Three Heavy Hitters at Top Represent a Big Change in Baseball Leadership

Three decades ago when a medical doctor named Bobby Brown was playing third base for the New York Yankees, the only adversaries he and his teammates knew were the seven other teams in the American League.

“Twelve or 15 writers traveled with us all the time, and we didn’t have an adversary relationship with any of them,” Brown recalled the other day. “(Manager) Casey Stengel used to call them, ‘My writers.’ ”

Today’s managers don’t use that expression much. The press plays a different role in 1980s baseball.

The athletes are different now, too--wealthier, seemingly less dedicated, clearly more independent.

But in the opinion of many in sports, it is the leadership in baseball that has changed the most.

In baseball’s early years, figurehead types and warhorses often presided over the leagues and sat in the commissioner’s office. However, since 1984, baseball has elected three administrators who are as able and sophisticated as their peers in other American fields. They are:

--Peter Ueberroth, 48, commissioner. The President of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee in 1984, Ueberroth succeeded Bowie Kuhn on Oct. 1 of that year.

--Robert W. (Bobby) Brown, 61, president of the American League. The former Yankee third baseman, later a cardiologist in Fort Worth, Tex., Brown succeeded Lee MacPhail on Jan. 1, 1984.

--Angelo Bartlett Giamatti, 48, president of the National League. The outgoing president of Yale University, Giamatti will succeed Chub Feeney in December.

Kuhn was a baseball lawyer before he was promoted. Feeney and MacPhail both are old, familiar baseball names, having spent most of their lives in the game. Most of their predecessors came from similar backgrounds.

Ueberroth, Brown and Giamatti, however, gained their merit in non-baseball areas.

Especially notable is Brown. A former major leaguer and a baseball club official in Texas, he has spent most of his life in cardiology as an expert on the functions and diseases of the heart.

Still, it was the diseases of baseball that he and the others were hired to cure.

The game has developed three potentially terminal ailments: a drug problem; a financial problem created by high player salaries; and a television problem that has led to annual revenues of as much as $18 million for some franchises, Ueberroth said, against $2 million for others.

“My goal is to help get all 14 (American League) franchises into good financial shape,” Brown said, “and I can already see some progress.”

As for television, Ueberroth said: “We aren’t trying to create an (NFL-type) arrangement of equal revenue sharing for all. We’re just trying to ratchet the wheel a bit, to correct some of the imbalance, to get a fairer distribution of the new revenues. And I think we’re getting there.”

On drugs, Ueberroth said: “We didn’t have an incident in the first half of the season. I know I’m taking a risk in projecting (a drug-free future) for baseball, but I’m pleased with what’s been accomplished by just two means--education and peer pressure--without the other thing (mandatory random testing).”

Drugs and dollars aren’t baseball’s only concerns. Among others, there is the designated-hitter confusion and the imbalance of franchises--12 in the National League, 14 in the American.

Nevertheless, baseball is no longer drifting along with its former peculiarities and problems. With Brown’s help, Ueberroth has launched attacks on them all, and shortly he will have Giamatti’s help.

Those in baseball say that for the first time, baseball can count on uniformly wise leadership from each of its three key administrative positions.

“We went after men of talent, stature and prestige, and got it all,” Dodger President Peter O’Malley said.

O’Malley said that 10, 20 and 30 years ago there were able leaders such as former American League President Joe Cronin, but that the requirements have changed for baseball leaders.

“We’ve had some really fine baseball men in the top jobs,” he said. “But what’s changed is the game. It’s so much more than a game now.

“The dollar is so important today. The player-manager relationship and all the rest--this isn’t just a change, it’s a revolution.

“So we’ve gone outside of baseball--deliberately--for new talent. For a fresh look at our problems. For a new kind of expertise.”

When I was playing for Casey Stengel, the players’ association wasn’t even an idea.

--Bobby Brown At a baseball game in Texas recently, Brown and his wife watched a designated hitter bat for a pitcher.

“I wish they’d left the game the way it was,” he said.

“I don’t,” his wife said. “Maybe he’ll belt one.”

Because of fans such as his wife, Brown said, the designated hitter is here to stay. In the American League, at least. For a while, at least.

“The fan goes to baseball games to see the hitter rip the ball,” he said. “And the DH increases the chance.”

Ueberroth, who agrees, considers the DH mainly a conversation piece. “People really love to talk about it,” he said.

Once inclined to ban it, Ueberroth has bowed to the numbers. The designated hitter runs about 50-50 in most polls.

Brown said he will never like the rule, which isn’t used in the National League. But he has made his peace with it. He realizes it’s the fans who pay the bills and that the game can’t grow without them. He knows that the future belongs to those who adjust.

In baseball’s new leadership hierarchy, Brown represents the link to the past. He is the only one who goes back to the 1940s and who has ever hit a major league pitch.

He is listened to because of that and because he has adjusted well to a baseball community that is far different from the one in which he grew up.

“Almost everyone in America today is reasonably close to some kind of major league team,” he said. “That’s a radical change from my day as a player, when big league ball was only played in half the country, and when it was never seen, anywhere, by anybody, on TV.”

It follows, Brown said, that a 1980s baseball leader must keep Idaho as well as Chicago in mind.

His role is necessarily far different from that of the American League president he knew as a Yankee third baseman: Will Harridge.

Although Harridge was the American League’s disciplinarian, as Brown is, he never dealt with a union leader in his life.

Nor did he ever have to hear a network sports president suggest a starting time of 10 p.m., “just this once,” or 9 a.m. “What’s wrong with 9 a.m.?” a network man once asked.

“He just went to the office and handed down his decisions,” Brown said of Harridge.

“Every (disciplinary) case that comes up, I have to think about discussing it with the players’ association--whether to make an announcement unilaterally or conjointly with them.”

