Business May Be Business, but This Is Baseball

Not too long ago, 2 years, in fact, the Pittsburgh Pirates were the sick men of baseball, an embarrassment to the game, the laughingstock of the National League. “What has 18 legs, is yellow and black and lives in a cellar?”

They lost 202 games in 2 years. Nobody came to see the games. They bottomed out the league with their worst attendance in more than 30 years. The franchise was ripped by a drug scandal.

Whatever could go wrong, did. They couldn’t even sell the kielbasa. There was talk of moving the team. Any direction would do, including straight up. Some recommended the Okefenokee swamp.

Into this Hogarthian setting stepped one of the unlikeliest saviors in the history of the sport. Slow-walking, slow-talking, shambling Sydnor W. Thrift was a guy you’d hate to buy a horse off. His good-ol’-boy accent and careless apparel made him look like a country lawyer about to get a multiple murderer his knife back. He came walking out of a real estate office in Virginia, but his background was solid baseball.

He did more with less than any general manager in the recent history of either league. He took this orphaned franchise, which had been laid on the city’s doorstep with a note on it, picked it up, cleaned it off, cast around the league for ways to improve it.

The team record went from 57-104 and 64-98 to 80-82 and 85-75, from last place to second place. Attendance soared from the low of 735,900 to more than a million for 2 years and almost 2 million, the highest in franchise history, last year.

And what was his reward for this little miracle of the Monongahela? A ticker-tape parade through the Golden Triangle? The keys to the city? The keys to a new Cadillac? A lifetime contract? Man of the year?

They fired him.

Now, this would be kind of understandable if Syd Thrift had spent his weekends robbing banks, pulling the wings off butterflies or selling atomic secrets or was even on steroids.

But all he seems to have done is keep the Pirates in Pittsburgh. And make them contenders. They don’t hang people for that. Not even in effigy.

The problem is, the Pirates aren’t really owned. They’re run by a bunch of executive-suite types who know a great deal about car loadings and stock options and junk-bond financing but are probably pretty weak on the difference between the hit-and-run and the run-and-hit.

Look at it this way: The Pirates are not U.S. Steel. Or even Westinghouse. Somebody has to be able to tell Pete Rose from a roomful of guitar players, spot a ballplayer amid a crop of ditch diggers.

It’s not as easy as people think. Baseball may well be a general manager’s medium, and there have only been a few who genuinely mastered it. Branch Rickey was the patron saint of the breed.

Rickey, who I always said could spot a ballplayer from the window of a moving train, built, first, the St. Louis Cardinals dynasty that was, before Lindbergh, the Pride of St. Louis. Then he built the Dodger franchise from a vaudeville joke to a perennial World Series participant. He really built the Stargell-Clemente Pirate dynasty before he retired.

The greatest empire in baseball history, maybe in sports, the New York Yankees were undoubtedly the work of Babe Ruth. But they were also the work of a front-office man named Ed Barrow, who kept the Babe in a fitting supporting cast. When Barrow left, George Weiss continued the level of superiority till he retired. The Yankees have never been the same since.

Baseball is more art than science. But the gang of 13 who bought the Pirates on the dock, so to speak, on their way out of town, were all corporate lawyers, CEOs, investment bankers. Guys who were used to getting their own way, not their own coffee. Bottom-line guys in a sport that frequently doesn’t have one. If the 1988 Dodgers are the world champions, what good are computers?

Baseball can’t be run by committee. Sports has monarchies, anyway. Teams are best run where authority is absolute.

Syd Thrift didn’t have an owner, he had a government--nine corporations and four individuals. It was like Congress running the Washington Redskins or the City Council the Raiders. They gave him a budget a parish priest would be hard put to live on.

His payroll was $5 million lower than the league’s next-lowest. He couldn’t have paid the Dodger infield, but he pared off the big salaries by trading off the name players. It wasn’t just a fire sale. He got quality in return.

For Tony Pena, for example, he got Andy Van Slyke, who finished fourth in this year’s most-valuable-player voting, and a pitcher named Mike Dunne and a catcher named Mike LaValliere. Thrift was living up to his name.

“I had the payroll down to $4 million at one time,” he boasts.

And, the more he dealt, the better they got. Far from dismantling the team, he seemed to be ensuring its future.

What went wrong?

Syd says he doesn’t know. The only thing he knows for sure is that he traded for a Seattle journeyman named Glenn Wilson who is not to be confused with Hack, in the process giving up Darnell Coles, whom he had acquired from Detroit.

Pittsburgh’s board of millionaires seemed to think they should have been consulted. After all, they paid $26 million for the team and some were heard to complain that Syd thought it was his.

It’s too bad it isn’t. The way American businessmen run most of their affairs these days, we can expect any day the team to be merged with the Phillies. Or sold to the Japanese.