You can’t acquire or develop good players unless everyone in the front office is thinking alike, or unless there’s one strong personality in charge. . . . You don’t find an organization like that very often, but when you do, it’s usually flying pennant flags.—WHITEY HERZOG, baseball manager
In 1976 the American League awarded two new expansion franchises: one to Seattle (which had lost the Pilots to Milwaukee in 1970 after just one season) and a second to a Toronto ownership group led by Labatt, the beer conglomerate, and R. Howard Webster, described by Time as a Montreal-based, publicity-shy bachelor multimillionaire.1 While Toronto’s new team owed its existence to the hard work and lobbying of many, Don McDougall, president of Labatt Breweries, a large subsidiary of John Labatt, Ltd., spearheaded the company’s pursuit. McDougall, as part of a five-person board, oversaw the building of a new baseball organization.
Testifying to Labatt’s business focus, the first executive hired by the board was Paul Beeston, a personable thirty-year-old accountant given wide responsibility on the administrative side of the organization. Early in his tenure with the Blue Jays, Beeston received some unwanted attention when he brashly claimed, “Anyone who quotes profits of a baseball club is missing the point. I could turn a $4 million profit into a $2 million loss and I could get every national accounting firm to agree with me.”2 Beeston proved a savvy hire. He went on to an illustrious career with the Blue Jays, eventually becoming president and CEO, and served a stint as president and chief operating officer (COO) of Major League Baseball. “I can’t imagine anybody who saw the way Paul would develop,” said attorney Herb Solway. “They might have thought he would be a good CFO [chief financial officer], but who in their right mind would have thought he would be the chief executive officer?”3
Labatt intended to run its baseball team as it had run its beer business. “It’s the same as any kind of management,” explained executive Peter Widdrington. “You get the most capable people you can and let them go to work, which means let them make mistakes. That’s why there are erasers on pencils. It’s not exactly a hands-off approach. We question and pursue things that should have happened and didn’t, and we decide policy in terms of how many farm clubs we are going to have and why. We look at the budgets, the salaries. We don’t negotiate salaries, but we sure as hell know how much they can spend. We leave it to them to work within that thing.”4 The board wanted to win, but they also wanted a solid financial foundation.
To lead their new franchise, McDougall and the board needed a strong baseball man with marketing smarts. They quickly settled on a short list of Bill Giles, a senior executive in the Phillies’ front office; Frank Cashen, the longtime general manager with Baltimore, regarded as one of baseball’s model organizations; and Peter Bavasi, the thirty-three-year-old GM of the San Diego Padres.5
The ownership group initially offered the job to Cashen, who demanded too much money and was uncomfortable jumping from his job at National Brewery, owned by Canadian brewing rival Carling O’Keefe.6 McDougall felt Giles’s background had been more administrative, a role they deemed already filled with Beeston. McDougall and the board turned to Bavasi.
Peter Bavasi had grown up in baseball. His father, Buzzie, spent nearly thirty years in the Dodgers’ front office, the last eighteen as the general manager. When Peter graduated from St. Mary’s College (California) in 1964 with a degree in philosophy, Buzzie hired him to be the business manager of one of the Dodgers’ Minor League affiliates. After a few years of apprenticeship, the younger Bavasi became a Minor League general manager.
In 1968 the expansion San Diego Padres hired Buzzie Bavasi away as minority owner and president, and he took his son along as farm director. Peter Bavasi was sharp, personable, confident, and already thinking about the big-picture issues of marketing and business strategy. When Padres general manager Edwin Leishman died in late 1972, Buzzie promoted his thirty-year-old son to the position. The Padres were struggling both on the field and at the gate; in their first four seasons the team finished last in the NL West and trailed the league in attendance every year. By 1973 the franchise appeared ready to bolt for Washington DC, and Bavasi told his dad, “If your will says I get the ball club, please change it.”7
San Diego received a late reprieve when Ray Kroc stepped forward to buy the club, and with the younger Bavasi at the helm the team’s fortunes began to improve. In 1975 the team finished fourth in the six-team National League West and sixth in league attendance. Bavasi believed that for a bad team to be successful at the gate, “you’ve got to sell the sizzle before you can sell the steak.”8 Kroc, who had built the McDonald’s hamburger chain into a behemoth, left a mark on Bavasi: “Ray always said to look at a product through the eyes of the consumer. He was a big fan of selling the sizzle if you don’t have the steak ready. It works the same with baseball as it does with food.”9 And the surprising jump in attendance testified to his maxim, at least for this time and place. With an opportunity to run a team of his own, on June 18, 1976, Bavasi accepted the job as executive vice president of the Toronto Blue Jays.
