Playing Hardball: The High-Stakes Battle for Baseball's New Franchises. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, June, 1993 by Matthew Cooper

Even more than most genres, sports books tend to be pretty predictable fare. There are hagiographic accounts of teams which are written for the benefit of hometown fans and which usually contain a phrase like "The incredible story of. . ." in the subtitle. There are "as told to" biographies that are as fun as they are self-serving. A recent and welcome type of sports book works the crossroads of sport and commerce, or, more properly, sport as commerce. The goal of these books is not only to explain the culture of the clubhouse but also of the front office, to give color and shape to the guys in suits as well as the guys in uniform. Barbarians at the Gate meets Ball Four

David Whitford's fun read falls into this last category. It's the account of the machinations that led to the creation of the Florida Marlins and the Colorado Rockies--both of which are now embarked on their first season. A Boston-based writer, Whitford parachuted into both Denver and Miami and kept a keen eye trained on the jockeying that marked both cities' efforts to acquire a franchise. What he's come up with is not only a solid sports book, but one with a public policy dimension that's worth wider consideration: the things cities do to revitalize themselves.

The Rockies and the Marlins are the first expansion teams in baseball since 1977, and, as fans know, that slow pace of expansion is no accident. (There were no new teams between 1902 and 1952.) The reluctance stems mainly from the wariness of owners to divvy up more of the pie, but also comes from a quite legitimate concern about the dilution of talent on the field. What got them to change in 1990, when they voted to allow two new teams into the National League, were two factors. First, their profits seemed safe. Baseball attendance had been soaring; television rights were up; the asking price for a new franchise had reached such a high level--almost $100 million to be shared among the incumbent owners--that the threat of a dip in profits seemed minimal compared to a few years earlier.

The second and more important spur to expansion was Congress' threat to lift baseball's exemption from antitrust laws--a status no other sport enjoys. The exemption dates to 1922 when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled that baseball was a game rather than a business and outside the purview of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Harry Blackmun, despite his reputation as a judicial activist, declined to overturn Holmes' opinion when he ruled on an important baseball case in 1972. In a majority opinion, he declared the exemption "illogical," but, citing precedent, he upheld it. In the manner of a Reagan-style constructionist, he ruled that the antitrust exemption is a matter "that is to be remedied by Congress and not this Court."

At times, Congress has toyed with the notion of removing baseball's antitrust safeguard. But for the most part, owners correctly dismissed the threat as halfhearted. Whitford tells the story of how that changed in the mid-eighties when a host of senators, eager to get a baseball team in their home states, threatened to lift baseball's exemption unless expansion was forthcoming. Al Gore (looking for a team for Nashville), Dan Quayle (Indianapolis), and especially Tim Wirth (Denver) joined the effort.

Wirth emerges in Whitford's account as a wily tactician, quick to understand the role Congress could play in making pro ball cough up more teams. He made it a point to attend the baseball owners' meeting just days after his election in 1986 to pitch Denver as a possible expansion city. He detailed a staffer to find out what Congress could do to put pressure on the big leagues; and it was Wirth who organized Gore, Quayle, and other expansion-hungry senators to come together for a press conference in early 1987 to threaten an end to the antitrust exemption.

If Wirth comes across as a savvy politician, then-baseball commissioner and oft-mentioned candidate-for-everything Peter Ueberroth emerges as anything but the suave wheeler-dealer you would expect. When Wirth's baseball task force held its first meeting, Ueberroth declined to meet with half a dozen U.S. senators. Instead, he sent his deputy commissioner who, in one of many very funny scenes in the book, Wirth derisively refers to as Ueberroth's "A.A.," Capitol Hill jargon for administrative assistant. When Ueberroth finally consented to meet with the senators, he was contemptuous, saying to them, according to a participant: "Do you want me to give you a line of crap? Or do you want the truth?" When Wirth dropped Ueberroth a note after the meeting, it took the baseball commissioner three weeks to respond.

Ueberroth thought that playing the role of tough guy would get Congress to back down. But it was his successor, Bart Giamatti, who charmed the senators. He argued that the removal of the antitrust clause would lead to havoc. (With owners free to move anywhere, he claimed, they would.) Eventually, in the wake of Giamatti's untimely death in the fall of 1989, baseball agreed to a limited expansion of two teams rather than the six the senators had tried to extract.