Selig is not so sure. Especially since the union exercised its option in August to extend the current contract through 2001, giving Steinbrenner and the other large market teams another year to keep spending big.
This also gives everyone one more year to load up on steroids, just as Selig is finally ready to start weaning the game off performance-enhancing drugs. The Commissioner, who ignored the Andro study in February and chuckled with the media about fallen home run records last spring, is no longer laughing. Too many records have been broken, too many aging players are performing as they did in their primes—if not better—and too many reporters have stopped being cheerleaders and started asking tough questions.
In April, ESPN the Magazine’s Jeff Bradley wrote about the time his brother Scott, then a backup catcher trying to hang on toward the end of his nine-year major league career, was told by a former player that steroids were the answer. No, Jeff Bradley wrote, he’s never seen a player shooting up. But how could the veteran writer not wonder who was using steroids after sitting with players during BP and listening to them play a guessing game they call “who’s on ’roids?”
By the All-Star break, reporters began wondering how Mark McGwire could hit 30 home runs in only 221 at bats—one every 7.37 official plate appearances—while hobbling on an arthritic right knee, a telltale sign of steroid use. Talk show callers were questioning the growth spurt of 35-year-old Barry Bonds, who’s on his way to a career-high 49 home runs in just 480 at bats.
We need a plan to get us to the next contract, Selig told his labor chief, Rob Manfred. And it wasn’t long before baseball decided to conduct random testing in the minor leagues—where the union has no jurisdiction—starting in 2001. Manfred let the union know baseball wanted the same thing for the majors in their next contract.
“We are clearly interested in getting some sort of steroid testing program in place,” Manfred told the New York Times in a revealing story published on October 11. The Times spoke with more than 25 major league players, coaches, and trainers, and the consensus was clear: baseball had a steroid problem.
“Players nowadays feel if it looks like it can help you, they’ll try it,” said Marlins outfielder Cliff Floyd, who told the newspaper he figured steroid use in baseball ran as high as 40 percent. “I came up with that number from talking to a lot of players. That’s how the game is and that’s probably how it’s going to be for a long time.”
It’s going to be hard to put the genie back in the bottle, and that’s what makes a player like Alex Rodriguez so attractive. He is as powerful as Bonds and Sosa but still graceful and lithe, able to glide across the infield to make all the plays at shortstop, with a rocket for an arm.
Simply put, it’s hard to take your eyes off A-Rod when the star player takes the field. He’s young, handsome, and just so talented. He won a batting title at age 21, when he hit .358. He went 40–40 two years later—only the third player in history to hit those magic numbers—when he hit 42 home runs and stole 46 bases. Now 25, Rodriguez already has 189 home runs and 595 RBI—49 more homers and 101 more RBI than Hank Aaron at the same age. If Alex stays healthy, he could wind up owning the game’s record book.
But why, Selig asked Hicks, did the Rangers owner have to put a target on A-Rod’s back with that obscene contract? Didn’t he understand that Alex will now be expected to get a hit every time the winning run is on base, or make the special play in the field whenever the game is on the line?
The reason is simple: Hicks, who built a personal fortune of $750 million as a leveraged-buyout artist, sees A-Rod as a brand—the Natural. To Hicks, Alex Rodriguez isn’t just a baseball player, he’s the key to turning the Texas Rangers into a sports and entertainment giant able to compete with the Dallas Cowboys on both the local and national stage.
And that makes it hard for Selig to argue with Hicks. He’s going to push like hell to make sure there are no more contracts like the one Hicks just handed his young superstar. And Selig won’t sign another labor deal that doesn’t include random testing for steroids. But just like the Rangers owner, the Commissioner of baseball thinks it’s good business to build his game around Alex Rodriguez for years to come.