Feeding the Monster Page 11
It was soon after this meeting that Henry began to come to grips with the fact that it was unlikely he’d be able to keep the Marlins in South Florida. “I am grieving over the extinction of this franchise [we] have worked so hard to have and have felt so much about,” he wrote that month in an email to Lucinda Treat. “We have to work to save as much [of it] as possible.” By June 2001, Henry’s negotiations concerning the Angels had advanced to the point at which Henry and Treat were examining the terms of the Angels’ stadium lease. Soon afterward, Larry Lucchino reported back to Selig that Henry did, indeed, seem to have exhausted all his options for staying in Florida. Not long after that, Henry asked Lucchino if he wanted to join his bid to take over the Angels, whether through an outright sale or contraction. “Let’s talk,” Lucchino said. “That could be interesting.”
*As part of his payroll reduction, Huizenga traded outfielder Moises Alou to the Houston Astros, starting pitcher Kevin Brown to the San Diego Padres, first baseman Jeff Conine to the Kansas City Royals, center fielder Devon White to the Arizona Diamondbacks, and closer Robb Nen to the San Francisco Giants. A month into the 1998 season, the Marlins traded right fielder Gary Sheffield and third baseman Bobby Bonilla to the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Marlins finished the 1998 season with 54 wins and 108 losses.
†Henry’s boat was christened as a way of honoring his steadfast approach to business. In 1985, a suddenly weakened dollar caused Henry to lose as much as 10 percent of his clients’ funds in a single day. One investment firm immediately fired JWH & Co. as manager of a futures fund named Iroquois. Henry didn’t alter his approach, rode out the plunge, and ended up recording one of his best years ever. The Iroquois fund didn’t fare as well, and soon went belly up.
*Following the 2004 season, the Montreal Expos became the first team to relocate in more than 30 years when they moved to Washington, D.C., and renamed themselves the Nationals. Before that, the last team to move had left D.C.: In 1972, the Washington Senators relocated to Texas, becoming the Rangers.
Chapter 10
Putting Together
the Team
IN OCTOBER 2000, when John Harrington announced that the Red Sox were up for sale, he became a very popular man. Throughout the fall, he received dozens and dozens of inquiries about the team; eventually, more than 100 parties indicated they’d be interested in bidding. Fewer than half that number paid the $25,000 fee required to start the process, and by the summer of 2001, that number had been whittled down to between five and 10 serious bidders.
“We basically spent most of the [2001] season revving up interest in the team,” says Bingham, Dana & Gould’s* Daniel Goldberg, one of the lawyers who handled the sale. “And the best way to realize the most value is to make it clear, repeatedly, that the only thing we’re looking for is the most money. There wasn’t going to be a local guy’s discount, or anything else.”
On the field, the Red Sox seemed almost determined to convince potential suitors to resist the urge to buy the team. In May, Pedro Martinez beat the Yankees, throwing eight innings of shutout ball. With a 7-1 record, he looked well positioned to make a run at his third straight Cy Young Award. After the game, Martinez got to talking. “I don’t believe in damn curses,” he said, referring to the by then infamous Curse of the Bambino. “Wake up the damn Bambino and have me face him. Maybe I’ll drill him in the ass.” Soon after, it became clear that something was physically wrong with Martinez, and by the end of June, he had been put on the disabled list, where he’d spend most of the rest of the season with a partially torn rotator cuff. Manny Ramirez, in his first season in Boston, began a pattern of confounding his teammates, his managers, and the media alike. When he arrived late at July’s All-Star Game—he was Boston’s only representative—he explained his tardiness by telling one group of reporters that his grandmother was “kind of sick,” while telling another group she had died. Ramirez’s agent, meanwhile, told the press that Ramirez was delayed because he had to attend to business in New York, while Ramirez himself said he’d flown in from Miami.
