Stadium For Rent: Ch. 2. For a Team To Be Named Later

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

2. For a Team To Be Named Later

"It is very hard to move a team today. I don't know why. I don't know why a person can't move a team if they're not making money. But you can't do it. You've got the anti-trust laws."
-- Calvin Griffith, former owner, Minnesota Twins

Tampa Bay baseball fans took the complete course in relocation dos and don'ts years before St. Petersburg ever dangled the Florida Suncoast Dome before Jerry Reinsdorf's eyes.

In 1983, the Minnesota Twins twinkled in the northern skies, the first team Tampa Bay dared to think of calling its own.
* * *

From 1920 until 1984, starting with Clark Griffith and then his stepson Calvin in 1955, a Griffith was always president of the Minnesota Twins, one of the most enduring families in the game's history.

Clark Griffith won 241 games as a big league pitcher, the first American Leaguer to win 20 in a single season. Then he managed the New York Highlanders before they became the Yankees, and took the reins of the Chicago White Sox in 1901, their first year. The Washington Senators hired him to manage in 1912. Eight years later, he progressed to ownership, joining with Billy Richardson to buy controlling interest in the Senators. Richardson subsequently sold his piece to Griffith who then controlled 51 percent of the team.

In 1923, Griffith reached out to help his Canadian in-laws, the Robertsons, through hard times and adopted two of their seven children, 12-year-old Calvin Robertson and his younger sister, Thelma. (Technically, he was the children's uncle by marriage, having married their father's sister.) They lived with him until he passed away at the age of 85 -- 30 years later. In return, he gave them his name, his baseball legacy -- he's in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. -- and his team.

The Senators were marginally profitable under Clark Griffith's stewardship. He took pride in making money for 21 consecutive seasons. Of course, back in those days, salaries were nominal. The Griffiths owned their ballpark, Griffith Stadium, and all the concessions. They also earned rental fees from George Washington University and Georgetown University football games in the off-season as well as a progression of Negro League teams (Pilots, Elite Giants, Homestead Grays and the Black Senators) playing baseball during Senator road trips. The NFL Washington Redskins also called Griffith Stadium home for many years.

"If you made $1,000, $1,500, $2,000, you were happy as all hell," Calvin Griffith says. "As long as you didn't have to borrow money."

Despite the many rent-paying tenants at the stadium, the Griffith bank accounts never grew fat. Tenants paid expenses -- Griffith enlarged his namesake's seating capacity by double-decking the grandstand -- but the family relied on the Senators to generate anything extra. It didn't amount to much. Attendance peaked in the post-World War II years, the club drawing an all-time high 1-million fans in 1946.

The Senators players didn't do much to attract attention, hitting just one home run at Griffith Stadium in all of 1945, an inside-the-parker at that. The team became a fixture in the bottom half of the American League in the 1950s and attendance fell off accordingly.

Other teams relocated from city to city during the 1940s and 1950s, chasing brighter vistas and greener box offices. But an aging Clark Griffith determined to stick it out in the nation's capital.

When the elder Griffith died in 1955, leaving the day-to-day running of the club in Calvin's hands (Calvin and Thelma Haynes each received a 25.5 percent stock interest in the Senators), his adopted son tried to follow Clark's wishes.

"He told me he never wanted to move the team out of Washington," Calvin Griffith recalls. "I didn't want to move. He told me, 'Never sell beer in the ballpark unless you have to.' But we had to sell beer in the ballpark to get more revenue. We couldn't get the money we had to have to carry on with the baseball club. Our radio and television contract was only in the neighborhood of $200,000 a year.

"We had big band contests," Griffith says. "We had opera in the ballpark. Wrestling. Mr. Griffith [that's the way Calvin refers to his adoptive father, Clark] would never allow anything there but ball games. You didn't come in for a side show. [But when he was gone] anything that had a chance to bring in a dollar, we would do it."

The days when the Griffiths could get through the winters on a $3,000 profit from the Senators disappeared into the history books. Before he died, Clark fell into the habit of borrowing up to $15,000 to pay expenses during spring training. The money came as an advance from advertisers at Griffith Stadium. "We played everything close to the vest," Calvin says.

There were seasons that the Senators drew fewer than 300,000 paying customers for an entire season. Building any allegiances in Washington was nearly impossible because everyone came from somewhere else. A Chicago White Sox fan living in Washington might pay to see the Sox take three from the Senators, but didn't care to see the Boston Red Sox do the same job.
* * *

Tampa Bay baseball fans believed their business and political leaders invented the franchise theft scenario, but it's a very old game. Minneapolis spent years tempting Calvin Griffith.

