Stadium For Rent: Ch. 1. About Last Night

STADIUM FOR RENT:
Tampa Bay's Quest for Major League Baseball
By BOB ANDELMAN

1. About Last Night

"They came within three minutes or so of getting a team."
-- Jerry Reinsdorf, Co-owner, Chicago White Sox

The flirtation began honestly, full of tenderness and respect.

Scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.

Quid pro quo.

Mutual exploitation.

That's the way the Chicago White Sox and the City of St. Petersburg, Florida, began an 18-month love affair. It would end badly, of course, but not before St. Petersburg would pencil its name on the national sports map.

***

In 1975, Chicago attorney Jerry Reinsdorf joined a partnership interested in buying a Major League Baseball team. Reinsdorf would be a limited partner; he and a number of other business people would share a minority stake. The general partner of the group first tried to buy the San Francisco Giants and failed. Later he tried to buy the Cleveland Indians and then the New York Mets.

"At the time the Mets deal fell through," recalls Reinsdorf, "I started thinking to myself, 'How much fun will I really get out of an investment in a team that plays in a city that I don't live in?' So I was sort of relieved that the Mets deal didn't go ahead."

Reinsdorf was by then chief executive officer of a Chicago-based real estate syndication firm called The Balcor Company. (He sold out in July 1982 to a subsidiary of American Express.)

In 1980, Reinsdorf's interest turned away from being a limited partner in someone else's group. He knew he'd be more comfortable and confident fronting his own group, so he formed a new partnership with broadcast executive Eddie Einhorn.

"I had known Einhorn since law school," Reinsdorf, a graduate of the Northwestern University College of Law, says, "although we weren't really friends in that we hadn't seen each other for 20 years. But we kept in touch, we had mutual friends and we talked from time to time. When I started exploring baseball opportunities, I realized what it really was was the entertainment business. And next to attendance, television was going to be the single most important thing in baseball and might eventually become the most important thing. So I asked Einhorn if he wanted to be involved as a co-general partner. He said he would."

Einhorn was eager to get into baseball. He had a company called TVS, which packaged and sold college basketball games. Einhorn sold the company for $4-million. By 1980, he was executive producer of CBS Sports Spectacular, a fairly rich guy with a job. But Einhorn was eager to do something else so he agreed to join Reinsdorf.

Einhorn led a group that tried to buy the San Diego Padres, which eventually went to McDonald's founder Ray Kroc. Kroc had told Einhorn's group, "Look, whatever you offer, I'm going to top it so you might as well drop out." They did. Einhorn was also involved in bids to buy into the Atlanta Braves and Toronto Blue Jays.

Reinsdorf and Einhorn turned their attention toward the Chicago White Sox, then owned by eccentric baseball executive Bill Veeck.

"Veeck's group had owned the White Sox for about five years. And Veeck's history was that he turned clubs over every four or five years. Sometimes less than that, so I decided to get in touch with him," Reinsdorf says.

Standing up and shouting you want to buy a pro sports franchise has a way of drawing attention. A friend of Reinsdorf's knew a minor stockholder in the Veeck group. Reinsdorf asked the man to contact Veeck and see if he was interested in selling the Sox. Veeck replied that not only was he interested in selling but he was currently in negotiations with a group of his minority stockholders. So sure, he wanted to talk.

"We talked and very quickly came to a price," Reinsdorf says. "Then, out of nowhere, Edward DeBartolo [chairman of The Edward J. DeBartolo Corp. of Youngstown, Ohio, one of the nation's pre-eminent shopping mall developers] surfaced and he matched our bid. For whatever reason, the White Sox board of directors decided to take the DeBartolo proposal."

But DeBartolo was turned down by the American League.

According to retired Tampa Tribune sports editor Tom McEwen, "They turned him down because they thought he had a Mafia connection. DeBartolo was crushed by this. Just a terrible decision. George Steinbrenner was supposed to help him and he said he would. The truth is he voted against him. [Steinbrenner] told [DeBartolo] that he voted against him on purpose so he could come back and apply for Cleveland. Mr. DeBartolo said, 'I don't want to own Cleveland. I want to own Chicago.' "

In fact, DeBartolo was denied the White Sox twice -- once in a September 1980 owners meeting and again in December. The Major League Boys Club didn't want him.

"After DeBartolo's second turndown," Reinsdorf says, "I guess I was the only one around."

Reinsdorf and Einhorn signed a contract with Bill Veeck in January 1981 and closed the deal a month later. "The price we paid for the White Sox was $19-million, which at the time was the second best price ever paid for a team," according to Reinsdorf. The New York Mets were the biggest deal of the era, selling for $20-million.