Then there was the team’s manager, the inscrutable Jimy Williams. He often refused to tell players if they’d be starting before the day of the game, leading to scenes like the one that occurred when infielder Mike Lansing gave a posted lineup card the middle finger when he came to the park and discovered he wouldn’t be playing that day. When asked about almost anything, Williams responded with a terse, enigmatic “Manager’s decision.” Duquette and Williams, who had been feuding since the close of the 2000 season, rarely spoke. In August, Williams was finally fired* and replaced by pitching coach Joe Kerrigan, under whom the team lost nine in a row and 13 out of 14. Less than a month after promoting Kerrigan, Duquette demoted John Cumberland, who’d been acting as the team’s interim pitching coach, just as the media was entering the Red Sox clubhouse. Nomar Garciaparra watched the scene unfold in amazement. “That,” he announced in a voice purposefully loud enough for reporters to hear, “is why nobody wants to fucking play here.”
Perhaps most disturbingly, Duquette and Kerrigan let the injured Martinez return to the mound in late August. He pitched 13 innings in three games—all Red Sox losses—between August 26 and September 7. The stupidity of allowing an injured, already fragile, franchise pitcher to risk a career-ending injury is staggering, but Duquette was looking to burnish his credentials for the team’s new owners. If Martinez gave the Red Sox even the slightest chance of advancing to the playoffs, Duquette was determined to take advantage of it.
Neither the Red Sox’s late-summer slide nor the dysfunctionality of its management seemed to dull the ardor of the team’s suitors, and by August, Harrington was ready to start collecting opening proffers. He asked for nonbinding bids from the most serious contenders, along with financial documents proving the interested parties could actually afford the team. Six legitimate bids came in from Cablevision’s Charles Dolan; Jeremy Jacobs, the owner of the Boston Bruins; Boston real estate developer Frank McCourt; Joe O’Donnell and Steve Karp; New York lawyer Miles Prentice; and Tom Werner and Les Otten. All of the bids were for between $305 and $325 million.
“We needed these bids before we allowed anyone in to see the documents relating to the team’s financials, before they could go and talk to John Harrington or kick the tires at NESN,” says Justin Morreale, the Bingham, Dana & Gould lawyer who handled the sale with Daniel Goldberg. Over the next month, Harrington, Morreale, and Goldberg met with every bidding group to discuss the specifics of a potential sale.
By this point, it had become clear that NESN, the Red Sox’s cable network, was a huge factor in several bidders’ interest in the team. A few months before, Harrington had successfully negotiated deals with all the major cable providers in eastern Massachusetts to move NESN onto basic cable lineups; the switch, once complete, would mean the network would reach 3.6 million homes in New England, about 10 times the number of subscribers who paid to receive the channel when it was a premium-only option. The network’s revenues, which would be around $3 million for 2001, were expected to rise to more than $40 million within four years, and conservative estimates put NESN’s worth at around $300 million. Crucially, while the money NESN paid to the Red Sox for the right to broadcast the team’s games qualified as local revenue and was therefore subject to baseball’s revenue-sharing agreement, NESN’s actual profits were supposed to be untouchable by Major League Baseball. The network virtually guaranteed that the new owners of the Red Sox would make money regardless of whether the team itself was profitable.
Harrington and his lawyers knew that the team’s newly negotiated cable deals and industry analysts’ robust projections for NESN likely meant that the team would go for more than what the six viable suitors had offered in the first round of bids. On September 10, the team gave Salomon Smith Barney, its investment banker, permission to go over its estimation of the team’s value with a reporter from The Boston Globe. The Yawkey Trust’s stake in the team, the investment firm told the Globe, was lik
ely worth “upward of $400 million.” With final, binding bids due on November 29, the Sox hoped this robust projection would help drive the team’s price even higher.
That same afternoon, Les Otten and Tom Werner had a meeting scheduled with John Harrington and the Red Sox’s lawyers at Bingham, Dana & Gould’s downtown Boston offices. The meeting was called for two o’clock. Not knowing how long it would last, Werner had booked the first flight from Boston to Los Angeles the next morning: American Airlines Flight 11.
