Sermons on the Mound : Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth Preaches About a Clean-Cut, Drug-Free, Financially Sound National Pastime. And He Means Business.

High above the United States, Baseball Commissioner Peter V. Ueberroth, bound for Houston to promote this week’s All-Star Game, stretched out in the small executive jet, collar open, tie loosened, feet up. Two nonstop days of meetings, lectures, press conferences, dinners and hand-shaking had dissolved into a welcome respite 29,000 feet in the sky. Ueberroth, trim at 48, pondered a turkey sandwich (no mayo) and sipped a Diet Coke.

In less than two years in office, he has faced some formidable challenges: an umpires’ strike his first day on the job in 1984, the threat of a players’ strike the following year and, most recently, one of the biggest drug scandals in sports history. Though he was hired by the major-league baseball team owners--including some of the most headstrong personalities in sports--he must weigh their interests against a powerful players’ union and millions of devoted fans, with his every decision and pronouncement scrutinized by the media.

“You know, it’s basically a very unpopular kind of position,” he said. “You are in a disciplining role, you decide disputes, there’s a governance factor to the commissioner, you try and assist in the growth and health and promotion of the game. And all those factors don’t necessarily fit together.”

In short, a complicated job for a complicated man. Hard-driving, tightly wrapped, Ueberroth defies easy analysis: Left in a room with Freud, Jung, Adler and Perls, he would most likely recruit the shrinks to a drug-treatment panel and franchise the couch.

He has brought the unmistakable Ueberroth touch to baseball, characterized by an almost missionary zeal, firm integrity, decisiveness and a remarkable knack for blocking the punches of his would-be critics. Ueberroth has been described as arrogant, aloof, abrasive, tyrannical, cold, warm, kind, gentle, caring. He can be all those things. The commissioner recently accepted the challenge of a 23-year-old appointments secretary who insisted she could outshoot him in basketball. At a suburban schoolyard late one Saturday, the pair shot it out. Ueberroth won. Sometimes, at home in Laguna Beach, master swimmer Ueberroth will tell his wife, Ginny, to start the coals for dinner while he heads out to the ocean to spearfish the main course. But in Houston the morning after his flight, it was Peter Ueberroth, baseball statesman and diplomat, very much on display.

They had gathered early and eagerly, awaiting him with the kind of excitement normally reserved for a major box-office hero. First was the Houston City Council. “You all have been very supportive of baseball, and it’s very healthy here,” he told the council in announcing plans for the All-Star Game. Then, seizing on a favorite theme, he reminded them, “Where government is not supportive of baseball, baseball does not do well.” Next it was the Harris County commissioners, standing around in cowboy boots and string ties, shelving feuds and petty differences for their moment with the commissioner of baseball. “Let me just say,” Ueberroth said, smiling and autographing baseballs, “it’s fun to be in this city.”

Ueberroth’s mission was to build support for an expanded Dome for the Astros, to remind the city of the economic value of its team and to point out the benefits of a three-day All-Star festival. “You will have 100 million people stop what they are doing in North America and look at Houston,” he said, and around him heads nodded in agreement. An old-timers’ all-star game, featuring retired major-league greats, would be followed a day later by the regular all stars holding home-run-hitting contests and performing other feats for charity. To get into the stadium, fans would have to make a contribution to several of Houston’s good causes. “It’s baseball teaching larger lessons of citizenship,” he said, another recurring motif. As an added bonus, Ueberroth said, “we have 40,000 people who have learned to donate.”

In one neat package, Ueberroth had tied up his entire baseball philosophy: teamwork, civic responsibility, charity, a clean-cut family atmosphere, broadening the game’s audience and establishing a sense of give-and-take between players, management, fans and the city. Ueberroth has become baseball’s leading ambassador: part lobbyist, part living embodiment of the clean-cut values associated with baseball’s better days. To him, baseball is not just a game or a business, it is a model for the nation’s youth, an incubator of heroes, a vital part of a city’s financial health and a living monument to traditional American values.

“Baseball has a responsibility to teach a value system,” Ueberroth often says. “It is the national pastime. Baseball players are the idols of millions of kids.”

As Ueberroth demonstrated with the Olympics, he is a forceful, no-nonsense administrator--”John Wayne Ueberroth,” one writer dubbed him. His management style, his determined attack on drugs and his attempts to modernize and merchandise baseball without forsaking traditional values have made him the most powerful commissioner since Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the game’s first.

