After the Kansas City Royals completed their stunning sweep of the Baltimore Orioles for the American League pennant, Jackie Autry, the league’s honorary president, presented the title trophy to the Royals’ owner, David Glass.
As I watched this improbable scene, I thought of how undeserving Glass was of any kind of trophy. But then I talked with Glass on the telephone and when I hung up I had two good reasons for giving him credit for the Royals’ presence in the World Series.
If Dayton Moore is the major league executive of the year, which he should be for building the Royals into a World Series participant, Glass should be owner of the year for hiring Moore in the first place and then letting him do his job for more than eight years without telling him what to do, a temptation many owners can’t resist.
“He said it would take seven to nine years,” the 79-year-old owner said. “We stayed the course and didn’t deviate from it.”
It took the Royals 29 years to get back to the World Series – back to the post-season – and Glass was the chief reason it took so long. For the first 7 of those years, he was the Royals’ board chairman following the death of Ewing Kaufmann, the team’s founding owner, and for the last 14 years he has been the team’s owner.
Glass was suspected of manipulating the sale of the team in his favor. He got the Royals for $96 million despite an offer of $120 million from a New York lawyer, Miles Prentice, who owned minor league teams and was making offers for any major league team that was on the market. Major League Baseball was concerned that he didn’t have enough assets to sustain sizeable losses and awarded the Royals to Glass.
“After we first bought the team we didn’t have a good feel for what we should do,” Glass said in our conversation. “It’s one thing to do whatever it takes to execute a plan, but you need the plan. We didn’t have a plan until Dayton came.”
Herk Robinson, one of the nicest guys who has ever worked in a baseball front office, was the Royals’ general manager when Glass took over. When Glass bought the team in 2000, he named Allard Baird general manager but fired him in May 2006.
What to do then?
“I called the baseball lifers I knew,” Glass said, “and Dayton was the only one they mentioned.”
At the time, Moore was Atlanta’s assistant general manager, slated to succeed John Schuerholz as the Braves’ general manager. The Royals, however, plucked Moore off the g.m.-in-waiting vine first.
Under Glass, the Royals have not been big spenders. In fact, Glass was accused early on of imposing the same kind of regressive pecuniary practices that his critics said he employed as president and chief operating officer of Wal-Mart Stores. The difference was Wal-Mart didn’t play baseball and didn’t need hitters and pitchers.
In his second and third years as board chairman, Glass slashed the payroll from $41 million, fifth highest in the majors, to $30 million and then to $18 million, 27th of 28 and only $3 million more than Montreal’s 28th-ranked payroll.
As owner, Glass demonstrated no greater willingness to spend money on players. Fans had become accustomed to the munificent spending of Kauffman, who became wealthy from his pharmaceutical business and eagerly used his wealth to bring his city a championship team.
Glass had no such attachment and no such goal. His payrolls as owner continued to be among the smallest, and the Royals’ won-lost records reflected it.
“Someone like Ewing Kauffman stands alone,” Glass said. “You can’t copy them or emulate them.”
Glass could be called the anti-Kauffman. In the five-year period 2002-06, the Royals lost 100 or more games three successive times and four seasons over-all. They finished last those last three years plus the next season for four in a row. In all, they finished last seven times in 12 seasons (1996-2007).
The payrolls stayed consistently low, remaining in the bottom third until 2009 when Glass, with Moore’s input, paid his players $82 million, placing the Royals 18th in the payroll rankings. With this year’s season-opening $92 million payroll, the Royals hit an all-time high, though it was only No. 19.
“When Dayton Moore came on board it was a commitment to scouting and player development,” said Dan Glass,” 15-year team president and David’s son, speaking of the team’s fiscal strategy. “We couldn’t compete for big-money players in the majors. The best thing to do was develop players, then supplement them with players from the free-agent market. I think we felt we were doing it before, but it doesn’t always work out that way.”
I asked David Glass if he expected the payroll to grow in the near future. “I have no idea,” he said. “I’m totally dependent on Dan and Dayton in what to do. They keep me in the loop.”
Dan and Dayton weren’t around when David Glass made his initial impact on Major League Baseball. It came late in 1994 after the start of the players’ strike over the owners’ demand for a payroll cap.