“Pete’s the most charming guy I ever met,” Paul Beeston said years later of his former boss. “I mean, he can sell. First of all, he’s brilliant. He’s a very, very smart guy. Tremendous energy. One of the very few guys you’ll ever meet in your life who has a hundred ideas a day. Maybe only one of them is any good, but I can find guys who won’t have 100 ideas in their lifetime and who won’t have one good idea in a year. This guy had one good idea a day.”10
Bavasi understood that his initial charge was to generate interest and convince the faithful that the owners had a plan for the franchise. “The intense marketing of the Blue Jays coast-to-coast in Canada (even into English-speaking Quebec) was critical to the club’s initial and long-term success,” Bavasi wrote. “And it was a key objective of Labatt Breweries, our most visible owner. They wanted to sell beer, and the Blue Jays were to be an important marketing vehicle.”11
Bavasi also embraced a formal management style. “We produced annual operating plans, budgets, cash-flow forecasts, business plans, marketing plans, strategy plans, short-term, long-term, medium term plans. It disciplined us.”12 Once the board recognized that Bavasi knew what was expected, they gave him room to operate. “They were great,” Bavasi recalled. “They turned the whole operation over to me to organize from scratch. We had monthly board meetings and a spring training meeting for the directors in Dunedin, and other than seeing them at games during the season, they never bothered us—except to ask periodically, is there anything we can do for you. Once the annual budgets and the operating plans were approved, it was total freedom to operate. The best owners you could ask for.”13 Kansas City’s Ewing Kauffman, who had started the Royals from scratch eight years earlier, later credited Bavasi with setting a sound organizational footing: “From a business point of view, Toronto has one of the best managed clubs in baseball. It’s one of the very few financially solid clubs.”14
Starting a new baseball franchise is obviously a huge undertaking, and it needed to be done quickly. “I preferred to recruit for the core group of senior department heads those who were experienced in their field, with a reputation for exceedingly hard work and for getting a lot of things done all at once without guidance or supervision,” Bavasi wrote. “‘Here’s the Management By Objectives operating plan we all agreed to, let’s go.’ They would be collegial and collaborative, and fearless and optimistic and not easily discouraged. They would usually be recruited on the basis of consistently high recommendations from other senior executives within baseball, whose recruiting counsel I would seek.” With only a couple of exceptions, Bavasi “never recruited anyone [he] had previously worked with, to avoid any perceived workplace favoritism issues, and in order to develop fresh ideas and new ways of looking at old methods.”15
For back-office functions the competent Beeston could help immeasurably, but Bavasi had to assemble a front office to run the baseball functions. Experienced as a baseball man, Bavasi was not ready to surrender control over player-personnel decisions but recognized he needed someone to supervise and build scouting and farm departments while he oversaw the entire franchise. Bavasi canvassed his colleagues for suggestions, at least two of whom, Houston general manager Tal Smith and San Diego scout Bob Fontaine, recommended another longtime scout, thirty-eight-year-old Pat Gillick, currently serving as the New York Yankees’ coordinator of player development and scouting.
“Both of them said, ‘Pat’s your man. Look no further,’” Bavasi remembered.
Pat was living in Atlanta at the time and was under contract to the Yankees until October 31, 1976. The expansion draft was scheduled for November 5, 1976. Yes, I tampered with Pat. The way the baseball grapevine works, that secret didn’t hold for very long. The president of Labatt received a blistering phone call from George [Steinbrenner], insisting that I should be fired, because I was tampering with and hiring away “the brightest young baseball mind in the business and the future general manager of the Yankees.” “Fired?!,” replied the Labatt president, “for hiring the brightest young baseball mind in the business? We’re not going to fire Bavasi, but we will consider giving him a raise and a bonus.” Years later, George would make me tell that story. He got a kick out of it.
Gillick would grow to be one of baseball’s greatest executives. “From the moment I hired Gillick, it was his baby,” Bavasi recalled, although he “did bother Pat rather often about roster stuff, which I should not have done.”16
Pat Gillick was mainly raised by his maternal grandparents in Southern California. His mother, a minor silent-movie actress, and his father, a pitcher for several seasons in the Pacific Coast League who later became the sheriff of Butte County, divorced when he was just a baby. Gillick and his mother moved into her parents’ home in Van Nuys. When he was nine his mother remarried and left to live with her new husband. Pat stayed behind.
