Tight Ship Finds Port in a Storm : His Austerity Moves Are Designed to Put Angels in the Black

At a lean 5 feet 11 inches and 165 pounds, wearing his customary blue sport coat and gray slacks, the physical appearance of Angel General Manager Mike Port is appropriately austere.

Appropriate because there is also a measure of austerity to the new fiscal appearance of the once free-spending club.

Port and owner Gene Autry say it’s not so much austerity as responsibility, but they acknowledge an obvious shift in philosophy--a change that goes beyond the October retirement of Executive Vice President Buzzie Bavasi and the ensuing appointment of Port, Bavasi’s longtime understudy.

There is a new emphasis on the farm system and growth from within. There is new caution concerning the signing of free agents and a stronger attempt to correlate performance and salary. There is new reluctance to sign physically suspect players, be they property of the Angels or free agents seeking employment.

“Boil it down, and we’re trying to win as many games as we can while finishing in the black,” Port said.

“We’re trying to develop a better blend that would put us in the middle of the road--a combination of our own young players and a few free agents.

“I don’t want to be locked into a position of saying we’re never going to sign a re-entry player, but we had to start turning the wheel, particularly since we’re in a position to do so because of the job (scouting director) Larry Himes has done developing young players.”

If this is an overdue direction for a club burdened with age and burned more than once by long-term contracts, it is not without risks.

Many in baseball believe it will be two or three years before the Angels’ farm system can adequately stock the varsity roster. They contend that it’s inconsequential anyway, since the club has foreclosed on similar promises in the past.

Many of the Angels most renowned players have concerns about 1985, believing that key questions were not addressed during the winter, that key players were not aggressively pursued.

By contrast, there are those on the club’s executive level who applaud the internal commitment, saying that it was mandatory after the wasted years of reckless spending. They say it will last this time because of Port’s grass-roots background. They also salute Port for rebuilding esprit de corps with improved communications and a willingness to listen to more voices.

At 38, Port is the youngest chief executive in the major leagues. If he avoids becoming simply another Port in a storm, it will be because of the course he has charted in conjunction with the Autrys, Gene and Jackie. The parameters of his authority remain hazy, but he has definitely achieved a dream. He envisioned a baseball career when he was a youth.

“The things I read and the things I watch are 90% baseball-related,” Port said. “I’m a fan and an operator, a baseball workaholic.

“I’d like to think I could make my way in the world if I was forced to, but I wouldn’t want to have to.”

Growing up in Fallbrook, Calif., where his father still runs a clothing store, Port first pursued his major-league goal as a Fallbrook High infielder, then as a San Jose State walk-on. He responded to a lack of playing time a year later by transferring to Cal Western University in San Diego, where he ultimately got a scholarship and a degree in business.

He would have traded the latter for a big-league contract, but the only offer was extended by a Fallbrook neighbor named Duke Snider, who talked the Dodgers into allowing Port to try out with their Arizona Instructional League team, which in turn netted Port an invitation to Vero Beach for spring training in 1968.

That’s as far as Port got with the Dodgers. He was released that spring and returned to Fallbrook, where Snider again went to bat for him, arranging for a look by the expansion Padres in the instructional league.

A willingness to do anything and everything resulted in Port’s injuring his rotator cuff while pitching batting practice in Arizona, but he kept it quiet and ultimately got a 1969 invitation to the Padres’ minor-league training base in Leesburg, Fla. There, still nursing the injury, his road seemingly ended.

The ax was wielded by Peter Bavasi, then San Diego’s farm director. A week later, however, Bavasi called Port at his father’s clothing store and talked him out of a banking career by offering a job as general manager of the Padres’ Key West farm club.

Now general manager of the Cleveland Indians, Bavasi reflected and said: “Mike had struck us as being a cut above. He was inquisitive about a lot of things, aside from what happened on the field. Then as now, he was bright, conscientious and attentive to detail. He’s come a long way in a short time, and he’s done it without benefit of being someone’s son. He’s not a baseball brat like many of us.”

Port earned $500 a month in his year at Key West, getting an education in ticketing, advertising, marketing and promotions, and a nightly seminar on country hardball from his manager, Don Zimmer.

He spent the next two summers as general manager at Lodi, then joined the Bavasis as San Diego’s promotions director in 1971. Port soon moved into the farm and personnel departments, becoming an authority on contracts and baseball’s often tangled rules and timetables.

The Bavasis, meanwhile, departed. Peter left to become president of the Toronto Blue Jays, and Buzzie was forced into retirement after a dispute with Ray and Joan Kroc, the club owners. He reappeared as Autry’s executive vice president in 1976, then hired Port as a vice president and administrative assistant a year later.