"I'd been hearing from them every week. They would send representatives. I'd see somebody at the baseball meetings. The city offered me all kinds of money, $750,000 for radio and television," Griffith says. "I said, 'That kind of money can pay my payroll. Everything else would just be gravy.' We were only drawing 300,000 in Washington. They offered us attendance of 700,000 a year for three years; if we didn't draw, they'd pay us for the [difference]."

Sports reporters in Washington knew all about the overtures from the Twin Cities and they didn't like it. "You can't be a sports writer without a local team to write about," Griffith says. "They smelled movement. They tried to get me to sell the ball club. I had no intention of ever selling it."

Griffith says he went to the 1960 winter meetings in New York unaware that his Senators had played their last game in Griffith Stadium.

"I had no thought of ever moving out of Washington," Griffith says. "But when we got into the meetings, they started talking about expansion."

As hard as baseball boosters in Minneapolis were pushing him, it suddenly occurred to Griffith that they might be angling for an expansion franchise instead. When a franchise was awarded to California -- the Los Angeles Angels -- Griffith saw the handwriting on the wall.

"I got up and made a motion that I'd like to move to Minnesota," he recalls.

"They took a vote and I got voted down. There were only eight clubs in the league then; you had to have five votes. It was 4-4. I said, 'This is going to be my last meeting in baseball.' Joe Cronin, the president of the American League, banged the gavel and said, 'We're recessed for lunch.' Dan Topping chief executive officer of the Yankees] came over to me and said, 'Calvin, are you really serious about moving to Minnesota?' 'I said, 'Dan, if I stay in baseball, [Minnesota] is the only place.' He said, 'Then don't worry." He got Baltimore to change their vote when he brought it up the next time. We came back from lunch and made it 5-3."

Reaction in Washington was muted. Well, almost muted. In allowing Griffith to leave, the American League created a new Senators franchise to play in the nation's capital. But Griffith's minority partner, Gabriel Murphy Jr., still didn't want the original Senators to move. The Murphy family's 42 percent stake in the team -- handed down from Gabe Sr. to Jr. -- provided a constant minority voice in operations for nearly as long as the Griffiths' involvement.

Griffith says he successfully fought 13 relocation-related lawsuits, at least 10 of them started by Murphy. The two men settled when Murphy was reinstated to the team's board of directors.
* * *

Minneapolis and St. Paul welcomed Griffith's team, redubbed the Minnesota Twins. The honeymoon got off to a fine start that first season, 1961, when Twins attendance -- 1.2-million -- topped the league average and was four times what the Senators drew the year before in Washington. Major League Baseball proved a big tourist attraction, luring busloads of fans from hundreds of miles around.

The Twins led the American League in attendance in 1963 and 1965, topping the average draw through 1970. This despite rollercoaster seasons when the team won as many as 102 games and as few as 70 games. Winning the pennant in 1965, and the west division in '69 and '70, proved that winning teams brought cash rewards. Besides their impressive attendance, the Twins ranked near the top in player salaries.

"Then free agency came in," Griffith says.

"I went on record," he recalls. "I said, 'I'm not going to pay for free agents. We'll develop our own ballplayers.' And we did. But if we developed a star and we couldn't afford him, we'd let him go. Rod Carew, for instance. We couldn't afford to pay him. He was entitled to the money that other people were getting. I told him, 'Rod, ain't no way I'm going to pay you this kind of money because I'm not going to the bank to borrow it. If I pay you this kind of money then I have to borrow it. If I have to borrow the money, I have to pay interest on it then I have to pay it back. This is just too much for me.' We finally traded him to the Angels."
* * *

During the 1982 baseball winter meetings in Honolulu, Earle Halstead Jr. recommended to the Tampa Bay Baseball Group (TBBG) that it buy the Minnesota Twins and move the team to the 46,000-seat ballpark the TBBG proposed to build next to Tampa Stadium. "They can be had," he said, based on conversations with team owner Calvin Griffith.

The following spring, Halstead and TBBG executive director Cedric Tallis took Frank Morsani, Tom du Pont, Ed McGinty and Bob Humphries to Winter Park, Florida, where Griffith stayed while the Twins trained in Orlando.