Gillick’s grandfather sent him to Ridgewood Military Academy in Woodland Hills, hoping to provide some structure and keep him out of trouble. At Ridgewood Gillick excelled in both baseball and football. On the gridiron Gillick played center and snapped the ball to quarterback Bobby Beathard, later to gain fame as general manager of the NFL’s Washington Redskins during their Super Bowl years in the 1980s. Ridgewood closed its high school after his junior year, and Gillick finished up at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks.
Smart and ambitious, Gillick graduated at sixteen and enrolled at LA Valley Junior College, from where the left-handed pitcher was successfully recruited by USC’s legendary coach Rod Dedeaux. In Gillick’s 1958 senior season the Trojans, featuring future big-league stars Don Buford and Ron Fairly, won the College World Series. Dedeaux later related that Gillick “remembered everything I told him.”17 Over the years his incredible memory and recall became a recurring theme in his colleagues’ descriptions of him. Some bestowed on him the nickname “Wolley Segap,” which is “Yellow Pages” spelled backward.18
Gillick graduated from USC with a business degree but decided to give baseball a shot, first pitching semiprofessionally in Canada, before signing with the Baltimore Orioles’ organization in 1959. “I wouldn’t say Pat was a can’t-miss prospect,” said Earl Weaver, who managed him in the Minors, “but he was definitely a prospect.”19 Gillick pitched five years in Jim McGlaughlin’s instruction-oriented farm system. “Last year he was mediocre pitcher,” read one scouting report from August 1960. “This year has a very good curve and change. Has lots of moxie.”20 But Gillick could not get past Triple-A, and after the 1963 season, having just turned twenty-six, he decided to go back to school, possibly to become a high school coach.
Eddie Robinson, the farm director of the Houston Colt .45s, intervened, however. Robinson had known Gillick from his time in the Orioles’ organization and offered him a job as his assistant in Houston. Gillick happily accepted, soon gravitating to the scouting side of the Astros’ organization.
As the southernmost team in the Majors, Houston had already developed a Latin American presence, and Gillick spent much of his time combing the area for ballplayers. In the fall of 1967 Gillick and fellow Astros scout Tony Pacheco were in the Dominican Republic when native Epy Guerrero, a part-time scout, took them to see sixteen-year-old Cesar Cedeno. “We noticed this kid and liked the way he moved, his actions and size,” Gillick recalled. “We saw him throw and then we saw him go up and get a hit and go up and get another hit.” The scouts arranged a workout a couple of days later, sixty miles away so as to remain hidden from competing scouts. They liked what they saw and met with Cedeno’s father to negotiate a signing bonus.
Once Gillick learned that the Cardinals had offered one thousand dollars, he offered twelve hundred, upping it to fifteen hundred when the elder Cedeno turned him down. Cedeno’s father rejected this offer as well. As the dickering continued one of Houston’s local bird-dog scouts came to warn him that a Cardinal scout was on his way. Gillick quickly raised his offer to three thousand dollars, and Cedeno’s father agreed. As Gillick was leaving he saw his rival. Holding up the contract he said, “You’re a few minutes too late.” Cedeno would go on to become one of the top center fielders of the 1970s.21 Partly because of the Cedeno signing, Gillick hired Guerrero as a full-time scout, and the two worked together for the next twenty-eight years with three organizations.
In 1974 Tal Smith, with whom Gillick had worked in Houston, brought Gillick to the Yankees as coordinator of player development and scouting. For most of Gillick’s tenure in New York, owner George Steinbrenner was under suspension. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn reinstated Steinbrenner before the 1976 season, and the working conditions in the Yankees’ front office deteriorated rapidly. Smith had moved back to Houston as general manager in 1975. When Bavasi came calling a year later, Gillick was ready to leave.
Gillick was initially named vice president of player personnel for the Blue Jays, but after one year became VP of baseball operations and general manager. He was allowed to build a top-notch scouting staff. Two of his most important hires were Al LaMacchia, a longtime scout for the Phillies and Braves, and Bobby Mattick, who had already signed Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, Curt Flood, and Gary Carter by the time he joined the Blue Jays. “Scouts are the backbone of the organization,” Gillick was fond of saying.22 He joined a minority of teams that shunned the new centralized Major League Scouting Bureau. Gillick was going to build his own organization.