Complicating matters was the second-class status of the White Sox. At the time Reinsdorf and Einhorn bought the team, it was clearly number two in the hearts and minds of Chicagoans. Most were Cub fans.

"This wasn't always the case," Reinsdorf says in their defense. "The White Sox were able to hold their own with the Cubs through the late 1960s. But something happened in the late '60s, it was probably 1969, that in retrospect was probably the dumbest thing that was done on behalf of this ball club."

Lousy TV deals ruined the White Sox for more than a decade, Reinsdorf says. Until the late '60s, the Sox and Cubs both broadcast their games on Chicago's WGN-Channel 9, a VHF station accessible to everyone in the Chicago area. But the then-Sox ownership moved to Channel 32 (now WFLD), a UHF station that few people knew how to tune to, let alone wanted to. In those days -- and even today -- UHF signals are not well-received in Chicago. Putting the games on Channel 32 was like taking them off TV.

By the early 1980s, ratings were awful. "Channel 32 filed a lawsuit against us, saying that our team was lousy," Reinsdorf says.

He and Einhorn angered fans even further by selling a package of Sox games to Einhorn's pricey pay-TV service, SportsVision.

"So that's why," Reinsdorf says, "from the late 1960s until Einhorn and I came along, the Cubs came to substantially dominate the White Sox."

* * *

After the 1983 season -- when the Chicago White Sox won the American League West division, drawing for the first time more than 2-million fans -- management felt it had a team that would be a contender for at least the next three years.

The '83 Sox drew 2-million fans by putting a winning team on the field. And expectations of another good season put another 2-million ticket buyers in seats in '84. "Then attendance started to slide because our team was starting to get lousy," Reinsdorf says. And there was something else, too.

Comiskey Park, home of the White Sox since July 1, 1910, was on its last legs. It was built for another era. Unlike Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs, Comiskey never established a warm place in the hearts of baseball fans. It lacked magic -- no bleacher bums, no ivy-covered brick outfield, no "Mr. Cub."

Comiskey was an inner-city ballpark that needed to draw fans from the suburbs to survive. It was a hard sell, in terms of aesthetics, safety and, until the pennant-winning '83 season, the quality of the White Sox as a ball club.

"The biggest disadvantage we had versus the Cubs," Reinsdorf says, "was that our ballpark was really a lousy place to watch a game. There were only about 7,000 seats at Comiskey that weren't behind a post. The seats weren't even angled right. We had about 5,000 seats that were good enough to sell as box seats. The ballpark was economically obsolete.

"So it was not a good place to watch a game and when the team was bad, people especially wouldn't come out. Every team is going to be bad from time to time. It's a cyclical business. And there's a certain threshold of people you have to draw even when you're not good. We couldn't do it in that park, whereas the Cubs could [at Wrigley]. When they had lousy years, they still drew relatively well compared to the rest of the league because Wrigley Field is a great place to watch a game," Reinsdorf says.

Making matters worse, the new owners of the Chicago White Sox -- lawyers -- failed at "due diligence" on Comiskey Park, the stadium they assumed. In the parlance of someone buying a home, they neglected to have the roof inspected, check the plumbing and in their case, the foundation. Big mistake.

"We knew it was an old ballpark," Reinsdorf says. "We did not have time to really do a physical inspection because DeBartolo was turned down on December 15 and we were told we had to get a contract signed within three weeks or there was no deal. So we really didn't do much of an inspection. We relied on Veeck's representation that DeBartolo had had the stadium inspected. It was only after we bought the club that we realized there were severe problems, although we didn't yet realize they were life-threatening problems."

Between the 1981 and 1982 seasons, Reinsdorf says the new owners replaced all the concrete in Comiskey's right field corner and its left field corner below the first aisle. They put in new seats. Then the dugouts on the home side collapsed and had to be rebuilt. A year later, he says, "We decided to try and put in suites. The inspection that was done for that showed further deterioration. The engineers told us that if we did certain things not only would the ballpark be safe for suites but it would overall be structurally sound. So we did.

"We spent $20-million on that stadium before we got out of it. We spent more money on trying to keep the stadium alive than we did to buy the team," he says.

A couple years into their stewardship of Comiskey, Reinsdorf and Einhorn had a meeting with the stadium's engineers. It had become an annual rite of spring, checking the stadium to see what damage the cold and blustery winter had done.