The association today routinely questions most player fines. Thirty-five years ago, according to Brown, “The only question we ever asked was, ‘Where do we send the check?’ ”

Looking back, Brown prefers 1940s baseball to that of the ‘80s.

“I don’t want to sound too reactionary, but there was something to be said for a time when the game was everything--when the players were just there to play it, and when the media and fans were just there to watch it,” he said.

“We never used to have ‘Panty Hose Night’ or the Beach Boys afterward, and we didn’t have to wait, between innings, for a TV sponsor to end his message.”

Baseball must have these things now to survive, he said.

Then he added: “They do detract from the game.”

The only distraction Brown permitted himself as a player was a joint career as medical student at Tulane and, eventually, as a doctor. The son of a Seattle insurance executive, he followed his Yankee tour with a tour as a battalion surgeon in the Korean War. He still serves as a consultant in cardiology cases.

It isn’t often that professional athletes combine the intelligence, energy and self-discipline to earn MD degrees while still playing ball. Other examples that come to mind are George Medich, a 1970s Yankee pitcher; Danny Fortmann, a 1940s Chicago Bear, and Bill McColl, a 1950s Bear.

Brown learned self-confidence and independence as a surgeon and athlete--he still plays tennis three times a week--and he brings Ueberroth’s kind of independence to the American League.

“I consider Peter Ueberroth a close friend, and our opinions usually coincide,” he said. “But if I have a different opinion, I express myself. I feel comfortable expressing my views to anyone I work with.”

Authority is 80% taken, 20% given.

--Peter Ueberroth Walter O’Malley, Peter’s father, was in his Los Angeles office visiting with a reporter one day in the pre-Ueberroth era when former Commissioner Ford Frick called from New York.

After listening for a moment, O’Malley put the receiver on his desk and continued the interview with the writer for another 15 or 20 minutes.

Periodically, as the voice on the phone grew louder or softer, O’Malley leaned over and said, kindly, “Yes, Ford.”

Baseball commissioners have not been universally respected. In the view of most club owners, even Kennesaw Mountain Landis wore out his welcome early on.

Ueberroth’s biggest achievement so far is holding the support of 26 diverse ownership groups. And he is doing it by making his first priority their financial well-being.

Even his drug campaign has had an economic base. He fears that drug users could cripple baseball, perhaps destroy it.

Asked about the game’s improved financial posture in the last couple of years, Yankee owner George Steinbrenner said recently: “I give all the credit to Ueberroth.”

Said Ueberroth: “The beginning of financial sanity is coming to baseball, and it’s the result of something I did, but I can take no credit for it because I did it for a different reason.

“My objective in ordering the owners to open their books last year was to avoid the (umpires’) strike.

“It seemed to have no effect on the negotiations, but the side benefits were important and surprising. The actual numbers had never before been laid out cold and stark.

“The owners had no idea of the financial difficulties they were in. Even those on the top side of the curve had an impression they were doing better than they were.”

As soon thereafter as they could, the clubs began cutting salary offers. They quit bidding on free agents. Most illuminating of all, they decided--individually, they said--to pare their rosters from 25 to 24 players.

Collusion, the union charged. And to many observers, it looked that way--particularly the roster reductions.

Was it collusion?

“No, it was embarrassment,” Ueberroth said. “There was a substantial amount of embarrassment when the owners looked at the books. And their reaction was just good common sense. These spiraling losses had to end.”

It is Ueberroth’s philosophy that every club in the majors should break even financially.

“Profits aren’t really necessary in baseball,” he said. “This is a public institution. But the game can’t be maintained indefinitely at a loss.”

I always wanted to be president of the other league.

--A. Bartlett Giamatti The newest member of baseball’s leadership triumvirate, Bart Giamatti is also the least known among sports fans. And he is likely to remain that way for a spell.

Giamatti is reportedly vacationing between his presidencies of Yale and the National League.

At the press conference called to introduce him last month, Giamatti said that one of the things he brings to baseball is a “willingness to learn.”

He is now holed up somewhere learning, and in the view of most baseball writers, this gets him off to the right start.

By profession, if Brown is a doctor and Ueberroth a businessman specializing in travel tours, Giamatti is a scholar. His specialties are the Renaissance period--1400 to 1600--and writing.

In recent years, he said at New Haven, Conn., recently, he has written almost as much about baseball as the Renaissance.

“I’d like you to come by someday and see all the baseball articles Bart has produced,” Peter O’Malley said. “He’s very knowledgeable, very interested.”

It was O’Malley who went after Giamatti for the National League when he became available this year.

“When (O’Malley) called to ask if we could chat, I said yes,” Giamatti said.

Giamatti is skeptical of such things as mandatory loyalty oaths and urine tests. And he’s coming aboard just as baseball seems to be making a slight adjustment in its campaign against drug users.

What Ueberroth and Brown would like to see is every major leaguer volunteering for baseball’s drug program, and Giamatti would be comfortable with that.

“I think (mandatory random testing) is a very difficult issue,” Giamatti said. “I’m certainly not averse to testing. And it seems like voluntary testing is to be desired.”

Brown agreed.

“The individual has a right not to be tested without his permission,” he said. “The patient always has that right. But when (the drug problem) is as serious as it is, my hope is that the (players) will waive their rights.”

Pro football has recently indicated a much harder line, mandating compulsory random tests for all, plus lifetime suspensions for repeat users in a program that is now before an arbitrator.

Ueberroth says he doesn’t believe in lifetime bans.

“Any player who can get well at any time should be able to play this game,” he said recently at a San Diego seminar. “I don’t think you can give up on a human being as long as he accepts help. The easiest thing to do is kick somebody out.”