Bavasi showed a surprisingly sentimental side in the selection of his inaugural manager. When Bavasi was the business manager for Albuquerque years earlier, Roy Hartsfield was the team’s field manager. Hartsfield took the young Bavasi under his wing, patiently teaching him the many intricacies of the game both on and off the field. Bavasi had promised Hartsfield that if he ever had an opportunity in the big leagues, he would name Hartsfield as his manager. More than a decade later, Bavasi honored this pledge. Even though Bavasi informed Hartsfield of his intent soon after his hiring, he delayed making the announcement to the press in order to give the appearance of a comprehensive investigation.
Bavasi and Gillick next needed to get down to the hard work of building a franchise and preparing for the expansion draft on November 5. The rules were similar to those eight years earlier. Each of the twelve established AL teams could protect fifteen players, after which Toronto and Seattle would draft twelve players—six each—one from each AL team. The AL teams could then each protect three more players, and Toronto and Seattle could pick another twelve players. This continued for a total of five rounds, with the AL teams allowed to protect another three after each round, except after the fourth round, when they could protect only two. In the end each expansion team had drafted thirty players.
Toronto and Seattle labored under additional handicaps when compared with the 1968 expansion, as the players had gained more rights in the intervening years. Most significantly, the fall of 1976 brought the first class of free agents, players who had played out their option and were free to sign with a new team. The two expansion clubs were not allowed to sign any of these players. Second, veterans with “ten and five” rights—those who had played ten years in the Major Leagues and five years with the same team—could not be forced to join an expansion team. If Seattle or Toronto drafted one of these players, he could decide to stay put, with no compensation to the drafting team. The established clubs could therefore leave these players unprotected without much risk. Finally, players who made their Major League debut in 1976 were exempt and did not have to be protected.23 Each of these handicaps reduced the pool of available players to the expansion clubs.
During the draft the Blue Jays emphasized younger pitchers (nine of their first fourteen selections) while also mixing in a few well-known veterans. The Blue Jays drafted two players, pitcher Jim Clancy and catcher Ernie Whitt, who would become All-Stars and play prominent roles on the franchise’s first division winner many years later.
Surprisingly, the Blue Jays also drafted Rico Carty, an aging slugger with bad knees, from the Cleveland Indians. “What do we need Carty for?” Bavasi asked Gillick before they made the pick. “Rico was Mr. Wahoo,” Gillick told him. After a blank stare from Bavasi, Gillick continued, “The Indians Man of the Year. Let’s take him. In Cleveland the writers and fans will kill the team if they lose Carty. Then they’ll have to trade and get Rico back.” Sure enough, in trading Carty back to Cleveland he extracted young catcher Rick Cerone, who played another sixteen years in the big leagues, plus longtime platoon outfielder John Lowenstein.24
Because the Blue Jays’ home ballpark, Exhibition Stadium, featured an artificial playing surface (the first in the AL’s Eastern Division), Gillick targeted athletic players. The game played faster on turf than on grass, and Gillick believed speed would make the team more competitive in their home games without sacrificing too much in their road games.25 With their first pick Gillick took Baltimore shortstop-outfielder Bob Bailor, who had recently hit .300 and shown speed on the bases in Triple-A for the Orioles.
Just as importantly, the Blue Jays needed to create and fill a farm system. “It all came down to the money,” Bavasi believed. “In San Diego, until Ray Kroc came in, we had very few resources to throw at the scouting and farm system operations. In Toronto, we had plenty of money from the very beginning.”26
Bavasi and Gillick used their resources to cast a wide net for players. “There are five or six rivers flowing into one river—fish in all of them,” Gillick said, describing his philosophy in finding players.27 One river involved trading with other Major League teams, and Gillick was always on the lookout for unappreciated young talent. Two of his early deals landed shortstop Alfredo Griffin (from Cleveland) and second baseman Damaso Garcia (from the Yankees, for Cerone). Griffin won the 1979 Rookie of the Year Award, and the two made up the Blue Jays’ double-play combination for several years.
