NO-FRILLS GENERAL MANAGER : MIKE PORT : For the Cost-Conscious Angels, He’s Probably the Perfect Cut Man

If it were true that a general manager creates a baseball team in his own image, Mike Port’s Angels would come packaged differently this season.

The uniforms would be all-white, save for a solitary light blue stripe across the chest. Above it would appear the logo, something short, something snappy, something like Baseball Team .

It would be grandly bland. Plain-wrap baseball, brought to you by a generic general manager.

No frills, no thrills. That’s the Port persona.

The cut of his clothes is conservative. So is the way he conducts business.

“Given the time and the capability, I am inclined to get as much information as possible before acting,” Port says, weighing his words with typical caution. “Some people operate baseball clubs with the wheeler-dealer syndrome. I do not.”

He is a baseball workaholic who is obsessed with numbers--from the statistical studies he pores over as a matter of routine to the salary figures he is driven to slash.

He is a self-contained personality, rarely deviating from his deadpan demeanor. When he speaks publicly, he cloaks his message in a mishmash of verbal misdirection.

For instance, Port’s opinion on Buzzie Bavasi, the man he replaced as Angel general manager in September 1984.

“When you look at his credentials, I know in the broad scheme of things, there are people, readers included, who would agree with some of the things Buzzie did, disagree with some of the others, such as is the lot of life.

“But when you talk of baseball general managers and go all the way back to Ed Barrow with the Yankees, George Weiss and Branch Rickey and people who are very prominent in that regard, I think that, again, with the game changing as it is, Buzzie might have been the last of that group who, by credential, could say they had a hand in a number of league championships and a number of world championships. Things are tough enough in the game now that one World Series is significant.”

In other words, Port admires Bavasi.

Player agents and writers come away from first meetings with Port wondering what sort of man this might be. Banker? Accountant? Lawyer? Computer analyst?

He is a baseball man but hardly in the traditional sense. He is fanatical about his job but not about the manner in which the pioneers of his profession operated.

Port talks of the stereotypical general manager, of “having a cigar and a telephone handy and calling some of your compatriots, saying, ‘I’ll give you this guy for that guy.’ Now, I can tell you, that is about 1/18th of your involvement.”

Port sees his job as holding the bottom line, hard and fast.

“My role in the scheme is to put together the best baseball team possible while at the same time retaining some element of solvency,” he says.

Anything that fails to assist the attainment of those goals is viewed as superfluous, counterproductive, a waste of time.

Thus Port has little time for hot-stove banter, for jockeying with the press the way Bavasi once did.

“I don’t view myself as being terribly creative,” Port said. “My adage is, if we have an announcement, we’ll make one--rather than try to create something that will result in an announcement.”

Color is not Port’s department. He prefers to keep to himself and keep his name in small print.

“If the California Angels were to win the American League championship and the World Series while going an entire year without having Mike Port’s name appear in print, I would be absolutely delighted,” he said.

“My name in print, to my way of thinking, has very, very little to do with what we’re ultimately trying to achieve. And that’s to win baseball games.”

Yet, remaining solvent depends largely on the number of people who pay their way into your park. Some might be interested in learning about the man responsible for assembling the team on the Anaheim Stadium turf, a man who, at 39, is the youngest general manager in the major leagues.

So who is Mike Port? What is he like?

Well, here is an evaluation from Port:

“I would say (I am) amicable enough on occasion, but at the outset, a baseball fan, and . . . desirous of wanting to see players do well but within the proper vein of how I see baseball and what the game should be. I’m cooperative enough and open-minded enough, but otherwise, with a very structured impression of what baseball is and the public trust that it holds and how the game and the club should be operated.”

That is how Port conducts interviews. Port-uguese, if you will.

The straight answer stops here.

At a January press conference announcing the signing of relief pitcher Donnie Moore to a three-year contract, Port launched into a rambling discourse about how the two sides “through continued discussion found some ways to compromise well within the range of their respective positions.”

When Port was finished and stepped away from the podium, one writer leaned toward another and asked, “Translation, please?”

Yet, on those rare occasions when Port lets his guard take a few minutes off, he can be an engaging story teller, particularly when he recalls his abbreviated playing career, cut short by an arm injury.

