IT WAS ONCE THE CITY OF CHAMPIONS : . . . But Pittsburgh Has Become the Pits for Teams and Fans, So Much So That the Pirates Can’t Draw People or Buyers

In the last couple of weeks, a local county commissioner named Tom Foerster kept repeating to the Pittsburgh media that there were viable groups interested in buying the red-ink Pirates.

Foerster identified one of the potential buyers of baseball’s worst team as Edward J. DeBartolo, the shopping-mall king who owns Pittsburgh’s hockey and indoor soccer teams, as well as three race tracks and, through his son, the San Francisco 49ers.

Despite Foerster’s pronouncements, a visit to DeBartolo’s office in Youngstown, Ohio, about 70 miles northwest of here, created a completely different impression.

Edward J. DeBartolo, who already owns two Pittsburgh sports franchises, has made some mistakes in his time, probably the biggest of which was trying to buy the Chicago White Sox in 1980. Besides being humiliated, he was also rejected by American League owners and Bowie Kuhn, then the commissioner of baseball. He now seems unwilling to throw good money after bad in Pittsburgh.

DeBartolo said that the Penguins of the National Hockey League and the Spirit of the Major Indoor Soccer League cost him $5.3 million last season. The Pirates, who in the 1970s won six division titles and two World Series, lost a reported $5.8 million last year, and they may show a loss of $9 million this year with another last-place finish in the National League East.

“The Pirates are a mess,” DeBartolo said. “Besides their problems on the field, they have a long stadium lease (through the year 2011) and they have some expensive, deferred-payment contracts with several players. I have not talked with Dan Galbreath at all about buying the team. And when I see John Galbreath, the only thing we talk about is horses.”

John Galbreath and his son Dan have been Pirate owners since 1946, when they bought into the team as part of a group that included Bing Crosby. It is not hard to understand why John Galbreath, who has won two Kentucky Derbies and one English Derby with his racing stable, would prefer talking about horses, or anything but the Pirates these days.

Pittsburgh, which called itself “The City of Champions” in the 1970s, has become the city of destitute franchises and the baseball club is at the front of the bread line. Only the Steelers, four-time winners of the Super Bowl and favored by many to win their National Football League division this season, have avoided the belly-up syndrome that has demoralized a city already reeling from double-digit unemployment and a 10% population decline.

Pittsburgh’s collective psyche could probably survive the loss of the Penguins and the Spirit. Unlike the city’s football and baseball teams, its hockey and soccer clubs don’t have winning traditions. In their 17 seasons, the Penguins have advanced to the Stanley Cup semifinals only once, and before last season DeBartolo talked about selling the team to some Toronto businessmen who would have moved the franchise to Hamilton, Ontario.

The Spirit, with a 19-29 record, failed to make the playoffs last season, a humiliation that was exacerbated by an eight-game suspension of their temperamental scoring leader, Stan Terlecki, and the firing of the coach.

At his own expense, DeBartolo can’t resist chuckling at the abysmal financial structure of the Spirit. “The way it’s set up, we need about 22,000 fans a game to break even,” he said. Seating capacity of the Civic Arena, which DeBartolo operates for the city, is 16,000.

The Pirates have been playing here since 1887, but one wonders how much they would be missed if Jack Kent Cooke took them to Washington or if Indianapolis added them to the NFL Colts among its recent sports collections. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asked readers: “Would you care if the Pirates left town?” and 38% of the answers were either no, or no strong feeling.

With no takers for the Pirates at the Galbreaths’ asking price of between $35 million and $40 million, Pittsburgh Mayor Richard Caliguiri recently proposed a plan that called for the city and the county to collect $25 million through the sale of bonds and buy half of the team. According to the plan, a group of as many as 15 individuals and corporations would pony up another $25 million.

Of the $50 million, $20 million would go to the Galbreaths, who own 51% of the club, and Warner Communications Inc., which owns almost all of the remaining 49%. Of the remaining $30 million, $7.5 million would be used to satisfy long-term player contracts and $22.5 million would be used to cover operating expenses for the next five years.

Admittedly, this would only be a finger in the dike. “After the partnership gets the team, maybe attendance would improve and a white knight will ride in and buy the team and keep it in Pittsburgh,” said Robert Rade Stone, president of the Pittsburgh City Council.

Caliguiri’s bail-out is a long shot. “We overestimate the interest in the Pirates among the overall population,” said Hugo Iacovetti, a Pittsburgh public-relations and advertising man for more than 45 years. “If the mayor’s proposal were put to a referendum, I doubt if 15% of the voters would support it.”

Maybe more so here than in other major-league cities, Pittsburgh’s man in the street is turned off by baseball’s high-salaried players and drug scandals.

Of the three Pirates reportedly earning $1 million a year--Jason Thompson, Bill Madlock and Steve Kemp--none was hitting as high as .260 going into the weekend. But, the Pirates unloaded Madlock’s salary Saturday when they traded him to the Dodgers. Recent drug investigations have centered in Pittsburgh, where many of the pushers for the players have been based, and several current and former Pirate players have been mentioned. Even the Pirate mascot, a dugout-skipping parrot named Kevin Koch, has been implicated, and of all things he pronounces his last name coke.

