Christmas came early this year for Major League Baseball’s 30 teams. Bob Bowman was the jolly old gentleman with the big belly and the fluffy white beard.
Bowman is the president of MLB business and media, formerly CEO of MLB Advanced Media, who is probably responsible for generating more revenue for MLB than any other individual.
His gift to the clubs was last week’s $1 billion sale to the Walt Disney Company of a one-third stake in BAM Tech, the venture Bowman and aides developed to stream live events, allowing them to be viewed on any device.
“We’re trying to grow a business,” Bowman said in a telephone interview last Friday. “We built third-party streaming technology. People started calling us. It was a client demand. People said we want to do it.”
BAM Tech has attracted widespread and serious attention from, among others, the National Hockey League, HBO, ESPN, the PGA Tour, WWE Network and Ice Network.
Under Bowman’s direction, BAM has overcome a stumbling start in its first two years, 2000 and 2001, and has become a major contributor to MLB’s $9.5 billion annual revenue.
Disney’s $1 billion payment will not be included in that revenue, Bowman said. “Revenue is merchandise, tickets, things like that,” Bowman said. “This is not revenue.”
But it is money that helps clubs spend millions on players’ salaries.
This particular $1 billion will not all be divided among the clubs, Bowman said. A member of management said the clubs would get 60 percent with the remaining 40 percent being held as a possible strike fund. Not so, Bowman said without offering details.
“Some is kept by BAM Tech,” he said. “A big slug is staying in the company to grow the business.”
Bowman has done such a good job with BAM that many people thought he would have made a good candidate for commissioner two years ago. However, he declined to be interviewed for the job. Why?
“I supported the better candidate,” he said, referring to Rob Manfred. “He was better than anybody.”
Manfred was elected two years ago today (Sunday). MLB’s chief operating officer and its No. 1 labor lawyer, Manfred was the clear favorite of Commissioner Bud Selig and a large majority of owners. However, one owner, Jerry Reinsdorf of the Chicago White Sox, strongly opposed Manfred.
I was told at the time and a member of management reiterated it recently Reinsdorf opposed Manfred for a personal reason. The longest serving owner in MLB, Reinsdorf had a long-time status as a power behind the throne, that is, he always had great influence on Selig.
Reinsdorf, though, had no such relationship with Manfred and was concerned that he would lose his status under Manfred.
“Selig never would have had a chance to be commissioner without Reinsdorf,” said a man close to baseball club owners. “Jerry was the biggest reason Bud got the job. Jerry had so much influence on Selig’s commissionership and he wasn’t going to control Manfred.”
Selig has always bristled at the Reinsdorf suggestion, insisting that his relationship with Reinsdorf had no bearing on his becoming commissioner or his decisions as commissioner. Reinsdorf doesn’t talk about the matter.
Reinsdorf split with Selig on the Manfred candidacy. Reinsdorf knew he would have difficulty finding a serious alternative, but he hoped to be able to collect enough owners – he needed eight – to block Manfred’s election.
He prevailed upon Tom Werner of the Boston Red Sox to be his candidate and solicited support from Werner’s partner, John Henry; Paul Beeston of Toronto, Arte Moreno of Anaheim, Bob Castellini of Cincinnati and Ken Kendrick of Arizona.
One person called the Aug. 14 meeting “brutal” and said questioning of Manfred, mostly by Reinsdorf, was “vicious.”
On the first ballot, Manfred was short of the 23 votes he needed for election. There was vocal support for Werner, but he didn’t have the votes to sustain his candidacy. A third candidate, Tim Brosnan, executive vice president for business, got one vote and was dropped from the next ballot.
Three owners were uncertain and were said to have gone back and forth. Then Stuart Sternberg of Tampa Bay and Mark Attanasio of Milwaukee joined the Manfred bloc, leaving him one vote short. Finally, Ted Lerner of Washington cast the 23rd vote, ending the Reinsdorf foray
Reinsdorf lost that battle, but he is neither gone nor forgotten. Representatives of the owners and the players are negotiating a new labor agreement, and where there are labor talks Reinsdorf is not far away. In 1992 he and Selig led the effort to oust Commissioner Fay Vincent so he would not be around to block their attempt to destroy the union.