“On a 1 to 10 scale,” says Washington attorney Edward Bennett Williams, owner of the Baltimore Orioles, “I’d rate him a 10. I think he’s what we need. He’s very smart, very strong, very very tough, but most of all he’s decisive. We needed those things badly. Those people who would like to have a less powerful commissioner may have a quarrel with him, but I’ve got no problem.”

Ueberroth’s power as commissioner by no means came with the office. Before he accepted the $400,000-plus-per-year job, he demanded several concessions from the owners that would give him far greater authority than his predecessor, Bowie Kuhn, ever had. And he got them.

Baseball’s search committee considered more than 100 people for the job. Committee members first approached Ueberroth a year before the Olympic Games. “I said no, under no circumstances, positively no,” Ueberroth says. “I told them, ‘I cannot leave an undone task.’ ” Eight months later, “they made a different kind of offer. (They) said, how about a few months after the Olympic Games? Now that was a different set of circumstances.”

He became baseball’s sixth commissioner on Oct. 1, 1984, seven weeks after the Olympics ended. By that time, Major League Baseball had sweetened the commissioner’s pie considerably. The most significant change was a guarantee that the commissioner would be formally recognized as baseball’s chief executive officer, with all major departments--and the presidents of the National and American leagues--reporting directly to him. Although Ueberroth was elected commissioner by unanimous vote, the owners also agreed that to be reelected, he would require approval from only a simple majority of the 26 teams, as opposed to the three-fourths vote from each league needed before. Teams would also vote in concert instead of by leagues, though each league would still have to give a minimum of five yes votes.

“We’re not used to dealing with someone with that amount of power,” Chicago White Sox president Eddie Einhorn says. “We gave it to him, no regrets.”

As a self-made millionaire, Ueberroth could easily identify with the millionaires who own baseball teams. Baseball’s 26 owners are a diverse group. As Ueberroth likes to say, picture the Yankees’ George M. Steinbrenner II and the Cincinnati Reds’ Marge Schott--and her dog--in the same room. Some owners look warily on Ueberroth, others see him as the sport’s savior--but virtually all seem to respect him. “He’s very smart,” Einhorn says. “He’s got incredible confidence, and a record to back it up. You got millionaires who are successful in their own businesses and they think they know about everything, and they’re not going to listen to other people. You look to someone with the credentials, a guy who’s done it. There’s mutual respect there.”

Ueberroth calls the owners “for the most part . . . good citizens.” When he accepted the job, he stressed his accessibility and urged owners not to stew about problems secondhand. “I said, ‘If you want to know what I think about any subject, ask me.’ ” But, he acknowledges, “It’s a job where you don’t please people. I’ve never had that experience before, because you have to make decisions that are basically unattractive . . . most of the time, to some extent, to basically everybody.”

For example, despite heated opposition, Ueberroth persuaded the owners to divulge the finances of their teams when the players were threatening to strike last year. He eliminated owners’ committees and now calls meetings of all the owners more frequently. He changed the voting rules and renewed entrepreneurship (for example, instituting corporate sponsorship of old-timers’ games in ballparks around the country).

Dealing directly with baseball’s volatile politics and economics, Ueberroth has persuaded the team owners who also own lucrative television superstations (independent stations, such as Ted Turner’s WTBS, that broadcast their programming by satellite across the country) to share the wealth--something predecessor Bowie Kuhn was unable to do. Ueberroth says he simply “determined a number, charged it to the superstations and took those funds and redistributed them among all the other ball teams.” The superstation owners had been beaming certain games into other teams’ markets but refusing to share the profits. The problem had been so nagging, he says, that owners in both leagues had been “arguing and sending letters to each other and threatening for nine years.” So when either side grumbles about the equity of his decision, “My answer to both is: ‘Nine years. Nine years of nothing. If you want to argue some more, let’s have the 10th and 11th years.’ ”

He has quietly strengthened the finances of some of baseball’s weaker teams, introducing, for example, a new program of corporate sponsorship, and has underlined Major League Baseball’s economic commitment to the cities that support teams.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Pittsburgh, the site of a unique experiment in community-based ownership. When the former owners of the Pirates announced plans to sell their money-losing franchise, Ueberroth worked behind the scenes with businessmen, bankers and Pittsburgh’s mayor to ensure that the Pirates didn’t leave town.