Some Pittsburghers are indignant about the city’s attempt to enter the baseball business. “If the mayor can form an authority to raise money to save the jobs of 25 athletes, why can’t he raise some money to try and save the jobs of 25,000 mill workers?” said one. “In fact, the salaries of the 25 ballplayers probably equal the salaries of the 25,000. The city buying the Pirates is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. What do we do next, save Kennywood (a local amusement park)?”

Dan Galbreath said that besides the Caliguiri plan, there are three groups still interested in buying the team--”one from out of town that wants to keep the team in Pittsburgh, and two from out of town that want to move the club.”

Galbreath did not identify DeBartolo as one of the groups and said: “Anyone who mentions Mr. DeBartolo as one of the potential buyers could be making a mistake. For one thing, I know he hasn’t recovered from being turned down when he tried to buy the White Sox. And for another thing, baseball still has a policy about people with gambling interests getting into the sport.

“Donald Trump (the owner of the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League who has casino interests in Atlantic City) could have a problem for that reason. And Mr. DeBartolo isn’t cutting back on his racetrack interests, he’s expanding them (trying to establish a track in Oklahoma).”

Bankruptcy has been mentioned as a way out for the Galbreaths. Presumably, the Pirates would then become the headache of the National League. Dan Galbreath does not discount that possibility.

“It’s not a palatable solution, and my family has never done business that way,” he said. “It would be a last resort, but something we could consider before getting rid of the team at a fire-sale price.”

Chuck Tanner, manager of the Pirates since 1977, has formed a group that is interested in buying the team. Tanner, the kind of optimist who would bet on a quick peace in the Mideast at even money, is one of the few people who thinks the Pirates can be quickly turned around in the standings.

“People forget,” Tanner said. “Just two years ago, we were second in the division, and took the Phillies down to the second-to-last day of the season. The World Series has been won by seven different teams in the last seven years, so everybody gets a chance in this game.”

This year, however, the Pirates are on their way to more than 100 defeats, the first time the club will have lost that many since 1954. Attendance, lowest in the league, will be under 700,000, lower than last year, when the Pirates lost 87 games and also finished last.

Actually, the Pirates have never drawn crowds commensurate with their success. Their record season, when they beat the Yankees on Bill Mazeroski’s seventh-game homer to win the World Series in 1960, is 1.7 million and they were unable to top that in the 1970s, despite the two World Series titles and having moved into the new Three Rivers Stadium from quaint but rustic Forbes Field.

When the Pirates went to Three Rivers, their roster included the electrifying Roberto Clemente, the bearish slugger Willie Stargell and a freshet of accomplished younger players. But the crowds never materialized. The Pirates won a division title in ‘74, but they drew only 1.1 million, slightly less than Pittsburgh’s last-place club played before in 1950.

“They’ve still got too many black players,” said one observer whose name has been mentioned as a possible buyer of the team.

Compared to most Eastern cities, Pittsburgh has a small black population--about 20%--and in the early 1970s the Pirates once put an all-black team on the field. Danny Murtaugh, the manager, said he never noticed, and Joe Brown, the general manager, never had a color quota in assembling his teams. The Pirates were at the forefront in signing Latin American players.

Brown, son of the satchel-mouthed comedian, Joe E. Brown, announced his retirement in 1976, but returned from the beach life in California last May when his successor, Harding Peterson, was fired.

Some critics blame Peterson for the Pirates’ downfall, saying he lacked a master plan and that he had his pocket picked in several trades. A current Pirate scout, not wanting his name used, blamed Brown, who pared the scouting department in the early 1970s as the team joined major-league baseball’s central scouting bureau.

Brown himself blames the disintegrating attitude of the players.

“When I came back in May, the negativeness hit me between the eyes,” he said. “George Hendrick can be a great guy, but put a baseball uniform on him and he turns into one of the biggest shirkers I’ve ever seen. He would hit a ball and carry his bat down to first base. He’d make a U-turn to the dugout halfway down the line, and walk around in the outfield like he didn’t know where he was.

“And John Candelaria, besides not contributing much, was a distraction to everybody else, constantly complaining about how the team was being run.”

Candelaria, who had been exiled to the bullpen, said that the Galbreaths’ race horses traveled better than the Pirates. He and Hendrick were traded by Brown to the Angels in early August.

Tanner has told friends that if his group should buy the Pirates, he would be both general manager and field manager. Brown considers himself an interim general manager, saying that the odds are “999 to 1” that he will return next year under any ownership.

One thing that shocked Brown when he replaced Peterson was the size of the Pirate payroll. “Joe looked at those player contracts and got the feeling that Peterson must have opened up the vault any time anybody asked,” said a source close to the club.

Tanner, who has two years left on his contract, either believes what he says about the team’s potential, or just prefers managing close to his home in New Castle, Pa., an hour’s drive from Three Rivers.

The manager commutes for each game. “I can’t get enough baseball,” Tanner said. “When I leave the ballpark after one of our games, I can pick up three or four other games around the country on the car radio. Sometimes I deliberately drive slow, so the game I’m listening to is decided by the time I pull into the house.”

If this isn’t a season to sour Tanner on the sport, nothing is. The Pirates’ longest winning streak is two. They are next to last in the league in team batting average, and last in important categories such as runs scored, home runs, team earned-run average and saves.

The team has no heroes--Stargell, that star of yesteryear, was brought back this season as a coach--and one of its best players, catcher Tony Pena, is a native of the Dominican Republic who speaks only passable English.

Many of the Pirates’ wins at home this year might be results, at least partly, of the opponents being lulled to sleep. One night the Dodgers pitched Fernando Valenzuela and only 6,000 turned out. A recent three-game series with the Mets drew fewer than 35,000 fans. After the Pirates surprisingly had taken two of the games, New York first baseman Keith Hernandez said: “It was like playing in a morgue. You had to really get it from within, because there was nothing else to pick you up.”

DeBartolo, who is in his 70s, operates one of his race tracks in Cleveland and has expressed intermittent interest in buying the Indians. He believes that the cities of Cleveland and Pittsburgh are paradoxical as far as sports potential is concerned.

“I’d like to do more in Pittsburgh, because I really like the town,” DeBartolo said. “How many towns in the East can you walk around and not worry about being mugged? In Cleveland, you have to be looking over your shoulder every step you take.

“But there’s more hope for baseball in Cleveland than in Pittsburgh. In Cleveland, I think you could make money with just a .500 club. In Pittsburgh, it’s been proved that you can’t make money with even a good team.”

As Dan Galbreath said, DeBartolo is still bitter over the rejection he got after offering more than $20 million for the White Sox in ’80.

In the beginning, Kuhn said he was against the sale because of DeBartolo’s race-track interests and that he didn’t represent local ownership. The Galbreaths, like George Steinbrenner of the Yankees, race horses and have had financial interests in tracks such as Hialeah and Churchill Downs, but Kuhn said they were protected by a grandfather clause.

Later, Kuhn said he objected to DeBartolo’s aggressive tactics in trying to sell himself to the other club owners. DeBartolo had also mentioned that he might sue the league if the sale wasn’t approved, but he never did.

It was whispered that there was another reason for the rejection. Vince Bartimo, who was then managing DeBartolo’s Louisiana Downs track, didn’t mince words: “Any successful Italian-American is always going to be suspected of having Mafia connections.”

DeBartolo points out that his background has been approved by the NFL, the NHL, the soccer league and the states that sanction his race tracks. He could be the man to bring Pittsburgh out of its sports malaise, but the baseball scars remain.

“Sure, I’m still bitter over the White Sox deal,” he said. “If I ever tried to buy a ballclub again, it might be the same old (bleep). I’d want the assurance of the commissioner going in that there would be no problems. I guess Ueberroth’s an easier guy to deal with than Kuhn was.”

Peter Ueberroth, who succeeded Kuhn, has told the Galbreaths that leaving Pittsburgh could be considered if all else failed, but he prefers that the Pirates stay. “I don’t believe in the moving-van cure,” Ueberroth said. “It would be devastating to the community if the Pirates moved. But their losses have been heavy, and the franchise needs some political and civic help if it’s going to make it.”

DeBartolo got some of that help with the Penguins, including a reduction of rent and an $11.4 million bond issue for improvements to the Civic Arena. The cost to the city and county is about $1.9 million a year. “We were captured as hostages and then we paid the ransom,” one City Council member said.

A bugbear for all of Pittsburgh’s sports teams is the city’s 10% amusement tax on ticket sales. “In baseball, I think there’s only one other city in the league that has a tax that high,” Joe Brown said.

Another Pittsburgh team that continues to be unhappy with the city is the Steelers, who, according to president Dan Rooney, account for slightly more than half of the stadium’s revenue each year. The Steelers practice at the stadium, but make only eight or nine game appearances each season.

When DeBartolo brought the Maulers, a United States Football League team, to Pittsburgh three years ago, they were permitted to play at the stadium. The Steelers say that violated and voided their exclusivity lease (which had 24 years to run) and the dispute is now in the courts.

Even though the Steelers for years were as inept as the Pirates are now, Pittsburgh usually supported them.

“Pittsburgh is a great football town,” Rooney said. “The city actually consists of a number of small communities, where everybody knows everybody else and where the biggest thing of the year is the high school football rivalry with another community. The Steelers have always benefited from this, and the fact that football is a tough game that requires a lot of hard work, just like the jobs of the steelworkers and a lot of other people in this town.”

It annoys Rooney when it’s suggested that the success of the Steelers is related to the failure of the Pirates. “As I said, Pittsburgh is just a great football town” he said. “Otherwise, it is just a good sports town.”

But if the Pirates should leave and Ed DeBartolo tires of footing the bills for hockey and soccer, it won’t be a sports town at all. It’ll just be a Steeler town. Which is all it may be as it is.