They succeeded in forcing Vincent to resign, but they failed to beat the union. They did, on the other hand, cause the disastrous players’ strike of 1994-95 and the cancellation of the 1994 World Series.
The labor environment among the owners is different because the cast of owners is vastly different from that disastrous time. In addition, Manfred is the management figure who is primarily responsible for the two decades of labor peace.
But, a lawyer said, “Jerry is still holding tremendous power among the owners,” adding, “The owners are terribly divided.”
One major change is the owners’ labor policy committee. Ron Fowler of San Diego is the chairman, and the committee also includes Dick Monfort of Colorado, Bill DeWitt Jr., Randy Levine of the Yankees and Attanasio. Levine was the owners’ chief labor representative who negotiated the 1996 collective bargaining agreement.
Another change, an owner said, is Manfred’s style. “He’s more transparent than Selig,” the owner said. “Selig held all the cards and told everyone what they wanted to hear.”
At the owners’ quarterly meetings, Manfred also holds sessions that are attended only by the control people from each team.
Selig, the emeritus commissioner, who is paid $10 million a year, apparently doesn’t attend meetings or do anything else. “He’s completely out of it,” one person said.
THE DIFFERENCE IN SPORTS EDITORS
Thirty-two years ago this month, when the 1984 Olympics were in full swing, the then sports editor of The New York Times called me and said, “All we have in the section is the Olympics. Could you write a baseball piece for Sunday so we have something else in the paper?”
Of course, I said, never one to turn down an opportunity to write. The piece that I wrote, about the opposite approaches to baseball salaries practiced by George Steinbrenner of the New York Yankees and Calvin Griffith of the Minnesota Twins, marked the start of a remarkably long journey of writing a Sunday baseball notebook.
It lasted until the end of March 2008 when another sports editor, this one ignorant and short-sighted, decided the popular notebook was outdated. In those nearly 24 years, seldom missing a Sunday, I wrote 1,155 Sunday notebooks, developing more than 4,000 original items ranging in length from one paragraph to more than 1,000 words.
Now the Times has another sports editor, and he hasn’t commissioned anything new for the newspaper’s baseball coverage during the Olympics or any other time. In fact, he has decommissioned the paper’s baseball coverage, depriving life-long readers of the Times of the coverage about which they were so passionate.
They are older readers, just as I am an older writer, but they served as a staple of Times circulation for decades. The current sports editor ([email protected]) prefers cup stacking and croquet and synchronized swimming and beach volleyball to baseball.
TORRE WITHOUT TEARS
Before Alex Rodriguez’s final game for the New York Yankees Friday night, the Yankees issued a news release with a series of statements from notable members of the team in Rodriguez’s 12 seasons with the Yankees. This was one of them:
“Alex was a hard worker, a genuine fan of the game and possessed great ability. In our time together, I always knew that the game mattered to him. Baseball teaches all of us at some point, and I think he should be proud of the way he carried himself these last two years. I wish Alex and his family all the best in the future.”
I have one question for the man who offered that statement: If the game mattered to him, why did Rodriguez disgrace it and throw its history into turmoil?
In case Joe Torre missed all of this, Rodriguez repeatedly lied about his use of performance-enhancing drugs, cheated by using PEDs, was suspended for an entire season for violating baseball’s drug policy, stormed out of a grievance hearing on his appeal of his suspension, maligned Commissioner Bud Selig and sued Selig and Major League Baseball.
As its chief baseball officer, Torre is one of MLB’s highest-ranking executive and thus responsible for enforcing MLB rules and policies. Curious that he felt comfortable lauding perhaps the most notorious PED abuser in baseball’s steroids era.