Morsani asked if Griffith would consider selling the Twins. He said yes, but not if it meant moving the team from Minnesota. "It would be too traumatic," Griffith said. "But," he added, "if things don't improve, I'm going to have to do it."

Twins attendance in 1981 was 469,000, not even half the American League average that year and getting precipitously close to the team's final years in Washington. And it was the second of three consecutive years the team could be found at the AL's bottom.

The TBBG declined to pursue the Twins at the time, expressing qualms about the ongoing spats between Griffith and his sister, Thelma, who controlled 51 percent of the team and Gabriel Murphy Jr., who owned 42 percent.

More than a year later the TBBG decided to try again after receiving word Murphy might be willing to sell. Morsani met with Murphy at his office in Washington, D.C.

"I was going to Washington a lot," Morsani recalls. "I visited with Mr. Murphy several times in his office and his home. He said he would sell his interest for $7-million. Then another team sold during that period and [Murphy's] price went up to $11-million."

No problem. Morsani gave Murphy a letter of credit.

Tampa Tribune sports editor Tom McEwen accompanied Morsani and TBBG majority investor Bill Mack to Washington when the deal closed. It seemed appropriate that McEwen, the man who conceived the Tampa Bay Baseball Group and beat the drum for it in the daily newspaper, would be on hand to celebrate its first major accomplishment.

"I got the only picture. I got the only story," McEwen says. "I was there when they signed the papers. I thought this was going to work."

Next, to gain a majority interest in the Twins, Halstead recommended that the TBBG buy either Calvin or Thelma's 25.5 percent interest in the team for $14 million. That would give the TBBG 67.5 percent; He intended to leave the siblings with a 25.5 percent interest so his friend Calvin could stay active in the game he loved.

du Pont, Morsani, attorney Ed McGinty and Halstead went to Apopka, Florida, to meet with Griffith at his winter home.

"When we walked in the door," Halstead says, "Calvin was sitting in a chair. He said, 'I've known Earle for 35 years and any negotiating will be done through him. McGinty took real offense to that. I would say he and [TBBG member Jim] Cusack sabotaged the deal. Calvin kept his word. He wouldn't deal with 'em."

Halstead's relationship with Griffith went back decades. In the early 1940s, Halstead's minor league team, the Williamsport (Pennsylvania] Grays, sold the contracts of 16 players to Griffith's Washington Senators for $100 each. Three of them eventually made the big club, proving themselves a bargain. And in the late 1950s, Griffith's Senators engaged Halstead's Blue Book to do a survey ostensibly on potential expansion sites but, in reality, to support Griffith's desire to relocate the Senators to greener pastures. "It saved him about $25-million," says Halstead. "That's why Calvin knew I could be relied upon."

Griffith and Halstead were two old dogs who still thought baseball was a game. They worked well when it was just the two of them but things always fell apart when the car dealer and attorneys got involved.

"Earle Halstead was the instigator of everything," Griffith says. "He was the man. He used to call me all the time. If I didn't get two or three calls a week from him, I felt bad."

Morsani and McGinty visited Griffith's attorney in Minnesota several times. The attorney told them he could deliver the balance of the Twins stock for $24-million. "We made a deal with him in his office to buy it for that," Morsani says.

Word leaked in Minneapolis-St. Paul and the Tampa Bay area that an offer for the Twins had been tendered and was under consideration. It rocked both communities. Morsani didn't attempt to extinguish concerns in Minnesota about where his Twins would play. "We did not say we were going to move the team," Morsani recalls. "I probably said, 'Draw your own conclusions [about] which is the best market.' "

All the heat came Griffith's way, just like it had in Washington. He hated that kind of heat. His solution: He denied striking any deal.

"I went to Minneapolis and met [Griffith's] attorney," Halstead says. "I didn't like him, didn't trust him. I called Morsani, he wasn't there. McGinty told me not to deal with anyone and to come home. Biggest mistake I ever made."

That's true. In a fit of pique with the TBBG's lawyers, Halstead leaked word to the St. Petersburg Times that the TBBG cut a deal to buy the Twins from Griffith. He even spelled out certain details: Griffith and Murphy each received deposit checks of $100,000 and Griffith would remain chairman of the board for five years. Griffith vehemently denied it.

"[Halstead] put the screws to it," Griffith says. "I started really getting criticized. It was unbearable."
* * *

Continue Reading?

Acknowledgements