The Game: Inside the Secret World of Major League Baseball’s Power Brokers Read online

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  To Suzi,

  and in memory of Harriet

  Prologue

  THE BESPECTACLED 66-YEAR-OLD man in the blue blazer, white shirt, and red tie is walking across the thin stretch of grass between the first baseline and the home-team dugout. His name is Bud Selig, and it’s several hours before his favorite team takes the field for batting practice. Selig usually enjoys being surrounded by people, but this quiet period before a baseball game is one of the Commissioner’s favorites. It’s April 6, 2001, and only a few stadium workers dot the stands. He’s not sure if it’s the serenity of the moment, the simple beauty of the manicured field, or the sweep of the grandstand that evokes the game’s past. But for a man who has a lifelong love affair with baseball, it feels like walking into a cathedral.

  He glances over at the pitcher’s mound, his blue eyes squinting, and marvels at just how high it rises and how gosh-darn close it feels to home plate. He looks beyond the mound to the green walls stretched across the sprawling outfield. Even on his best days growing up on Milwaukee’s ball fields, he could never knock a ball over those fences. No; the players who could do that were gods.

  There’s much about the game he cherishes, though maybe not as much as he did in the ’70s, when he was a young owner and the game seemed simpler. So much has changed, so many battles have been fought, so much blood spilled. He often finds himself thinking back to 1992, when he led the revolt against his friend Commissioner Fay Vincent, took control of the game, and saved it. The game was in chaos back then. Yes, he’d sacrificed a World Series, but it was his good judgment, his innovations, and his political skill—especially his political skill—that brought the game back to life. He’s sure of that.

  Baseball is too important a social institution to fail—isn’t that what he’s told every fan, reporter, and lawmaker ever since? If that weren’t true, how had he been able to help raise billions in taxpayer money to build baseball stadiums? The game has 11 sparkling new stadiums because Selig persuaded local governments to give him what he wanted—what he needed—to keep baseball alive in their cities.

  Nowhere is that more true than here in Milwaukee, where the stadium closest to his heart is finally ready. In a few hours the first pitch will be thrown at the $414 million Miller Park. There are still many in this town who bitterly resent bailing out his debt-ridden team, but even the harshest critics admire the architectural wonder he’s given them.

  Selig’s eyes roam his team’s new home. The one-of-a-kind fan-shaped retractable roof. A plaza lined with restaurants, shops, and luxury suites. Soaring brick archways that keep the promise voiced in the Brewers’ new promotional video: Miller Park, where a fan can’t help but feel the reincarnation of baseball’s romantic past.

  Selig walks a few steps down the baseline, his hands in his pockets, his slight slouch familiar to any baseball fan. How many times has he already watched the six-minute promo? He loves the clip of Hank Aaron and the Braves winning the ’57 World Series and the celebration that followed—the first and last the town’s enjoyed during its 50 years of baseball. And the clip of Robin Yount getting his 3,000th hit in a Brewers uniform. He’s especially fond of the final passage, which will soon play on the 48-foot-wide screen in center field.

  Miller Park will create a barn fire of passion for the team. The eyes of the baseball world will focus on Milwaukee, and talk of the inadequacies of small market baseball will give way to praise and the recollection of a time when fans lived and died with their team and the team waged battle for their fans. A time when loyalty to the grand old game was shared equally between players, owners, fans, and corporations.

  Selig smiles. He was the town’s 35-year-old boy wonder when he brought baseball back to Milwaukee in 1970. His reward: a team to run as he saw fit. Now he stands in his new stadium, running not just his team but also his entire sport.

  Selig takes one more look around the park, then walks slowly into the Brewers dugout. He ambles through a series of tunnels and onto an elevator that brings him up to the .300 Club, where his friends and the city’s leaders are gathered to celebrate the place that took him almost 15 years to build. He spends a few hours there, shaking hands and accepting congratulations, until word comes that he is needed back downstairs.

  It’s time to greet the man who once believed he would become the Commissioner of baseball.

  President George W. Bush is working his way through Miller Park’s visitors locker room surrounded by Secret Service agents and White House reporters. Just 24 hours earlier, Bush was in D.C., where the popular new President pushed Congress closer to passing his $1.35 trillion, 10-year tax cut. He’d promised his old friend Buddy that he’d throw out the first pitch the night Miller Park opened, and it was a promise he planned to keep.

  So he’d flown into Milwaukee on Air Force One earlier this afternoon with Laura, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and his Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, the former Wisconsin governor who helped build Bud’s stadium. And now Bush is doing what he loves—hanging with major league players, sharing stories of his days running the Texas Rangers, and autographing a baseball for Hall of Famer Rod Carew, now the Brewers hitting coach.

  “Something’s wrong with this picture, me signing this for you,” Bush tells Carew as he hands him the baseball. Everyone laughs. Bush is radiant in his black cowboy boots and dark slacks, a blue satin Brewers warm-up jacket pulled over a 40-pound flak vest. He’s smiling broadly as he shakes hands with player after player.