“Several of us felt it would be very bad for Pittsburgh and the community to lose a major-league baseball team,” says Douglas Danforth, chief executive officer of Westinghouse, which is headquartered in Pittsburgh. “Peter felt very strongly that local teams should only be moved as a last resort. The Pittsburgh Pirates had been here for 101 years, and he would lend his support and counsel to keep them here.”

Over lunch in a private dining room at Pittsburgh’s old-line Duquesne Club, Ueberroth spelled out his ideas to some of the city’s leading citizens. “He persuaded us that with the right management and the right corporate interest, we could rebuild fan interest and rebuild our farm system,” Danforth says. “He shared with us the conviction that the team ought to stay.”

The eventual solution placed the Pirates under a consortium of local owners, including corporations and banks. The city made an interest-free loan to the group to serve as working capital. As a public statement of his commitment, Ueberroth attended the Pirates’ opening home game this year.

“It’s a unique experiment,” Ueberroth says. “It developed a ‘you belong to us’ philosophy. It’s a Pittsburgh team that belongs to the Pittsburgh community. It belongs to the fans, the people. I tell you, I think it’s going to work.”

Ueberroth would almost certainly say the same about his assault on drugs in baseball. At a recent congressional hearing in Washington, he went so far as to say, “Drugs in baseball are history.”

It has become a familiar refrain. “Somewhere, sometime, somehow, somebody had to say enough is enough to drugs, and baseball has done that,” he told 1,200 Houston executives at a luncheon. It was the same message he had brought to students at Yale University (where he lectured as a Chubb Fellow); the same sentiment he gave Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III when they discussed strategies for fighting drug use; the same statement, essentially, he offers journalists day in and day out.

So insistent is his party line on drugs that some critics call it more show than substance. Pointedly noting that the commissioner’s “understanding of the public-relations business is regarded with awe in the business world,” New Yorker magazine baseball writer Roger Angell expressed impatience with Ueberroth: “The need for symbolic victory seems to outweigh every other consideration or sensible procedure.”

Last March, Ueberroth conditionally suspended seven players for the 1986 season after a well-publicized investigation showed they fell into a pattern of drug use and distribution. Each suspension was held in abeyance, however, if the player agreed to a combination of fines, drug-related community service and random urinalysis testing.

From the start, Ueberroth knew his decision would be scrutinized intensely. “It’s a lose-lose decision,” he said shortly before announcing the suspensions. “The only thing you can do is lose. I can’t imagine that any owner will be pleased, any baseball player will be pleased, or any watcher of baseball will be pleased. They will either think I was too harsh, not harsh enough, too fast, too slow, too anything.”

“If you remove the drug issue,” Ueberroth has said, “I have probably one of the best jobs in America. With the drug issue, it’s less than attractive.”

Far less controversial was Ueberroth’s reinstatement to baseball last spring of baseball heroes Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. Because of their affiliation with Atlantic City gambling resorts, the pair had been banned by Ueberroth’s predecessor. Reviewing the matter, Ueberroth called Mays into his office. “I met him, and we just talked baseball,” Mays said. Then Mays was again summoned to the commissioner’s office, this time in the company of Mantle. “You guys are back in baseball,” Ueberroth simply told them moments before a press conference announcing their return to the sport.

The same directness was evident on Oct. 1, 1984--his first day as commissioner--when Ueberroth was faced with his first crisis in the job. The major-league umpires went out on strike, over the issues of post-season pay and job security. Their walkout could not have come at a worse time--in the middle of the American and National League playoffs.

Ueberroth’s assault on the problem set the tone for his regime. As the strike began, he sent private signals through a series of intermediaries to Richard G. Phillips, general counsel for the Major League Umpires Assn.

“Basically, these people were saying, if Richie and Peter could sit down together, we could work this thing out,” Phillips recalls. But first, there had to be public courting. Phillips and Ueberroth were interviewed separately on television in Kansas City during the playoffs by Howard Cosell, who acted as an on-air marriage broker. “Howard kept pushing me to ask Ueberroth to come into the thing. I was afraid to ask him before a nationwide television audience and have the rug pulled out,” Phillips says. “I’m saying, ‘It’s his job to get involved and to resolve the issue.’ Ueberroth came on Howard’s show a few minutes later. He said on the air that Richie Phillips is a great lawyer. He threw me many bouquets. I sat back. The intermediaries went to work.”