At least one big fish got away. Just prior to the team’s inaugural 1977 season, Gillick believed he had worked out a deal to trade veteran pitcher Bill Singer, taken in the expansion draft, to the Yankees for young pitcher Ron Guidry. “I knew [New York manager] Billy Martin wanted some veteran players and I knew he didn’t like Guidry—because I came from over there,” Gillick recalled later.28 Bavasi, however, vetoed the trade because he had made Singer one of the focal points of the team’s marketing. “We were selling the collective American baseball experience, not wins and losses,” Bavasi wrote. “So much so that I turned Gillick down on a trade he had arranged with the Yankees. To Pat’s everlasting credit, he never ratted me out on that one.”29
Gillick had better luck with the Yankees in bringing over Epy Guerrero, possibly the greatest of all Dominican scouts. In 1977, using borrowed money, Guerrero spent nine thousand dollars on eighteen acres and some cinderblock buildings outside of Santo Domingo. He built a ballpark and created a rudimentary baseball school for youngsters. Several years later the Blue Jays began to fund the operation, expand it, and run it year-round.30 Guerrero helped the Blue Jays sign several top Dominican players, enrich the organizational environment for Latin players, and identify worthwhile trade and draft targets. Other organizations soon followed, but Toronto established a prominent presence in the country, one that provided them an advantage for a decade or more.
Scouting and continuity were two key areas in which Toronto differentiated itself from Seattle, its sister expansion club. “The biggest reason Toronto passed us was that they had money to spend,” said one Mariner scout. “We started pinching pennies. While the Blue Jays were opening up in Latin America and signing players to good contracts, we had the smallest scouting staff in baseball and were losing people like Julio Cruz and Floyd Bannister because we weren’t paying them enough.”31
In the fall of 1977 Gillick began to exploit a little-used “river” when he selected first baseman Willie Upshaw, whom he and Guerrero knew from the Yankees’ organization, in the Rule 5 Draft. Generally held in December, this draft allows teams to claim veteran Minor Leaguers not protected on their club’s forty-man roster. The catch was that the selecting team had to put the player on its Major League roster for the entire upcoming season. Oftentimes the player is not advanced enough to play for his current team, but perhaps good enough to play for a team like the expansion Blue Jays. Over the years Gillick mastered the Rule 5 Draft to uncover a number of valuable contributors, including George Bell, Manny Lee, Jim Gott, and Kelly Gruber.
Gillick was also willing to take risks with multisport athletes, accommodating them in ways other teams might not have. In 1977 Gillick drafted Eugene, Oregon, prep star Danny Ainge in the fifteenth round. Ainge was heavily recruited by big-name colleges to play football or basketball, so Toronto paid him a bonus of three hundred thousand dollars and allowed him to play college basketball at Brigham Young. Two years later Toronto drafted prep quarterback and baseball catcher Jay Schroeder in the first round, paying a bonus of one hundred thousand dollars and permitting him to play college football at the University of California–Los Angeles.
In the end neither panned out. After four years in the Blue Jays’ organization, including 211 games in the majors, Ainge finished college after a decorated All-American basketball career. After contentious negotiations, the Blue Jays let him out of his contract so that he could sign with the Boston Celtics. Schroeder never learned to hit the breaking ball and went on to play quarterback for the Washington Redskins. Schroeder believed that several position shifts in the Minors hurt his development. Gillick instead blamed the lack of focus on baseball: “If he had devoted all his time to baseball instead of switching between the two sports, maybe things would have been different.”32 The same likely could be said for Ainge.
“It’s a game of mistakes,” Mattick told Gillick. “Don’t pull in your horns. Keep firing.”33 Bavasi concurred: “We did things in Toronto that many clubs then could not afford to do. Pat gambled with multi-sport players and began the Blue Jays foray into international scouting—because we had the money and a wide margin for error. Gillick was always respectful of the budget, he never overspent. He created a terrific player development and roster development program.”34
Despite the team’s poor showing in 1977, this first season was widely viewed as a triumph for baseball in Toronto. Their attendance of 1.7 million surpassed expectations and ranked fourth in the league. For Bavasi’s success the Toronto and Montreal baseball writers named him baseball’s man of the year in Canada. Moreover, the team turned a profit of about $1.5 million, as Bavasi successfully sold the sizzle before the steak. He clearly understood the profit imperative: “When the great scorer comes to mark against your name, it is not whether you won or lost, but how many paid to see the game.”35 In recognition of the team’s off-field success, the board promoted Bavasi to president, also promoting Beeston to VP of business operations and Gillick to VP of baseball operations.
As Gillick built the ball club, Bavasi preached patience. “You realize the importance of patience when you handle a team like ours,” Bavasi said.