Glass was a labor hawk and joined Bud Selig and Jerry Reinsdorf, among others, in waging war with the players over the cap issue. That was the strike that led to the cancellation of the World Series for the first time.
With the season gone and the World Series in jeopardy, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service summoned the two sides to a major meeting. Several owners and players attended.
Glass made his case for a cap, which players fiercely opposed, and some of the players challenged him. Ruffled, Glass never attended another meeting.
As the losing seasons mounted – 17 in 18 years – the once passionate fans became apathetic and the days of George Brett, Frank White and Willie Wilson became a distant memory.
Two World Series, one World Series championship, four other league championship series – all in a 10-year window.
Is the window opening again? Is this the start of recapturing and recreating those years? Is this the start of renewed financial initiatives?
On the matter of payroll, Dan Glass said, “As our revenues grow, we can increase the payroll.” But he added, “Payroll isn’t everything.”
David Glass opted not to discuss those issues.
“I’m focused on this year,” he said. “I’ve been a baseball junkie forever. This is the highlight of what I love.”
PAYROLLS TO PICK WINNERS BY
If you feel you have to place a bet on the World Series, you can call your local bookie and get his odds or just take a look at this.
In the past 11 World Series, the team with the higher payroll won 8 times. In two of the three instances where the higher-payroll team lost, the payroll difference was nearly negligible.
In 2012 the Tigers ($140.7 million) lost to the Giants ($138.1 million). In 2005 the Astros ($76.3 million) lost to the White Sox ($75 million). The one where the payroll difference was sizeable was 2003 when the $150.5 million Yankees lost to the $48.4 million Marlins.
This year’s World Series matches the $154 million Giants and the $92 million Royals.
Not that I am an expert on sports betting – I don’t do it and I am against it – I get e-mail from an offshore sports book called Bovadar. That’s why I know the Royals are slight favorites to win the Series.
I doubt that sports books include team payrolls in their odds computations, but payrolls can play a role in a Series outcome. Have they played a role in this year’s playoffs?
In the American League the team with the higher payroll has won only one of four matchups (Royals over Athletics). The National League has been the opposite. A team with the higher payroll (the Giants) has won three matchups (Pirates, Nationals, Cardinals) while the lower-payroll Cardinals defeated the Dodgers.
BELATED JOLTS FROM 25-YEAR-OLD EARTHQUAKE
How could it already be 25 years since the San Francisco World Series earthquake nearly sent me flying from the press box at Candlestick Park into the seats below?
But it is, and the 25th anniversary was Friday. I did very little to note the anniversary. In fact, I did only one thing. I called Fay Vincent.
He had been the baseball commissioner for only a matter of weeks when the earthquake interrupted the Bay Area World Series between San Francisco and Oakland, and he instantly became embroiled in a perilous situation.
I’m not referring to his health and well-being; he escaped unscathed physically. But the club owners and umpires gave him a hard time.
As Vincent related over the telephone from Florida, Richie Phillips, the umpires’ lawyer, came to him and said, “I have to file a grievance. You didn’t consult us before postponing the game.”
Phillips, Vincent said, told him he didn’t want to file the grievance, but “they’re giving me a hard time. I don’t want to file it but I have to.”
“The umpires thought it was insulting that I didn’t talk to them. I didn’t want to talk to Don Fehr either.” Fehr, the players’ union leader, didn’t file a grievance, and nothing came of the umpires’ foolish action.
Referring to the umpires’ action, Vincent added, “It was my first experience knowing what a hellhole I was in.”
It was not his last, not even from that event.
“I was on the Today show the next morning, and I wore a jacket but not a tie,” Vincent recalled. “George Steinbrenner called me and said, ‘You looked like a bum. That was disgraceful.” I said, ‘George, this is a war zone. Where are you?’ He said in Tampa.”
One of my vivid images from that episode was seeing Vincent at a news conference without a tie or a jacket. A basically informal person myself, I thought that any official in Vincent’s position who was not afraid of being seen in public sans tie and jacket had to have a lot of confidence in himself.
The story used to be told that a neighbor would see one of Vincent’s predecessors, Bowie Kuhn, working in the garden at his home in Ridgewood, N.J., wearing a dress shirt and a tie.
As for Steinbrenner, it would be less than six months later that the New York Yankees’ owner would see Vincent in tie and jacket banishing him from baseball for consorting with a two-bit gambler to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield.