Brown, Angels Almost Did It

The final days of the Richard Brown presidency are upon us. Brown, the Angels’ CEO since November 1990, knows it. Disney, expected to assume controlling interest of the Angels within a month, knows it, too.

The only difference is Brown is available for comment on the matter.

“I have been told absolutely nothing,” Brown says, “and I have to respect Disney’s wishes to say nothing because [the sale] hasn’t been approved by baseball yet . . . But I read the papers like everyone else. The betting line is quite in favor of Disney not retaining me.

“I assume that the papers reflect the public common opinion. I suspect that’s what most people think. Does it bother me? Not really. You know, I’m human. I love my job. I would feel more comfortable about leaving the Angels if we had won it last year--or even got into the World Series. We did not.

“I feel the job is undone and I may be departing a job I have not completed.”

The sorry irony is that Brown has been caught in the cross-fire of an ownership overhaul just as he seemed to be getting the hang of the job.

Just like Mike Port, who made two of his smartest trades (Luis Polonia, Dave Winfield) weeks before Brown fired him.

Just like Buck Rodgers, who probably knew what to do with a team leading its division by 11 games in mid-August, but was fired by Brown months before Jim Edmonds and Gary DiSarcina blossomed into All-Stars.

For four years, Brown oversaw an operation that changed managers twice, general managers three times and committed so many pratfalls in the personnel department that entire rooms of baseball executives would convulse into delirious laughter at the drop of a few names.

Von Hayes.

Kelly Gruber.

Joe Magrane.

Dave Parker.

Junior Felix.

Then, suddenly last summer, the Angels almost won the West. That’s the way Brown will choose to remember it. Not cough it up, throw it away, flush it down the tubes, tank it, choke it, gag it.

Almost won it.

With a roster that featured an entirely home-grown outfield and double-play combination, two candidates for rookie of the year, Jim Abbott back in the starting rotation and seven regulars under the age of 30.

If Brown’s tenure as Angel president were a football game, he’d have fumbled the opening kickoff, trailed by four touchdowns at halftime, changed quarterbacks early in the fourth quarter and staged a desperation rally, only to lose at the gun on a field goal that caromed off the crossbar.

“These five years have been an extraordinary, extraordinary learning process for me,” Brown says. “I think I’ve learned well. I have the scars to prove it . . .

“One of the things I’m most proud of, even though we didn’t stick to the plan, is being one of the architects who developed a plan by which the Angels will field a competitive team for years to come.

“I couldn’t have developed it by myself, but I helped keep us on the path--even if there were some blips in the road. Which, on some occasions, were downright huge U-turns.”

Mistakes? Brown made a few. He admits, early on, to having “too much interaction with the press. I created unwittingly and unintentionally left an impression that I perhaps was passing myself off as someone who had a lot of baseball acumen.”

Brown “came into baseball self-admittedly as a fan. I never said I was qualified to run a baseball club because I was a fan. What I said was [being a fan] has some advantages because, having two little kids growing up in Los Angeles and going to ballgames, I knew what attracted me to the ballpark and I knew what my kids were looking for. I think that has helped in our marketing.”

He also had a fan’s mentality when it came to personnel decisions. He wanted to be involved in trade discussions, consulted for his two cents on that second baseman the Angels were thinking about signing. He loved the hot-stove banter. He enjoyed seeing his name in the paper. He was Everyfan, taking his crack at Baseball Executive Fantasy Camp, and pulling down six figures while he was at it.

This caused more problems for Brown than he could have ever fathomed.

He was laughed at when he called Luis Sojo “the next Bobby Grich.”

He was ridiculed by Angel front office staff members for “butting into” the Gary Gaetti negotiations and offering the free-agent third baseman more money than Port was willing to part with.

He was embarrassed when colleagues from other teams congratulated him for the Dave Parker-Dante Bichette trade, which is how Brown says he first learned about the deal.

He deferred to Whitey Herzog’s wizard reputation and watched idly as the Angels attempted to build for 1995 by entering 1992 with some of the top names of 1985--Von Hayes, Hubie Brooks, Alvin Davis, Ken Oberkfell.

He became an easy target when front office strategy went awry, blasted both by Port and Rodgers after their firings as the know-nothing lawyer lousing things up again--or worse. Rodgers called Brown “a cancer” that was eating away at the Angel organization.

That was in May of 1994.

Brown says he has not spoken to Rodgers since.

“Buck ripped me as a cancer in the organization,” Brown says. “The funny thing is, I’ve never had more calls from cancer victims, telling me they were disgusted by the use of the word ‘cancer.’

“I tried to make a light thing of it--’No, he’s wrong, I’m a Scorpio.’ I don’t think he was trying to demean people who had cancer . . .