If you draft young as we did, you have to bite the bullet. You don’t want to make wholesale changes too quickly. If you do you wind up mixing and matching and eventually rebuilding. The same goes for financing. In San Diego we had to trade three good pitchers—Pat Dobson, Fred Norman and Dave Giusti—for financial reasons. If we had bitten the bullet and made other financial adjustments, we would have been sitting pretty. But we had no other choice. Fortunately, we have the financial resources in Toronto to forestall any such difficulties.36
While Toronto was fielding poor Major League teams, Gillick was expending his energies creating the team he hoped would someday contend. In Toronto’s first crack at the amateur draft, in 1977, he selected Illinois prep outfielder Jesse Barfield. The next year he nabbed high school first baseman Lloyd Moseby, whom Toronto turned into an outfielder, and Dave Stieb, who had starred at Southern Illinois. Stieb hoped to play the outfield, but after Gillick met his asking price, he agreed to switch to the mound.37 He was one of baseball’s best pitchers in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, the Major League team continued to lose games, finishing a woeful 53-109 in 1979. Moreover, their manager appeared to lose control of his team. “Hartsfield was a bitter man,” wrote sports reporter Alison Gordon, “loathed by many of his players, ignored by his coaches, and the focus of the frustration of supporters who were impatient to win. It was not an enviable position, but he handled it badly.”38 In August relief pitcher Tom Buskey went public, saying, “We need a new manager. Roy Hartsfield just doesn’t know how to handle a pitching staff. Nobody knows what he’s supposed to be doing. Maybe you can see it in other parts of the game as well.” Third baseman Roy Howell and pitcher Tom Underwood piled on, voicing their own frustrations.39 Hartsfield, hired by Bavasi and never really a Gillick favorite, was let go after the season.
Knowing his club was not a contender, Gillick wanted a manager willing to sacrifice the present for the future as the team advanced its prospects to the Major Leagues. Gillick named Bobby Mattick, a career baseball man with limited managerial experience, who at sixty-four became the oldest rookie manager in Major League history. Under Mattick’s watch the team turned in its best season, albeit by winning just sixty-seven games. “He didn’t know beans about managing in the big leagues,” Gordon wrote. But “he lightened up all around and gave players back the fun they’d been missing. He brought Hartsfield’s enemies out of the doghouse and gave them a chance to play.”40
Mattick could not sustain the improvement in 1981. The team stood at a horrific 16-42 when a players strike interrupted the season, and even a 21-27 second half could not save Mattick’s job. “When the team began to lose in 1981,” Gordon wrote, “the honeymoon ended. What had once been quaint suddenly seemed incompetent.”41 Gillick returned Mattick to his scouting and player-development role, where he remained a valued member of the organization. “Bobby Mattick was the most complete scout and player development man I’ve ever seen,” Gillick later said.42
Despite the 1981 regression Gillick knew he was making progress. Several prospects from the system or the Rule 5 Draft had reached the Major Leagues, including Garcia, Griffin, Moseby, Bell, Upshaw, Barfield, and Stieb. “While the roots of the roster-development plan would remain in the farm system,” Gillick wrote in his year-end report, “the emphasis for 1982 will shift to a future-is-now concept.”43
For his new manager Gillick wanted Bobby Cox, who had managed in the Yankees’ system while Gillick was there and had just been released as manager by the Braves. “I’d call him a player’s manager,” Gillick said. “By that I mean his approach is to build confidence. He can be tough when that’s called for but basically, he gives the players the notion he’s on their side. And he knows what it takes to play defensively and scratch out runs.”44 Beeston concurred: “Cox’s biggest strength was the players loved to play for him. The guys never knew whether he liked them or didn’t like them. But they all thought he liked them. And you know he was just mean enough and tough enough that you weren’t going to take a chance.”45
Bavasi, however, fought Gillick on the choice: “He’s a friend of yours. That’s why you want him.”
“The hell it is,” Gillick shot back.46
Bavasi eventually acquiesced, but Gillick had grown tired of Bavasi’s management style, which he considered micromanaging and driven by an overgrown ego. Moreover, getting a decision out of Bavasi was becoming increasingly difficult. “You can’t get your ass in a wringer if you say no,” Gillick complained. “So anything you went to Bavasi for you’d have to fight him to make him say yes. It really got to be very tiring.”47 With lower subordinates Bavasi could be even more disagreeable. “He would just lose control of himself,” recalled lawyer Herb Solway. “There were two things he could do. He could either lose control of himself completely or he would go into an act where he would try and embarrass somebody in front of somebody else. It was just awful behavior.”48 Most agreed Bavasi had built a fine organization but was no longer effective. “He had a brilliant mind,” wrote longtime announcer Tom Cheek, “but had a grating obstinacy that made it difficult for those working under him. He was impulsive, at times egotistical, and he sorely lacked patience.”49
Beeston was even more frustrated than Gillick. When he resigned to take another job as business manager of a law firm, board chairman Peter Hardy decided it was time to investigate the team’s management. After talking with a number of people, he fired Bavasi on November 22, took over himself, and put Gillick in charge of the front office and Beeston the back.