"We got a laundry list in '85 that really upset me," recalls Reinsdorf. "I got mad at the engineer. I got rude and I said to him, 'When is this shit going to stop? We've done everything that you've ever told us to do, now you're giving me a list that's longer than anything you've ever given me.' He looked me right in the eye. It was almost like a doctor telling me I had cancer. He said, 'Mr. Reinsdorf, you don't understand. The building is nearing the end of its useful life.' I said, 'What do you mean by that?' Although having been a tax lawyer and a real estate person, I knew what it meant.

" 'In a few years,' he said, 'you're not going to be able to play here.'

"That's when we got panicky and realized we were going to have to do something."

Another difference between the Cubs and White Sox is that the Sox lacked the deep pockets of the Cubs owners, the Tribune Company. So while the White Sox sat on top of their division -- and the Windy City -- it was time to think about a new stadium.

Sox management began looking for a new stadium site in the summer of 1984, concentrating on the suburbs west of Chicago. By the following summer, a subsidiary owned by Reinsdorf purchased a block of land in Addison, Illinois. The idea was to get Chicago "goosed up" -- nervous -- at a time when it looked like the city would otherwise drag its feet to accommodate the team.

Team owners Reinsdorf and Einhorn entertained Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson in their box on Opening Day 1985.

"There are a lot of things in life that happen that you don't know they're going to affect you in the future," Reinsdorf says. "Eddie and I went to law school with the governor. We graduated in 1960; he graduated in 1959. Thompson was editor of one of the law school journals, The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Einhorn worked under him on that journal; they knew each other well. I knew Jim somewhat."

Thompson subscribed to the idea of building a new stadium. But according to Reinsdorf, the governor told the owners, "You'll never get one built unless there's a crisis. Unless people think you're going to have to leave if you don't get one." It turned out to be prophetic.

Addison was one of those good move/bad move decisions. It did force the City of Chicago to get busy, but to no avail; the 1986 Illinois Legislature turned down Chicago's efforts to finance a new stadium for the Sox.

"That's when we decided we would really look to Addison," Reinsdorf says.

"We went down so many different avenues. We were trying to do it privately at one time and we tried to do it privately in cooperation with the city. I remember there were serious negotiations with the [Chicago Mayor] Harold Washington administration about the city building a stadium -- or, at least in part financing a stadium for the Sox and the Bears. We were willing to do it although we weren't thrilled about it because football/baseball stadiums have never worked. We had no choice. We agreed to it. But when the city went to the Bears, [president and CEO] Michael McCaskey said the Bears don't want to play with a baseball team, but if they did play with a baseball team, it would have to be the Cubs because they have a natural affinity for the Cubs."

By mid-1986, the White Sox felt they couldn't get anything done in Chicago. Reinsdorf and Einhorn chose to devote their efforts to Addison.

"We had no thought of moving anywhere other than from Chicago to Addison, which is 25 miles away," Reinsdorf says. "In the same metropolitan area. And probably closer to where most of our fans lived than Comiskey Park."

The notion of a suburban stadium in Addison was brought to a halt in 1986, this time by disinterested voters. Apparently, Addison was a Cubs town, too.

"We lost by a very few votes, which indicated to me the support was there because all the anti- zealots came out and voted and those in favor didn't all show up. What killed us was that one of the local politicians who didn't want the team out there was able to block legislation. So we [sold] the land in Addison for the only profit we had ever made at that time."

Reinsdorf and Einhorn again sat down with the City of Chicago. This time, the city and the team succeeded in getting legislation passed to build a new stadium.

In December 1986 the Illinois Legislature approved a bill for a new stadium, so all was not lost. A governor's committee was formed to pursue the issue and develop financing. The mayor was to appoint three members, the governor would appoint three members and a chairman -- with the consent of the mayor. Good luck. The mayor and the governor got into a big political fight and were constantly tweaking each other in a war of words. They couldn't agree on whether the sun rose in the east or the west.

Harold Washington was mayor of Chicago in those days, the first black mayor the city had ever known and a man politically embroiled from day one.

As far as the Sox could see, interest in their stadium proposal came to a standstill in 1987. Mayor Washington and Gov. Thompson were fighting over so many issues, baseball lost its priority. By late '87 appointments to the governor's stadium committee, particularly the chairmanship, were still unfilled. The average Chicagoan had heard talk of a new stadium -- for either the Sox or Cubs -- for more than 30 years and didn't blink at the latest delays.

"I went to Harold Washington and told him we had had it," Reinsdorf says. "I wanted him to know that we were going to have to look elsewhere. He said that was a great idea because that way he could get the governor to focus on this.

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