The meeting that afternoon went well; Werner remembers thinking that Harrington seemed to feel that Werner and Otten would be good caretakers for the team. By four thirty, Werner was done for the day. Instead of spending the night wandering around Boston, he called his girlfriend, Katie Couric, who was in Washington interviewing Vermont senator Jim Jeffords.
“I’m out of my meeting early,” Werner said. “If you’re okay with it, I’ll fly out to New York and have dinner with you tonight and leave tomorrow morning for L.A.” Couric was almost done with her work in D.C., and the two agreed to meet around seven. Racing to the airport, Werner caught the 5:30 P.M. Delta Shuttle to New York City. The next morning he left on the day’s first flight from JFK Airport to Los Angeles.
“I remember so vividly what a clear day it was,” Werner says. “The plane had a stunning view of the World Trade Center over the Hudson River. It was beautiful.” Less than an hour later, the pilot on Werner’s plane made an announcement. There was a systemwide grounding, the pilot said, and all the planes in the air had been directed to the nearest airport. Werner wondered if someone had called American Airlines with a bomb threat. It was only after landing in Kansas City that he learned about the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.
“Now there’s something like 300 people in the airport lounge, and American is telling everyone we’re all going to take off and continue to go to our destinations in a couple of hours,” Werner says. “My instinct was I wanted to be with my kids. I had spoken to one of them the night before, but one still thought I was on Flight 11 [one of the planes that had crashed into the World Trade Center]. And also there was the assumption that there might be terrorists on other planes. So until I landed and could reach them, there was a lot of concern that I was dead.” Werner decided it was unlikely his flight would be taking off anytime soon. Instead of waiting at the airport, he rented a car and made the three-day trek to California.
“It was a very sobering experience,” says Werner. “And obviously, it makes you think about what’s important in life.” During the drive back to California, Werner kept thinking about how unpleasant his tenure with the Padres had been. If he was successful in his attempt to purchase the Red Sox, he vowed that the experience would be one that would bring him joy.
Immediately after the September 11 attacks, Major League Baseball shut down operations. Planes around the country were grounded and there was great anxiety about the potential for violence or suicide attacks at large public gatherings. Ballparks hadn’t been built with bomb threats or renegade terrorists in mind; in fact, most stadiums made an effort to get as many people as possible into the park with minimum hassle. Throughout the game, owners were concerned about how the attacks would affect fan attendance. Even after the 2001 season resumed, with attendance more or less equal to what it had been previously, baseball executives were worried about how the long-term repercussions of a post-9/11 world could affect the game.
The Red Sox were particularly worried. If baseball, which had experienced an enormous boom in the previous five years, was seen to be on shaky footing, the interest in the team could crumble. “We had no idea how this was going to affect the economy, how it’d affect fans, how it’d affect efforts to build a new stadium,” says Daniel Goldberg. “We’d spent all these months driving up the price. And now we were worried the bottom could fall out.”
Even without worrying about a drop-off in fan support—the Marlins rarely had enough paying customers to make the threat of low attendance much of a concern—John Henry’s situation in Florida was rapidly changing as well. The September 11 attacks had hurt Florida’s tourism industry, thereby ending any possibility the Marlins would get public money for a stadium. What’s more, the collective bargaining agreement that governed the players’ relationship with the league was up for renewal, and the threat of a protracted labor dispute seemed at least to delay, and possibly squelch, baseball’s contraction plans. After a year of telling Henry that he wouldn’t need to continue losing money in Florida, Bud Selig gave him a “put” for his team, guaranteeing that Major League Baseball would buy the franchise from Henry for $158 million—the price he paid in 1999—if Henry had an opportunity to purchase another team and couldn’t find a suitable buyer for the Marlins.* At last, Henry entered into serious negotiations with the Angels to buy the team outright. He asked Larry Lucchino—“by far and away the smartest man in baseball,” Henry says—to join his effort as the Angels CEO should Henry win the team.