With Bobby Cox leading the team in the dugout, Gillick continued to promote his prospects and make trades to fill in the positions not sufficiently addressed by the farm system. He traded veteran first baseman John Mayberry to the Yankees to open a spot for Upshaw, while Cox gave starting jobs to Barfield (right field) and Moseby (center field). Gillick also acquired two valuable platoon players: third baseman Rance Mulliniks and catcher Buck Martinez (obtained during the 1981 season). With a moderately revamped lineup and the same top-three starting pitchers—Stieb, Clancy, and Luis Leal—the 1982 Blue Jays finished a franchise best 78-84.
With his remarkably young team ready to break through, after the season Gillick acquired two older players—Cliff Johnson and Jorge Orta—to platoon at designated hitter. He also traded for thirty-year-old speedster Dave Collins to play left field. Gillick called this latter trade one of his favorites, not because of Collins, but for the additional prospect he wheedled out of the Yankees. Gillick initially negotiated with Bill Bergesch, the latest general manager in the Yankees’ ever-changing and chaotic front office. The Yankees desperately sought Toronto’s relief ace Dale Murray, and after several rounds of negotiations, Gillick agreed to take outfielder Dave Collins and pitcher Mike Morgan in exchange. But like any savvy trader, he wanted an additional prospect, particularly one with power. Gillick and his scouts liked eighteen-year-old first baseman Fred McGriff, still in rookie ball, but did not mention him right away for fear the Yankees would ask for more. Instead, Gillick mentioned Dan Pasqua and Don Mattingly, two prospects he knew the Yankees did not want to surrender. Finally, Steinbrenner stepped in and called Gillick, telling him that he would have to take McGriff as the third player in the deal or there would not be one. Gillick coyly said that he needed to check with his scouts and would call back in fifteen minutes. When he did so he got the player he wanted.50
Gillick’s team stepped forward in 1983, leading the division as late as July and finishing 89-73. Upshaw (27 home runs, .306 average), Barfield (27 home runs), Moseby (18 home runs, .315 average, 27 steals), and Johnson (22 home runs) all had solid offensive seasons. The platoons of Whitt and Martinez at catcher, Mulliniks and Garth Iorg at third, and Johnson and Orta were all productive as well. Of the regulars only Griffin, who had been unable to replicate the success of his rookie season, struggled at the plate.
The team again had excellent starting pitching, with Stieb (17-12, 3.04 ERA) the big star. In late June Gillick signed veteran pitcher Doyle Alexander, whom the Yankees had released. Alexander could be ornery, but Gillick believed the thirty-two-year-old right hander still had something left, and over the last half of the season Alexander finished 7-6 to round out an excellent rotation.
“If you can always stay in that 85 to 90 win area,” Gillick later said, “if you can stay injury free and somebody has a hot year offensively or a pitcher has a great year, you might get 95, 96, or 99 wins.”51 The Blue Jays, winners of 89 games, had a young core and were within Gillick’s window, and, accordingly, he tinkered less with the roster.
The 1984 Blue Jays returned nearly an identical team and posted an identical record, 89-73. Yet because of the Detroit Tigers’ phenomenal start (35-5 at one point), no pennant race ever developed; the Jays finished in second place, but 15 games out of first. The team’s lineup underwent two significant changes. Tony Fernandez, signed out of the Dominican Republic by Epy Guerrero in 1979, finally wrestled the shortstop job from Alfredo Griffin late in the 1984 season. And George Bell, the former Rule 5 signee, finally earned regular playing time, hitting .292 with 26 home runs. The Blue Jays’ young outfield—Bell, Moseby, and Barfield—was often ranked as the best in baseball over the next several years.
The most troublesome element of the team’s performance continued to be the bullpen. For 1984 Gillick had signed veteran Dennis Lamp and promoted twenty-three-year-old Jimmy Key, drafted in the third round in 1982. Neither proved particularly effective, nor did holdover Roy Lee Jackson. “I learned a couple of things,” Hall of Fame manager Whitey Herzog once wrote. “First, if at all possible, get yourself a great relief pitcher.”52
Gillick resolved to do just that and traded Griffin and Collins, recently displaced by Fernandez and Bell, to Seattle for Bill Caudill, whose 36 saves in 1984 were second in the league. Cox was not fully sold on Caudill. “He placed his two index fingers about six inches apart,” Cheek later wrote of a conversation with Cox during the trade negotiations, “and said ‘Tom, he’s lost about that much off his fastball.’”53 Gillick also acquired left-handed reliever Gary Lavelle from the Giants for two Minor Leaguers and pitcher Jim Gott.