“When does one consider a career as a baseball general manager? At that point in life when you cannot throw the ball from me to you,” he says.

And: “The life plan I had in place was to play in the major leagues for 20 years--because that’s the maximum pension requirement--and prosper and do well and thereafter, move into front-office work. But the way the fates handled things, the transition to the front office came about 19 years and 9 months sooner than the master plan had provided for.”

And: “I hesitate to say my career drew to a close. It was more akin to slamming the door shut.”

Tim Mead, the Angels’ director of publicity, said he is disappointed that more people don’t know this side of Mike Port.

“People think of him as some stone figure,” Mead said. “He has a light side to him and a very keen sense of humor.”

There have been glimpses of it.

When former first baseman Daryl Sconiers failed to report to camp for the first 17 days of spring training in 1985, Port quipped:”I imagine they’ll find Amelia Earhart before we find Daryl Sconiers.”

During the contract negotiations with Moore, Port complained about how Moore’s agents hadn’t countered the Angels’ offer, preventing “a ceiling” from being established in the talks. Finally, a counter-proposal was made during the winter meetings.

“They gave us a ceiling,” announced Port, who then stood on a chair and raised his right arm above his head. “Unfortunately, the ceiling was here.”

For the most part, however, Port conducts his business with the media in a cool, detached manner.

And, he is especially reluctant to discuss unsavory news.

Last October, when Port decided not to offer a 1986 contract to Rod Carew, seven-time American League batting champion, he issued only a terse one-page written statement to the press and was unavailable for comment the rest of the day.

Two months later, when Port made the same decision with Sconiers, who missed part of the 1985 season because of treatment for “substance abuse,” Port made no announcement at all.

“That was awkward,” Mead admitted. “But that was done as much for Daryl’s protection as anything else.

“Mike is still learning. . . . If he puts up a facade, it’s not to make the writers’ jobs tougher, but a protection facade. Mike’s concerns are to maintain the organization’s best interests. He’s calculating and wants to make certain everything is covered.”

Said Bavasi, who remains one of Port’s closest friends and advisers: “Mike’s a hard worker, a plower. He never takes any rest and he works 20 hours a day. The job’s the thing, and right now, he’s getting his feet wet.

‘I think you gotta know Mike. He seems aloof, but I’ve known him to be a good story teller. He’s fun to be around.”

Certain player agents might disagree with that assessment. On the wall in Port’s Anaheim Stadium office hangs a message for all visitors, which reads:

Yea, Though I Walk Through The Valley of the Shadow of Death, I Shall Fear No Evil; For I Am The Meanest S.O.B. in the Valley. It’s a message that Port periodically lives by.

“I have a tendency to display a certain temper and get my back up when I run into people who have never scouted a player, drafted a player, signed a player or developed a player, who will tell you all you have to know about players and the nature of this industry,” Port said.

“Some guys will call up and say, ‘My client hit a home run last year. We want a five-year contract.’ And I’ll go off the deep end.

“People in the office will see my door close, and about twice a year, usually around January and February, there is some validity in that sign on the wall.”

David Pinter, who negotiated Moore’s contract with Port during the winter, said that Port “can be a really pain in the butt for an agent. You can’t get nothing out of him.”

Port played a mean game of hardball in the Moore negotiations, making an early offer of $2.7 million for three years, taking it off the table in November and then re-submitting it in December in slightly modified form.

One day before the Jan. 8 signing deadline, Port still hadn’t budged from the original $2.7-million figure. “Maybe I made a negotiating mistake, but we presented our best possible offer too soon,” Port said at the time.

An exasperated Pinter slumped in his chair at an Anaheim hotel bar later that night and muttered, somewhat sardonically: “Mike Port never makes a mistake.”

The next day, Pinter was so thoroughly convinced that Port wouldn’t compromise that he checked out of his hotel and prepared to fly home to New York. But a last-minute phone call by Port to Pinter’s partner, Peter Rose, laid the groundwork for an 11th-hour settlement.

Once the dotted line was signed and all parties shook hands, Pinter came away with grudging respect for Port.

“He’s the brightest young baseball executive I’ve dealt with in my 10 years in the business,” Pinter said. “If I owned a baseball team, I would kidnap Mike Port, make him my general manager and then go fishing for the rest of the year. The shop would be in good hands. The man pinches pennies.