Within 24 hours, there were some private understandings. Ueberroth was made to realize that the umpires were very serious. Their value in the World Series was an important bargaining chip, and they had the bases loaded. Ueberroth’s major condition was that the commissioner had to play a key role in sealing any deal. Ueberroth was pressing for arbitration between the umpires and the American and National League presidents--and he wanted to be the arbitrator.

“He’s a good negotiator,” Phillips says. “The way he negotiates is, ‘Here’s the olive branch and here’s the sword.’ He downplays the sword part, but it’s always there. He’s saying, ‘I’ll bend over backwards with you. I’ll cut off your . . . if you don’t go along and negotiate.’ He doesn’t do a hard sell.”

When the playoffs switched to San Diego, Ueberroth and Phillips began meeting at the Town and Country Hotel. The chemistry was right. The umpires and the league presidents agreed to arbitration, with Ueberroth as arbitrator. Having essentially agreed on the outcome beforehand, it came as no surprise to either side when Ueberroth ruled in favor of the umpires.

Sitting by the hotel pool, Phillips and Ueberroth agreed it would be nice if the umps came back ahead of schedule, in time for the fifth game of the playoffs. With that, the two men retreated to the commissioner’s hotel room and began making phone calls. Ueberroth the master strategist was in his element, orchestrating the umps’ return, arranging police escorts, helicopters if necessary-- anything to get them to the stadium.

“That Sunday during the game when the umpires went back to work, I mentioned on ABC how I trusted Peter Ueberroth,” says Phillips. “I think that’s important to him. He feels that with mutual trust, you can get things done.”

Implicit was the notion of shared responsibility to something bigger--the 110-year-old institution of baseball. “It’s a ‘we have a responsibility to something called the game’ mentality,” says Ueberroth. “You have a responsibility to run your own team, you have a responsibility to try to win your ballgames, but you also have a responsibility to the betterment of the game.”

While revealing his skills as both public and behind-the-scenes negotiator, Ueberroth’s swift resolution of the umpires’ strike also reflected elements of his personal philosophy. Over the years he has developed a formula: “Authority is 80% taken, 20% given.” And, he often says, “leadership is not just thinking, it’s also doing. And it takes a lot of people

caring about something.” Another pillar of the Ueberroth philosophy: “You can succeed if you’re not afraid to try.”

In many ways Ueberroth himself is the epitome of that belief: a millionaire travel executive who, with his job as head of the Olympic committee, made the plunge into public life with a big splash. His background is pure Americana. The son of a traveling aluminum products salesman, Ueberroth was 4 when his mother died of cancer. Those who bristle at Ueberroth’s legendary quizzes (at Olympics headquarters, he was known to corner employees in elevators and grill them on such topics as the ins and outs of the Olympic charter or the correct spelling of the provinces of Yugoslavia) may find the genesis of the practice in a father who kept encyclopedias by the dinner table. “Each night,” Ueberroth wrote in “Made in America,” his autobiography, “he’d select a volume or a section of the paper and quiz us on different subjects.”

Ueberroth’s first job was delivering newspapers. By age 14, he supervised 10 delivery boys. Soon he was working in a local children’s home and caddying at a nearby golf course. “I was turning into a workaholic at an early age,” Ueberroth wrote. “It was also when I discovered that I liked being in charge.” A C student in high school, Ueberroth went to San Jose State as an athlete, not a scholar. “To show you how terribly intelligent I was,” he is fond of observing, “under the heading Church Preference, I had written in big letters ‘RED BRICK. ‘ “ Ueberroth became captain of his school’s water polo team but detoured thoughts of a shot at the 1960 Olympics team when he met a Long Beach baker’s daughter named Virginia Mae Nicolaus. Low on funds, Ueberroth insisted the two go Dutch the first few dates. They married in September, 1959, with $500 between them. Now, with the youngest of their four children college-bound in the fall, it is Ginny Ueberroth who handles the finances, from constructing the new house at Laguna Beach to running the family’s other diverse concerns, including a small winery and almond business.

For a time after graduation, Ueberroth sold copying machines and managed a charter airline, but he found his metier in building First Travel Corp. into the second-largest travel enterprise (after American Express) in North America.