Otherwise, Gillick returned the same team in 1985, losing only DH Cliff Johnson to free agency. Of the eight position players, only catcher (where Whitt and Martinez platooned) was manned by a player who had reached thirty years old. On the mound Stieb (twenty-five) was a star, Clancy (twenty-nine) was still going strong, and Key (twenty-four) joined the rotation for the first time.
On the strength of its pitching staff (a league-leading 3.31 ERA despite playing in a hitter’s park), in 1985 the Blue Jays broke through with a 99-63 record to win the highly competitive AL East. Stieb led the league in ERA, Key finished fourth, and Alexander went 17-10. The lineup was balanced and deep, led by the slugging of Bell and Barfield and the all-around excellence of Moseby and Fernandez. Cox worked all season to replace Johnson’s DH production, before Gillick acquired veteran Al Oliver in July and then reacquired Johnson in late August.
In the bullpen Caudill and Lavelle pitched poorly during April, earning the scorn of the now impatient Jays fans and losing Cox’s confidence. Although both pitched better as the season evolved, neither ever really gained the team’s complete trust.
Fortunately, Gillick had again secured a key player from an unconventional source, a new river. For a few years in the 1980s, teams that lost a free agent (as the Blue Jays had lost Johnson) could select from a pool of players made available by teams that signed free agents. As compensation for losing Johnson, the Jays selected Tom Henke, a young, hard-throwing relief pitcher who had yet to break through with the Rangers. Henke started the 1985 season in the Minors, but Toronto promoted him in late July, and he thereupon pitched spectacularly, allowing no runs in his first eleven appearances. Henke ended the season with thirteen saves, blowing just one, and an ERA of 2.03. In recognition of his influence on the pennant race, Henke finished twentieth in the league MVP voting.
Cox deserves additional credit for the division title because he essentially played the season with just twenty-three players. While the Blue Jays scouts were successful in finding value in the Rule 5 Draft, these players needed to be kept on the Major League roster the entire next season. Because most of these players were generally not Major League ready—otherwise they would have been protected from the draft—they often just sat on their new team’s bench for a season. When Toronto was still uncompetitive, the burden of carrying these players seemed a reasonable trade-off. But with a contending team in 1985, it is surprising that Gillick saddled Cox with two Rule 5 players, Manny Lee and Lou Thornton. Both appeared only sporadically, effectively leaving Cox with a much shorter bench than he would have liked. But one of the many things Gillick appreciated about his manager was that be bought into the overall program, even when it made his job a little harder.54
In the 1985 League Championship Series against Kansas City, the first year the Series expanded from best of five to best of seven, Toronto won three of the first four games. Then the offense went cold, and they scored only five runs in the last three games. In the end Kansas City prevailed in seven games, winning the pennant and, ultimately, the World Series.
In building the 1985 Blue Jays, Gillick lived by his “many rivers into one” metaphor, using, among others, the expansion draft, the amateur draft, the Rule 5 Draft, and even (in the case of Henke) free-agent compensation to build his team. One river that he fished in more productively than most other teams was the one representing Latin America. In 1985 Toronto allocated 2,068 plate appearances to Latino players, second only to the Giants, who had just 1 more. No other team had more than 1,600. The Blue Jays also had quite a few African Americans on their squad, resulting in the team receiving fewer plate appearances from Caucasian players than any team in the Majors. This tendency was much less pronounced on the pitching side, though there were comparably few nonwhite pitchers in that era.
Gillick had built a team he wanted: one that could be consistently profitable while winning 85–90 games, with the expectation of occasionally breaking through to 95-plus wins and a division title. The Blue Jays were loaded with talent, and Gillick had continued to integrate new young stars as the older ones lost effectiveness.
The Blue Jays suffered a setback when Cox resigned shortly after the 1985 playoff loss to become the general manager of the Atlanta Braves, whose owner, Ted Turner, had realized his mistake in letting Cox go four years earlier. Cox would help rebuild the Braves’ organization and later return to the dugout, where he would manage the club to one of the great multiyear runs in baseball history. As for Pat Gillick, he would need to utilize one more river before finally delivering a World Series to Toronto.