  “You’ve got my support on the tax cut,” Cincinnati Reds pitcher Scott Sullivan tells him.

  “It’s going to be a heck of a lot bigger than anyone thought,” Bush shouts back.

  Bush is clearly enjoying himself, Selig thinks as he follows the President on his tour of the clubhouses. The two men developed a bond when Bush joined baseball in 1989, a few months after helping his father win the White House. They had much in common. Both grew up close to their mothers and wanted desperately to impress their fathers. Both were accustomed to being underestimated, something each uses to his full advantage.

  And both have an abiding love for baseball. As a boy in grade school, Bush carried a bat to class every day, idolized Willie Mays, and talked about owning a baseball team, just like his uncle, one of the original owners of the Mets. But his real dream, one of Bush’s best friends told a magazine writer just before the 2000 election, was to become baseball’s Commissioner.

  “He wanted to be Kenesaw Mountain Landis,” the friend said. “I’m still convinced that’s his goal.”

  Chances are Selig has seen that article. There isn’t much concerning baseball that he doesn’t read, listen to, or watch. While some scoffed at the notion after Bush was elected President, Bud and others inside baseball know how much George W. Bush wanted to be Commissioner. And how close he had come.

  It was one of the many challenges Selig faced after Vincent’s removal in September of 1992. Vincent is a longtime fr
iend of the Bush family, and George openly supported the Commissioner right down to the day of his forced resignation. Selig assumed control two days later, but the last thing he wanted was to alienate a friend. Especially one with such powerful connections. So Selig made Bush a promise: he would support his dream to become baseball’s next Commissioner.

  It was a promise Selig would never keep—there was just too much at stake, and Bush wasn’t battle-tested. The owners were preparing for another war with their players and union leader Don Fehr, a war Vincent was not prepared to fight. “The Commissioner should represent the players and the fans as well as the owners,” Vincent kept telling Selig. That’s when Selig knew Vincent had to go.

  No, this was not the time for someone else to run his game—no matter how often he told Bush the job could be his.

  Selig is sure he made the right decision back in 1992. And he is even more certain now, in 2001, for history seems ready to repeat itself. The labor deal he accepted after the 1994 strike was a truce, not a peace plan. Players are still making too much money. George Steinbrenner—with four titles in the last five seasons and a cable channel soon to launch—is still spending too much money. And Don Fehr is still in charge of the union. The power struggle between Selig, Steinbrenner, and Fehr—which in many ways has defined this era—has not abated.

  Billions are again on the line, but this time there is a difference. Selig has made the owners even richer, doubling the value of their franchises and tripling their revenues with new stadiums and television deals. He’s growing rich, too, thanks to this new stadium and the $3 million salary—plus bonuses—he now earns as Commissioner.

  And he has far more power, too. Last time his main focus was bringing the owners together—a task once thought near impossible. Nothing, he knew, could ever get done without a united front. That accomplished, he now has complete control of labor negotiations. He’s spent millions lobbying Congress to get to this moment, and he has a popular friend and ally in the White House, one who’s just passed a landmark tax bill favoring many of the rich men who own baseball teams.

  How could things have worked out any better?

  Every one of the 42,024 seats at Miller Park is filled with fans who’ve already splurged on overpriced hot dogs, beer, and Brewers merchandise. They’ve watched the huge bald eagle leave its left-field perch next to Bernie Brewer and swoop down to the pitcher’s mound while kids from every county in the state held the edges of a giant, outfield-covering flag. They’ve listened to longtime Brewers announcer Bob Uecker’s well-worn but oddly entertaining jokes and paid equal attention to the introductions of Yount and Rice. Now they’re ready for the main event.

  “Mr. President, Mr. Commissioner, it’s time,” a Brewers official says just minutes before the first game’s scheduled start.

  Bush practiced pitching for an hour with White House spokesman Ari Fleischer a day earlier while waiting out the tax vote. He entertained reporters earlier that night by telling them he was still deciding between throwing a split finger or a straight fastball to Brewers manager Davey Lopes, who is now standing behind home plate ready to catch the first pitch. The President and the Commissioner, still chatting away, follow their escorts into the Brewers dugout.

  The two men pause, then Selig climbs the steps and strides to the top of the pitcher’s mound. He will throw out the first pitch. The President will have to wait his turn.

  Selig is, after all, the Commissioner.

  And this is his game.

  PART I

  CHANGING OF THE GUARD

  (1992–1994)

  Chapter 1

  IN BUD WE TRUST

  September 3–September 9, 1992

  IT’S THE THIRD day of September in 1992, and Milwaukee Brewers owner Allan “Bud” Selig turns his black Lexus sedan south on Interstate 94 for the short drive to Chicago that’s been a long time coming. He’s called a meeting to decide the future of Commissioner Fay Vincent, the man he now considers the most urgent of baseball’s many problems. Most of the game’s other 27 owners want Vincent to resign, a rare display of unity, but Selig isn’t sure their resolve will hold. Nor is he certain they can fire Vincent without an ugly fight.

