Angels ’87 : Q AND A WITH MIKE PORT

Mike Port succeeded Buzzie Bavasi as general manager of the Angels Sept. 1, 1984. Port discussed several issues, including free agency and his methods of negotiating with free agents, in a recent interview. Here are some of his responses to questions asked by Dean Hill of The Times’ special sections department.

Question: Near the end of last season, a colleague of yours in the front office of another team gave you credit for helping the Angels have such a successful year in that you would not negotiate during the season with eight players whose contracts were running out. How do you feel about that?

Answer: We did not want this to be a distraction, which it can be. And I think our intention right now would be not to negotiate during the course of the season.

I know suggestions have been made that it might be helpful to begin negotiations earlier so that you don’t run into problems coming down to the wire, when you get to Dec. 7 or Jan. 8. But no matter how early you start, you’re just stretching out the same number of discussions, and it will probably still come down to a matter of either Dec. 7 or Jan. 8.

The Angels will still sign multiyear contracts when we feel appropriate, and still institute certain elements of guarantee. But I think we will try our best to do so when it is not harmful or distracting to the effort on the field.

Our approach over the recent past has been “Let’s take first things first.” We just wanted to have everyone pull the wagon across the finish line before we started on the next race. Not at all an original idea. If anything, a traditional idea from back in the era when baseball had nothing but one-year contracts. And what anybody got for the succeeding season depended on what they had done during the previous season.

Q: Have you been surprised by the inability of Tim Raines and people like that to sign with other clubs?

A: Not really, because they have had offers. The offers have just not been as high as they might like. But after roughly 10 years of free agency, at least on the part of the California club, there has been a virtual trail of disasters; a lot of dollars spent and some fellows still being paid who are no longer in baseball.

I think it’s understandable that after 10 years some people are going to see the market adjust. Our club has not been active to any great extent in the free-agent market since about three years ago when we signed Ruppert Jones, who was a non-ranking player at the time, and the year before that when we signed Frank LaCorte. So we had those two years where we involved one individual. But ever since then, we like to think that the path that we have adopted has resulted in improved performances on the field, having come closer to the World Series last year than we ever have before.

Q: Hasn’t free agency been costly to clubs in terms of losing draft picks who have turned out to be good players for other teams?

A: Absolutely. It costs you, depending on the ranking player, in terms of draft choices; in terms of roster flexibility, because when you sign an individual to a multiyear guaranteed contract for a lot of money, you may go down the drain and out to sea with that individual trying to bear out your investment, which may stymie the progress of a young player.

You don’t have that flexibility of saying, “OK, you’re not doing the job so you go down to Edmonton and we’ll bring the young player in.”

There are motivational questions, though, that will be disputed by obvious sources. We have studies showing that performance will drop after X number of years of a multiyear contract. I think that’s only human nature at work.

You used to be able to go out and sign a player to a multiyear guaranteed contract at a high rate of pay and turn around and go to an insurance carrier and insure that for disability or whatever. But now, with 10 years or so of experience, we’ve had some downside occurrences in that respect--pitchers with bad arms and so forth and some claims have been paid--you find that coverage is not as easy to acquire. Just so many, many things that I think it comes down to the realization that there are many problems connected with free agency.

Q: Isn’t a prime example of free agency Wally Joyner, because you used a compensation pick for Don Baylor signing with the Yankees and drafted Joyner? If that hadn’t been the case, Joyner might be playing with another team now.

A: Exactly. I think that free agency is a great thing to write about during the off-season, and it takes a bit of restraint to keep from jumping in there and saying that we were successful in being able to acquire this guy and a making big splash. But getting back to practicality, you have to be concerned with performance and try to make the best blend for your club.

Two years ago we were criticized for not having heavily pursued Bruce Sutter and/or Rick Sutcliffe. And sometimes all things don’t turn out to the good. With all due respect to Bruce, those things happen. People have learned that just because you give somebody a large amount of money and guarantee it under any and all circumstances is no guarantee of the performance you’re expecting. Baseball has learned that time and time again.

Q: Baltimore Orioles’ owner Edward Bennett Williams called accusations of collusion among owners over the lack of signing of free agents ridiculous; that the most devastating impact on the owners was when everybody opened the books and saw what this was costing every one of them.

A: As competitive as this industry is, trying to get all major league clubs to agree on having lunch at the same time is a good trick in itself. But it is becoming increasingly a practical industry. The California club alone for around a five- or a six-year period was averaging about $1 million a year to players who hadn’t been with us, absolutely not furnishing services.

We have responsibilities to so many people aside from what you see on the field at Anaheim--minor league managers and trainers and scouts who are very much an integral part of the fabric of baseball. The allegations of collusion, I think, are some people taking the easy way out because they were having a good time at baseball’s expense, failed to foresee market adjustments and this is the only way they can rationalize the situation.

When baseball as an industry gets smart and tries to be practical, the reaction is somebody gets mad. And that is the easy way out.

Q: Would the owners becoming “smarter” have something to do with the fact that because salaries got larger, all of a sudden major league franchises were running much narrower profits or nonprofits?

A: I would say a much narrower margin, and I think you hit on the right word in ‘nonprofit’ and for that matter loss.

We’ve had on the average for the past however many years 26 existing major league franchises, and it is not unusual to see that only seven to eight would finish in the black. I know that people will refute that by claiming creative accounting measures, but when you consider salaries having gone up to the extent that they have, that is the biggest overhead factor. And then when you consider the other elements, meal money having risen, the expenses of stadium rental and especially air travel, I think there come to be known some financial realities.

If nothing more than as a matter of pride, a businessman likes to see the bottom-line figure written down in black and not in red, even if it’s $1.

You sit down and look at over the recent past what people would consider the most successful baseball operations in all respects, you would hear names such as the Dodgers and the Baltimore Orioles, the Kansas City Royals, the Toronto Blue Jays, people like that. But when you stop to think about it, those have not necessarily been clubs that have been heavy participants in free agency. They have built from within, they have developed their players, and I think you’ll see an increasing trend in that direction.

Q: The Orioles only in the last several years have really started participating heavily, because things haven’t worked out in their farm system.

A: And where have they gone? We as an organization will again come upon a time when we will sign free agents, but it is a distant third in our priorities on how to build a club.

Q: What do you think about the emergence of agents as bargainers for players when, 20 years ago, a Sandy Koufax or Don Drysdale would sit down with Buzzie Bavasi and say, “OK, the holdout is over”?

A: I think that a lot of attention is generated by agents. You see a lot of comments in the press during the off-season by agents who have this in mind or that in mind. I would correlate it closely to the advent of free agency, and agents and representation of players has now become the norm. For a player not to be represented is very much in the minority.

Q: Has it been a good thing in the sense of helping the players, or has it made your job that much tougher?

A: Probably a little bit of each, because I think there are some good agents. To me, a good agent is somebody who will help these young men properly handle their tax situations, budgets that save some money, make proper investments and so forth.

Unfortunately, there’s an element that consider themselves agents who show up only in the months of January and February when there’s a contract to be negotiated, then leave the player for the balance of the year and ride on the coattails of his performance.

It’s the baseball people who scout the player, draft the player, sign the player, develop the player, and then, more often than not, the agent shows up and says “Well, my player” or “This is what we want.” But again, I think on balance there are some good agents and some less than good.