“As an agent, I hate him,” Pinter continued. “But as a business man, I respect him.”

Port considers his two dealings with Moore--first by selecting him in the 1985 free-agent compensation draft and then by keeping him under contract through 1988--to be the highlights of his first year as Angel general manager.

“If I made a mistake it was not getting Donnie Moore two years sooner,” he said, smiling.

Port had his share of difficult decisions as a rookie chief executive. He released a future Hall of Famer in Carew. He failed to sign Juan Beniquez, the team’s only .300 hitter last season. He traded two of the organization’s best pitching prospects, Bob Kipper and Pat Clements, and a young outfielder, Mike Brown, for veterans John Candelaria, George Hendrick and Al Holland--a move seemingly contradictory to Port’s stated commitment to youth and the Angels’ farm system.

Port reflected on each decision.

--On Carew: “For Mike Port to sit down, face to face, and tell Rod Carew that the club did not intend to offer him a contract for 1986 still staggers me. I’m trying to think of anything that was harder for me to do.

“Rod is of the opinion that he can still contribute to a baseball team--and, in honesty, I would have to agree with Rod. If we had a 26- or 27-man roster limit, it’s very probable that Rod Carew would still be with our ballclub.

“But when you start to break down our club, if Rod Carew returns this year, what do you tell a Wally Joyner, who won the first triple crown in Puerto Rico in the past 14 years? How do you displace a Darrell Miller, who has done everything asked of him? From a personnel standpoint, it had to be done.”

--On Beniquez: “That decision was made difficult. We wound up offering Juan more money than what he ultimately realized with Baltimore, but the stumbling block was the element of guarantees.

“His agent wanted the money guaranteed. He said Juan always has a bad spring, and what if he had another this spring and the club released him?

“We said, ‘Wait a minute. Here’s a guy who hit .300 the past three years. What is the likelihood that if he hits .147 in the spring that we’ll tell him, ‘That’s it, see you later’? I would submit that it’s less than likely.

“We did not let Juan Beniquez go. Juan Beniquez chose not to accept what the California club offered and decided to go elsewhere. He settled for $450,000 with Baltimore when with us, at worst, he would have walked home at the end of 1986 with $550,000 plus a chance to earn $150,000 in incentive clauses.

“That is, of course, assuming he survived spring training.”

--On the Candelaria trade: “This is something we contemplated long and hard and researched. We realized that it might be criticized in some quarters.

“We could have turned away from the John Candelaria transaction and still have Mike Brown and Bob Kipper with us. But would we have finished one game behind Kansas City last year and would our pitching staff stack up as well as it does this year?

“Who knows? That’s endless ammunition for the hot-stove type of discussion. Again, I may be proven wrong but I’ll go on the record saying I firmly believe that the unsung part of this thing is what George Hendrick is going to do for this club. I have a certain feeling about George Hendrick. Let’s wait and see how it goes.”

Bavasi has another view on why Port has this certain feeling about Hendrick. It has something to do with birds of a feather.

“Mike sometimes reminds me of George Hendrick,” Bavasi said. “I think George is one of the finest young men in the game. He got the reputation for not talking to newspapermen, but you can’t hold that against him. He performs.

“Same with Mike. Mike’s not afraid of the press and it’s not that he doesn’t like them. He believes his job is behind the desk and it’s somebody else’s job to put people in the ballpark.”

Behind the desk, Port ranked among the best in baseball in 1985, according to Bavasi.

“I’d give him an A-plus,” Bavasi said. “He was right on in the Donnie Moore negotiations and I think Mike has given Gene Mauch the kind of club he likes--a mixture of veterans and youngsters.

“He had a tough year, but he handled it. It’s a good thing those experiences came early (in his career). He’ll learn from them.”

Bavasi did, however, have one piece of advice for his protege.

“Mike has no hobby,” Bavasi said. “He should get one.”

But it will probably never happen. Mike Port, Mr. Tunnel Vision, develop an outside interest?

“Sure,” Mead says. “He already has one.

“Baseball.”

‘Given the time and the capability, I am inclined to get as much information as possible before acting. Some people operate baseball clubs with the wheeler-dealer syndrome. I do not.’

--MIKE PORT