“That might be a problem,” Lucchino said. “Tom Werner called and offered me the position of president and CEO of the Red Sox. But I don’t think he’s going to get the team.”
“Look,” Henry said, “if you’re in a position to run the Red Sox, you gotta go for it.” And if, as Henry and Lucchino both suspected, Werner failed in his bid to get the Sox, maybe all three of them could join forces in California, with Lucchino running the team and Werner coming on board as a minority partner. “You’ll love Tom,” Lucchino promised. “He’s an incredible guy.”
“The Angels situation seemed perfect,” says Henry. “I had lived there, Peggy was okay with moving back there, we could be relatively low key about the whole thing.” But Disney was proving difficult to negotiate with. “They just wanted to negotiate the hell out of the deal,” Henry says. “And what they wanted to do wasn’t a good deal for us from the player-contract standpoint. It wasn’t a good deal from the price standpoint. And it wasn’t a good deal from the cable standpoint.” The Angels were saddled with the prohibitively expensive contract of ex-Red Sox slugger Mo Vaughn, who had been hobbled by injuries but was still owed $40 million over the next three seasons. Henry refused to take on Vaughn’s contract. “Disney was being pretty intractable, and the chances of a deal occurring seemed increasingly remote,” Henry says. “I’m very intractable myself, especially because the Angels weren’t a team I was wedded to. So I began to think that, you know, a deal just wasn’t going to happen.”
The baseball season, meanwhile, drew to a close. After a late-season run, the New York Mets, who’d become the sentimental favorites of much of the country, missed the playoffs. So, predictably, did the Red Sox, who collapsed at the end of the season, finishing 13.5 games behind the division-winning Yankees and 19.5 games behind the wild-card–winning Oakland A’s. There was off-field turmoil as well, with outspoken center fielder “Caveman” Carl Everett (who once famously said, “You can’t say there were dinosaurs when you never saw them”) becoming a punching bag for the press as well as a clubhouse distraction. At one point, while Everett was on the injured list, Red Sox right fielder Trot Nixon said Everett was “waiting around and not rehabbing or anything.” Nixon soon tried to backpedal. “I am not trying to piss off Carl by any means,” he said, “because that is not my job.” Even Red Sox reliever Derek Lowe commiserated with the team’s angry fans: “I’d boo too,” he said. Manny Ramirez, despite hitting 41 home runs and knocking in 125 runs, complained about never feeling at ease in his new home. “Manny performs best in a relaxed environment,” Ramirez’s agent said after the season ended. “He prefers a comfortable clubhouse. It was anything but that last season.”
The Yankees, for their part, advanced to the World Series for the fifth time in six years. There they faced the Arizona Diamondbacks, who had the imposing pitching tandem of Randy Johnson, the 6-foot-10 southpaw who hurled fastballs close to 100 miles per hour, and Curt Schilling, the media-loving warrior who threw almost as hard. Schilling and
Johnson started five of the seven games in the series, and Johnson came on to win Game 7 in relief. The Diamondbacks beat the Yankees four games to three, and the two pitching aces shared the 2001 World Series Most Valuable Player award.
On Friday, November 2, two days before the World Series ended, Henry took a walk around the man-made lake that borders his house in Boca Raton. By this point, Peggy Henry, who had already picked out a house in Southern California, was urging her husband to just sell the Marlins and get out of baseball. “I didn’t want to do that,” he says. “I still really wanted to be a part of the game.” That night, after deciding he was no longer going to pursue the Angels, he began to consider making a play for the Oakland A’s. Before going to sleep he asked Peggy if she’d consider moving to San Francisco. She looked at him with tears in her eyes.
“The next day, I woke up and I’m in our morning room still thinking about Oakland. They’re down at the bottom of the revenue scale, too. Do I really want to do that again? Why don’t I look at the opposite end of the spectrum? So I said, ‘OK, what about the Yankees? Is George [Steinbrenner] going to sell?’ I had a great relationship with him, and with all of the partners. What would it take to gain control of the Yankees? But I just didn’t see that happening.