When the baseball owners convene this Thursday in Baltimore to vote on a new commissioner, Bud Selig, whose legacy is clearly hanging in the balance, will no doubt be thinking about those famous words of Don Vito Corleone — “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer” — and lamenting how he didn’t know the difference.
For it is Selig’s alleged closest friends in the owners’ fraternity — his longtime BFF, White Sox board chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, Blue Jays president Paul Beeston, and the Red Sox ownership troika, John Henry, Larry Lucchino and Tom Werner — who have joined forces to block the commissioner’s longtime deputy, Rob Manfred, from ascending to the top job.
In 2001, Selig secured one of baseball’s signature franchises for Henry, Lucchino and Werner for $660 million in what the Massachusetts attorney general famously called a “bag job,” designed to keep Cablevision tycoon Charles Dolan (who reportedly bid $750 million for the Red Sox) out of baseball.
Although Reinsdorf has continued to insist there is no rift between him and Selig and that all he wants is “an open election,” he and his cohorts, who also include Angels owner Arte Moreno, have made no secret of their opposition to Manfred, the point man in all of the commissioner’s most notable “legacy” achievements. Those achievements include: 19 years of labor peace; revenue sharing; the unprecedented, most comprehensive joint drug agreement in all of professional sports; the successful prosecution of Alex Rodriguez and the 11 other drug cheats in last summer’s Biogenesis scandal; and the resolution of the Frank McCourt-Dodgers sale debacle.
What do they have against Manfred? Supposedly, in their minds, he is not tough enough with the players union — a notion that is laughable when you consider Manfred was able to finally get the players on board with drug testing after years of their leaders fighting fiercely against it. But even more laughable is their contention that Selig, for whom they lobbied and campaigned to be elected to the Hall of Fame while he was still in office, was constantly making side deals and was not nearly inclusive enough as commissioner. To now elect Manfred, they say, will be an extension of this.
Selig is guilty on both counts, but who were the biggest beneficiaries of his actions? Reinsdorf has been on the executive council and in the seat of power for as long as Selig has been in office, while Henry has been on it the past five years. And the “three-team monte” Selig pulled off in 2001, in which MLB bought the Montreal Expos from Jeffrey Loria, who then bought the Florida Marlins from Henry so Henry could take over the Red Sox, literally saved the baseball careers of Henry, Lucchino and Werner.
Henry was drowning in red ink in Miami, fighting a losing battle with the south Florida bureaucrats for a new stadium for the Marlins and drawing hatred from the fans; Lucchino, after a highly successful run as president of the Padres from 1995-2001, had a bad falling out with San Diego owner John Moores and was lobbying Selig to find him a new team to operate. And Werner, after running the Padres into the ground and near bankruptcy in his disgraceful 41/2- year ownership of the club from 1990-94, continued to promote himself with Selig as someone who deserved a second shot as a baseball owner or top-level executive.
So this is how they now repay Selig? By aligning themselves with the anti-Manfred forces — with Werner eagerly accepting the nomination as Reinsdorf’s “stalking horse” commissioner candidate along with MLB VP of business Tim Brosnan — to run against the commissioner’s man. But before we get into what an absolute joke Werner’s candidacy is, it is important to understand why the Red Sox have turned on their biggest benefactor.
A while back, when clubs began creating, buying or doing lucrative local TV network deals (and thus greatly enhancing the value of their teams), a formula was created that put a fair market value on each team’s individual TV rights, a move designed to avoid cheating when it comes to figuring out how much they have to pay in revenue sharing. These values are re-evaluated every five years. The Yankees’ YES and Dodgers’ Time-Warner Cable deals are both valued well north of $100 million, but the Red Sox’s NESN deal, which by contrast should be valued somewhere around $80 million, has instead remained at around $40 million, which means the Red Sox pay less than even the small-market Pirates or Padres in revenue sharing portions of their TV deals.
Negotiations between Selig and the Red Sox over this issue have become rancorous, and because the Sox know Manfred will see to it they come into line with the other clubs, Henry, Werner & Co. have bonded with Reinsdorf. For all of them, it is not at all about Manfred being just like Selig, but rather Manfred playing no favorites, even though these owners are used to being favored. Reinsdorf is a smart guy, and, in fact, one of the best owners in the game, having been in the forefront of minority hiring; he lets his people, from his GM to his groundskeeper, do their jobs without interfering. But he ought to be embarrassed backing a lightweight sop like Werner for commissioner. These are Werner’s “credentials” for commissioner: In his term as Padres owner, they went from a second-place 89-win team, three games out in 1989, to a last-place, 101-loss team by 1993. In the process, Werner slashed the team payroll to the bare bones, conducted fire sales of all his best players, including Benito Santiago, Randy Myers, Gary Sheffield and Fred McGriff, and pocketed his $12 million share of the expansion fees from the Rockies and Marlins to use it to pay off part of the loan he took out to buy the club.
Meanwhile, Werner’s role with the Red Sox is best described in former Sox manager Terry Francona’s 2013 autobiography with Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, in which the authors wrote that Werner was “constantly trying to assert his importance” and actually hired a P.R. firm to get his name in the local newspapers.
“When stories were written about Henry or the Red Sox, he was known to call writers and ask: ‘Why didn’t you mention me in your story?'” Werner made his name as a TV producer of such shows as “Roseanne” and “The Cosby Show” — the all-time low point of his term as Padre owner was Roseanne Barr’s infamous screeching, crotch-grabbing version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” parodying the players — and his primary function with the Red Sox is overseeing NESN and heading up their foundation. Some impressive resume.
Perhaps this is why, sources are saying, the anti-Manfred forces have been trying to convince owners that voting for Werner is voting for one of their own. And that if elected, it would actually be a ticket, with Werner retaining Brosnan (for business) and bringing in Beeston (for labor relations) as his top two deputies.
It doesn’t matter if, even combined, they don’t have near Manfred’s credentials for the job. With Selig out of the picture, Reinsdorf is counting on enough owners (it will only take eight) reverting to what they always did best, ignoring the unprecedented revenue and franchise values they reaped under Selig’s stewardship (with Manfred’s considerable input), and voting in their own interests instead of the best interests of the game.