  What Selig does know is this:

  He has to persuade Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to share his rapidly growing revenues, which Selig’s Brewers have no hopes of ever matching.

  He has to force union leader Don Fehr to accept a cap on the players’ rapidly growing salaries, which his Brewers have no real hope of paying.

  And he has to twist the arms of Wisconsin politicians to build a new stadium so he can pay off his rapidly growing debt.

  There’s only one way to make sure all this happens: take control of the game. Now. The survival of his baseball team—and every other small market team—depends on it.

  Vincent didn’t have to be shoved aside like this, Selig thinks as his car barrels down the highway. He’s been warning Vincent for months that his Commissioner’s job was in jeopardy if he didn’t agree to stay out of the upcoming labor negotiations.

  Sure, there are other issues that have put Vincent’s job at risk. American League owners are still irate that Vincent gave them less than a quarter of last year’s $190 million expansion fees—$42 million to the National League’s $148 million—even though both leagues supplied the same number of players to stock the new Colorado and Florida teams. Of course the owners somehow forgot they’d asked Vincent to decide the split after they couldn’t agree among themselves.

  And the Tribune Company is now taking baseball to court over Vincent’s decision to move their Chicago Cubs to the NL West along with the St. Louis Cardinals. Again, it was the NL owners who asked Vincent to make that call. But by next season the Tribune Company will pay seven teams for their broadcast rights, so that request was easy to forget, too.

  Truth is, Vincent was never a comfortable fit for the game’s owners. He was already a wealthy man when he was swept into office two days after his close friend and Commissioner Bart Giamatti died of a sudden heart attack on September 1, 1989, after only five months in office. He was elevated to stardom a month later for the calm hand he displayed after a 6.9 earthquake hit minutes before Game 3 of the Giants-A’s World Series, killing 63, injuring 3,700, and paralyzing the Bay Area for days. Working with local authorities, Vincent and baseball played a key role in guiding a crippled San Francisco back to life. A dedicated baseball fan and star athlete until a fall in college left him hobbled, Vincent felt the Commissioner should tend to the interests of the owners and the players and fans. And that meant wading into labor negotiations when they stall, as they have like clockwork for almost two decades.

  But the labor contract holds the key to fixing the owners’ problems, and labor talks have been Selig’s domain ever since he took over the Player Relations Committee, the owners’ bargaining unit, in 1985. Going up against Fehr and the union was his job. And Selig desperately wants Vincent out of the way.

  Selig and his allies have no intention of allowing a replay of 1990, when they felt Vincent double-crossed them by meeting secretly with Fehr at his Greenwich, Connecticut, home during the owners’ long spring training lockout. Vincent undermined management’s position during that visit, taking their salary cap proposal off the table and giving in to union demands. At least, that’s the way the owners saw it. The resulting agreement left free agency intact and player salaries continued to climb.

  No, Selig isn’t taking any chances this time around. Not when he has so much at stake.

  Quite simply, Selig knows he can’t keep things going in Milwaukee unless the game’s economics change—and change dramatically. He already has so many liens on his franchise that he was forced to take $35 million from baseball’s line of credit just to pay this season’s bills. He’s certain to lose a host of players to free agency in a few months, including his team’s biggest star. And he needs a new stadium, but those talks are going nowhere with the game’s financial structure in doubt.
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  Fehr’s solution: move the Brewers to a bigger market. Selig was a 31-year-old car dealer and the largest nonvoting shareholder of the Milwaukee Braves when his team packed up and moved to Atlanta for the 1966 season. It took four years for him to beg, borrow, and all but steal a team out of a Seattle bankruptcy court to bring Major League Baseball back to Milwaukee. He’ll be damned if his hometown will lose a baseball team for the second time.

  Selig’s mind turns to his relationship with Fehr. Nothing infuriates baseball’s owners more than the media calling Fehr the game’s most powerful man. Selig believes all Fehr really cares about is getting big money for his players. And that’s why he has to be stopped, if not driven from the game completely.

  Not that Selig hasn’t already tried and lost. It was Fehr who took the owners to arbitration—three times—after they stopped bidding on free agents for three seasons in the late ’80s. Each time Fehr accused the owners of collusion, and each time an arbitrator agreed. It cost the owners $280 million—almost $11 million each—to settle all cases. Selig is still working to pay off that bill.

  Selig glances in his rearview mirror and sees the man who negotiated that settlement, Foley & Lardner lawyer Bob DuPuy, sitting in the backseat of the Lexus, behind Bud’s daughter Wendy. DuPuy looks a bit nervous, and Selig jokes that they both need to relax instead of worrying about how fast he’s weaving his car through traffic.

  Was it only last May that he instructed DuPuy to work with a growing number of owners who wanted to sack Vincent? What began as a group of six teams grew to 18, and Selig had DuPuy monitor their meetings, coordinate with their lawyers, and report everything back to him. When Vincent got word of these meetings, he told them what they were considering was meaningless—the game’s constitution clearly states that a sitting Commissioner cannot be removed. It became DuPuy’s task to find a hole in Vincent’s argument, a task that turned into a full-time job.