“Bob Fontaine had come in as general manager in San Diego, and Ballard Smith (Kroc’s son-in-law) was taking an active role as the club president,” Port said. “Ballard and I were at a similar age, a similar point in our careers. I saw three of us in a two-man job.”

Cautious. Guarded. Conservative.

Those are the adjectives most frequently used to describe Port. People who work closely with him say that he frequently displays a dry wit, but casual acquaintances seldom see it.

Talking to a reporter the other day, Port got off a rare line. Alluding to Snider, his Fallbrook acquaintance and benefactor, Port said: “Duke was scouting at the time he got me a tryout with the Padres. They took one look at me and made him a broadcaster.”

Unlike the gregarious Bavasi, whose office door was seldom closed and who was usually available to reporters, Port often operates behind a closed door and prefers that visitors have an appointment. He frequently directs media calls to the Angels’ publicity department, and has told reporters that he will not interrupt his schedule to take or return their calls if nothing has changed regarding the subject of their inquiry. His posture in that regard seems to have eased with the diminishing of his winter workload, but Port weighs words carefully.

He made his only public display of emotion when he accused free-agent pitcher Don Aase of disloyalty and verbally attacked Aase’s attorney, Jerry Kapstein, for not giving the Angels a chance to improve their offer before Aase signed with Baltimore.

Said Peter Bavasi: “Mike is slow and steady, a good, strong organization man who doesn’t feel the need to throw out a lot of story lines. There’s a lot more to Mike than what most people see. There must be because of the enormous amount of interest in him.”

The Indians and Minnesota Twins were among the teams that reportedly offered Port front-office jobs before Buzzie Bavasi made his retirement official. Bavasi had dropped hints for more than a year, consistently counseling Port to be patient, to stay where he was.

The Angels ultimately announced his promotion on the same September day that Bavasi’s retirement was announced, a surprisingly quick move for an organization whose owner has always favored marquee names.

This time, however, Autry said he accepted Bavasi’s recommendation and considered no one else. This time, he said, the club was faced with a number of complex decisions requiring a rapid transition to someone familiar with the situation. Port, he said, had impressively reorganized and restructured the farm system to a point where it could be productive again, where it could replace the re-entry draft as a more realistic foundation.

Said Autry: “Mike is a very thorough, a very organized person, and from here on, we’re concentrating on the farm system. That doesn’t mean we’ll never sign another free agent, but we’ll have to be convinced he can significantly help us and we’ll have to be able to do it at a figure we can live with. It doesn’t make sense to keep signing players to long-term contracts at $1.5 or $2 million a year.

“If you’re asking me is it important for us to finish in the black, the answer is, damn right it is. You can’t continue to run any business that can’t carry itself. I can’t keep asking the radio station to carry the ballclub, or the hotel to carry the radio station. They have to carry themselves.”

This is a dramatic change for an organization that:

--Spent approximately $19 million signing 17 free agents selected out of nine re-entry drafts;

--Gave up a significant number of minor-league products in trading for imminent free agents Fred Lynn, Rick Burleson and Rod Carew before spending another $14 million to sign them;

--Believed it could compete for attendance with the Dodgers only with the acquisition of headline names.

Port is believed to have insisted that the Angels travel a new route before accepting Autry’s offer, although he said there were no negotiations because the offer was the high point of his career and he considers Autry’s word a bond.

Autry said that he and Port did discuss direction but that it wasn’t a new subject because Bavasi had been lobbying for it throughout his final year at the helm.

Said Peter Bavasi: “I don’t think this is as much a change in direction as an implementation of already planted roots.”

Some of it, in fact, stems from Jackie Autry’s increased role. Her influence has been seen in two key areas:

--With her financial background as a former bank vice president, she helped negotiate the 1983 deal in which Autry sold KTLA, his Los Angeles TV station, and acquired the liquidity to buy out Signal Co., the Angels’ minority owner. Signal had first option on the Angels in the event of Autry’s death.

Jackie Autry, the sole heir now, has said that it is her intention to keep the club in the family name. This, she has said, has helped ease the pressure her husband felt to win it all before dying.

“He’s happy and healthy, and now believes he has time to build with a mix of veterans and young players,” she said in a 1984 interview.

--It was Jackie who pushed for a 1983 marketing study that ultimately led to long-needed expansion of the marketing and business staffs. She was influential in the hiring of marketing and finance directors, essentially leaving the general manager in charge of only the baseball operation. She is in almost daily contact with marketing vice president, John Hays, whose long-range program is built around the youth movement.