It was all good preparation not only for making the Olympics into an industry but for becoming baseball commissioner--a position that provides diverse satisfactions for Ueberroth. As commissioner, he says, no day is ever the same, though many begin with an 8 a.m. breakfast at Park Avenue’s posh Regency Hotel. Ueberroth’s Upper East Side address is close enough to walk to work, also on Park Avenue. But these days, it’s often hard for Ueberroth to take a walk, ride an elevator or hail a cab without receiving ad-lib appraisals of his job. “Hey, Commish, keep up the good work,” a cabbie yelled out to him recently as Ueberroth waited to cross a street in Midtown. Partly because of his passion for privacy, but also because of the increasingly public nature of his position, Ueberroth prefers quiet dinners in small restaurants with his wife and no more than three other couples.

Ueberroth inspires great loyalty among his staff, but despite his own calm armor, he has also been known to instill near-frenzy in those around him. So enamored is the commissioner with the question-and-answer process, for example, that colleagues say life with Ueberroth often resembles one big Socratic dialogue. He will not entertain a problem without a solution--any solution, no matter how off-the-wall. “No more flights to New York today?” he once chastised a co-worker in Los Angeles. “Well, what’s the next flight to London? Doesn’t it stop in New York? Couldn’t you fly into New York from Mexico City? Have you thought about those? Well don’t come in here and tell me there’s no other way until you’ve checked it out.”

An aide who was squinting persistently during Olympics meetings still remembers Ueberroth’s interrupting the proceedings to bark in front of the entire room, “Wake up! Is this boring you? Or do you just need glasses?” (The aide needed glasses.)

“Somebody said one day that I don’t take stress,” Ueberroth says, “I give stress.”

Even though he showed no interest in running for the Senate from California, he is often mentioned as someone made for the stresses of politics. One New York sports columnist made that point after the commissioner’s recent congressional appearance, sarcastically labeling Ueberroth’s testimony his first speech for the presidency, with the campaign theme: “I have cleaned up baseball. Let me clean up America.”

A registered Republican, Ueberroth insists he is no hard-line party man. His centrism makes him attractive to both parties, with some soothsayers likening his office-winning potential to Lee Iacocca’s: the personification of the American dream of self-made success and entrepreneurial genius. Besides, they reason, now that he has turned the Olympics into a profit-making business, graced the cover of Time magazine as Man of the Year, taken a hard-ball position on drugs in baseball, forged a powerful position with the team owners, what else is left?

“He is obviously a well-known person with a great record and an exciting personality,” says San Diego banker Gordon Luce, a key Republican fund-raiser in California. “He would be successful in any direction he would like.”

Ueberroth, however, steadfastly maintains that that direction will not be political. “I’ve never been one who plans and seeks things,” he said en route to Houston. “That’s one reason why this political thing, running for the Senate, felt all wrong to me.” Besides, he said, “My skills are at running something. A U.S. senator doesn’t run anything. If I do serve government at any time, it will probably be something appointed, and running something that’s a disaster.” Still, Ueberroth’s popularity continues to grow. When he delivered an address at Harvard last month, some of the students carried an 80-foot banner that read “Ueberroth for President.”

Those closest to Ueberroth have another explanation for his political reticence. “I’m not sure I would expect Peter to put himself in a position where he would be so vulnerable to the electorate,” a former Olympics colleague says. “Peter likes to be in control--he’s not likely to put himself up issue by issue like that.”

Another close Ueberroth associate calls his boss “too blunt” for political campaigning but conceded he might not turn down, say, a Cabinet position. “He’d do it if he could really get in there and bring about some change, or bust his butt trying,” he says. “The status would not remain quo, it just would not. Things would change.”

Ueberroth himself withholds judgment on the changes he has made in baseball, saying, carefully, “We’ll see. The jury’s still out on some things.”

So far, Ueberroth’s performance as commissioner has won him more admirers than detractors. Howard Cosell, seldom generous with his praise, says of the commissioner, “He has a dimensional mind, an encompassing mind, an encompassing view. It takes a big man to have these qualities. I think he will wind up being remembered as the finest administrator of sports in the history of the country.”

And after working with Ueberroth on the umpires’ strike, Richard G. Phillips was moved to quote from one of the giants of the sport: “As Casey Stengel said, ‘The world is full of nice guys. Give me someone who can hit.’ Ueberroth is a guy who can hit.”