“It was difficult to read in the newspaper. It was absolutely untrue. But I think Buck believed I was the one who fired him and lashed out at me. Billy [Bavasi] always said it was his decision. Ultimately, yeah, it was my decision. I could have turned to Billy and said, ‘No.’ ”

Brown says nine months after the firing, “a mutual friend” told him that Rodgers had reconsidered, that Rodgers now believed “it was Billy and that Rich was just acting as an executive”--words to that effect.”

Apology, if it was one, not accepted.

“I said, ‘I have no feeling about Buck,’ ” Brown recalls. “I said, ‘What he did was extremely unprofessional--calling your own press conference and saying those things.’ I said, ‘I cannot be friends with Buck until he comes up to my office and give me an apology.’

“The way he ripped the organization and the very nasty, cruel things he said? I have no room in my life for a Buck Rodgers.”

Brown says he fired Port over a communications breakdown, claiming Port did not keep him properly informed during two fateful negotiations in early 1991--Chili Davis’ back-door escape as a free agent and the now infamous Parker-Bichette trade.

‘I thought I could work very well with Mike Port,” Brown says. “I knew Mike for four years. I thought Mike did a good job--he was articulate and well-organized and everything else. Unfortunately, we really couldn’t work well together . . .

“I think our styles were totally different. I have a car telephone, I have a designated baseball line at home and I have a pager. The reason I have that is because I’m always accessible. I’m always accessible and I expect before a baseball trade is made that it’s run by me, that the rationale is given why the trade [has to be] made and then my job is to alert the Autrys and give them my recommendation.”

According to Brown, he learned of the Bichette trade from a third party, after it had been consummated.

“The main thing is, I would not have negated the trade with Bichette. I would have went along with Mike because I knew that the manager we had at the time, Doug Rader, could not deal with Bichette,” Brown says. “But not being told about the trade until after it was done . . . Do you know how embarrassing it is for me not to know that a deal has been done?

” . . . I called Mike in and told him, ‘This will never, ever happen again. I cannot run a ballclub where I feel I don’t know everything that’s going on.”

The Bichette trade went down three months after Davis bolted for Minnesota, a move Brown calls “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Brown: “I knew Minnesota was going to be very embarrassed about Gary [Gaetti] leaving. They did make a last-ditch attempt to keep him before we signed him . . . I said to Mike, ‘I guarantee you, we’re going to lose Chili. I do not want to lose Chili.’ Gaetti was one piece of the puzzle, but so was Chili. We had to keep Chili.

“Mike says, ‘It’s a done deal, don’t worry about it.’ . . . Three hours later, I’m driving home and I hear on the radio, ‘In late-breaking news, Chili Davis is signed by Minnesota.’ Man, I felt, ‘Wow, that’s it.’

“I’m not blaming Mike for letting Chili go to Minnesota. I’m blaming him for not keeping me up to date. He could have said, ‘Rich, I thought it was good a couple hours ago, but it’s getting worse.’ Let me know what’s going on. Maybe I’ll extend his budget, maybe I won’t.

“Budgets aren’t sacrosanct; they’re living things. As circumstances change, you don’t sit there with a budget of $25.9 million like last year and all of a sudden a player goes down and you say, ‘Well, that’s it. We’ll just play with eight men. OK, Garrett, you cover left and center.’ You don’t do that.”

Dan O’Brien followed Port, and Herzog overlapped O’Brien, and Herzog couldn’t work with O’Brien, so O’Brien was fired, and then Herzog lost his patience--some trades he made suggested that wasn’t all Whitey lost--and then Herzog handed off to Bavasi, who was left with, essentially, a 33-year-old expansion franchise.

Brown says he erred with Herzog by acting “a little more deferential to him than I should have. We enjoyed his colorful history--he was a winner. So when he suggested something, the thinking was ‘Hey, he’s so convinced, maybe we should be convinced.’ ”

According to Brown, Herzog “changed his mission after he got here. Initially, he thought his mission was evaluating the organization, and then quickly, in his own mind, his mission changed: To be the individual who wins it for The Cowboy . . .

“If Whitey had come on a little bit later, when I had a little more baseball acumen, I’d have been basically a little tougher and less deferential. I should have done more to keep us on course. But, you get caught up in the fever when someone says, ‘Hey, you’re two ballplayers away.’ . . . It’s very easy to let your heart rule your head.”

Next up, Disney decides on Brown. Brown has heard nothing, good or bad, and assumes that in this case, silence is ominous. He is already thinking about life after the Angels--maybe a job as a university athletic director (“College athletics fascinate me”) or a front office position with another professional sports franchise. Or, he could always hang the lawyer’s shingle out there again.

“You know,” he says, “I’m 53 years of age. I have no regrets. I can honestly say if I knew on the day I took the job that in five years they would sell it and I’d be out of a job, I’d do the whole thing over again.”

Though he’d probably do it without Gaetti, Parker and Gruber. Dump a few passengers, lighten the load. It wouldn’t have made the ride any longer, just a lot smoother.