There have also been rumors that it was Jackie Autry who blackballed the signing of high-priced free agent Goose Gossage last winter, and an aggressive pursuit of free agents Fred Lynn, Rick Sutcliffe and Bruce Sutter this winter.

Port denied it.

“Neither of the Autrys have been restrictive in any way,” he said. “There have been times I’ve solicited her opinion on financial questions, but those who write that she desires to run the club or is cutting this to the bone are wrong.

“She wants what he does . . . the best possible club in all respects. The question is, what sense does it make to win a World Series and not finish in the black?”

What Mike Port inherited wasn’t exactly the Hope diamond. The Angels finished at .500 last year, three games out of the lead and tied for second in the West. There were times when the average age seemed to match the team batting average. There were questions regarding intensity and desire.

Port has since had to deal with the selection of a new manager, seven potential free agents, five players eligible for salary arbitration and a trading situation restricted by no-trade contracts held by the most famous Angels and an unwillingness to give up the prospects most sought by other clubs.

The new philosophy has been seen in several ways:

--A refusal to pursue Sutcliffe and Sutter because of their demands for long-term contracts that would include annuities and deferments, and would lead, Port said, to an immediate increase in ticket prices. “There were too many downside risks, particularly considering a pitcher’s vulnerability to injury,” he said.

--An unwillingness to guarantee Lynn the same $5.4 million Lynn had made under terms of his expired four-year contract. Port said that Lynn, 33, had failed to generate a Boston-type year for the Angels and offered what he called a shared-risk concept that guaranteed Lynn about $800,000 and gave him a shot at the $1.4 million he made in 1984 through incentives.

-- A similar shared-risk offer made to free agent Don Aase, who missed almost two full seasons because of an elbow injury; and an unwillingness to offer the competitive Bruce Kison, who returned from back surgery in the second half of last season but was still having problems in September, anything more than a conditional spring tryout.

Of their seven free agents, the Angels offered contracts only to Lynn, Aase and second baseman Rob Wilfong, the only one who re-signed. The loss of Lynn led to selection of Atlanta relief pitcher Donnie Moore as compensation and the signing of free-agent outfielder Ruppert Jones to a one-year contract. It also creates the possibility that right fielder Mike Brown will join fellow farm products Dick Schofield, Gary Pettis, Mike Witt and Ron Romanick in playing a front-line role with the club.

Port and scouting director Himes are already looking forward to June, when they will have five selections in the first three rounds of the amateur draft, two in the first round.

Said Himes: “In Buzzie’s last days we were going more in the direction of farm and scouting development, but Mike has made it known that this is the year the plan will be officially put in place. He had a meeting with the scouts recently and said we will be more organization oriented.”

Port has also asked Himes and minor-league director Bill Bavasi to sit in on most personnel meetings, joining manager Gene Mauch and special assignment scouts Preston Gomez and Cookie Rojas.

“Mike has already gone a long way toward strengthening a feeling of harmony and loyalty,” Himes said. “We can now tell people, ‘Yes, we’re part of the Angels. Yes, we’re asked to participate. And yes, our opinion is valued.’ ”

All of this has confused agents conditioned to arriving at Anaheim Stadium with an armored truck. Several said it was difficult this winter to get a definitive answer from the general manager, difficult to get a read on the direction the club is headed.

Port, who avoided arbitration with all five of his eligible players, said agents calling at Anaheim Stadium should be prepared now to negotiate incentive provisions, which he favors both as a hedge against the guaranteed demands of multiyear contracts and as a motivational factor.

This, too, is a change from Bavasi’s era.

“With the work load Buzzie carried, he didn’t have time to get into the statistical studies that I did,” Port said. “I’ve read two reports (one by Dr. Richard O’Brien of Hofstra and the other by Dr. Ken Lehn of Howard) on the correlation between incentives and performance, and I definitely subscribe to the concept.”

A three-year contract Port negotiated with pitcher Witt illustrates it. Witt is guaranteed $2.1 million. He can make another $800,000, depending on the number of innings he pitches and postseason awards he wins.

Bavasi’s teams won eight pennants, four World Series and two division titles in his 33 years as a major-league executive, a performance Port said he would like to emulate. He said he’d like to start on it this year, that he does not consider it a rebuilding year. He said the Angels are a definite contender in the West, and that he is still attempting to get a proven pitcher. He contemplates the possibilities while jogging two miles every morning near his Dana Point apartment.

During those runs, he also reflects on the path he and the Angels have chosen and hopes it does not lead back to Fallbrook. Duke Snider wouldn’t know where to send him next.