Stadium For Rent: 3. Is It Later, Yet?

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

3. Is It Later, Yet?

"Through all of this, you will find Jerry Reinsdorf was the catalyst who drove an awful lot of the things that happened."
-- Frank Morsani, Tampa car dealer

Frank Morsani never met a baseball owner he didn't like.

And baseball owners never met a man on whom they more enjoyed pinning "Kick Me" signs.

Calvin Griffith used the president of the Tampa Bay Baseball Group and wound up a rich Florida retiree. In the years to come, Morsani would be used and abused by the entire Major League Baseball hierarchy, from team owners to league presidents and even the commissioner of the sport.

One of these episodes took place in Oakland in 1985, where the owners of the carpetbagging Athletics -- previously based in Philadelphia and Kansas City -- sought out Morsani, cut a deal and even told him to call a press conference to announce the sale.

Morsani received a call during the spring of 1985 from A's vice president Roy Eisenhardt, son-in-law of team owner Walter A. Haas Jr. (former chairman of the board of Levi Strauss & Co.). Are you still interested in buying a team? Certainly, Morsani said, and off they went.

The first meeting took place in Dallas, a neutral point, away from the press and other prying eyes. Eisenhardt was there, as was Wally Haas, son of the A's owner. The first meeting went well; a slew of cross-country telephone calls followed.

"We went out to the All-Star Game in San Francisco," Morsani recalls. "I met with Roy again over lunch or dinner at the Stanford Court Hotel and we discussed the acquisition. Over time, we prepared a contract to purchase the Oakland A's for $37-million.

"They were ready to do the deal," he says.

Morsani got a call from Eisenhardt. Announce the deal, he said. Eisenhardt complained that the press was at his door, smelling something in the air. "I don't want to deal with them," Eisenhardt told Morsani. "You go ahead and tell the folks down there that you've made a deal to purchase the Oakland A's and then we will sign the agreement."

Morsani called Tampa Tribune sports editor Tom McEwen with the good news.

The next morning, Eisenhardt denied the deal was ever finalized. The mayor of Oakland, Lionel Wilson, had kept him up through the previous night and promised a $10-million loan and rent concessions at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum to convince Eisenhardt to stay in Oakland. It worked.

Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth later said this to Tampa Tribune reporter Joe Henderson about the collapse of the Oakland deal: "In discussions of the two [San Francisco] Bay area teams, the commissioner took the position that the market could support two teams."

Kick me, the sign said.
* * *

There's nothing in Frank Morsani's background to even remotely explain why he allowed Major League Baseball to stomp all over him from 1983 through 1991. He's not even that big of a baseball fan, truth be known.

"I never got the impression Frank was a big baseball fan," says Earle Halstead Jr., a founding member of Morsani's Tampa Bay Baseball Group. "He was brought in for his astuteness."

He developed that talent the hard way, just as his father had.

Helen Beatrice Crane was just 16 years old when she ran off to marry the 20-year-old son of Italian immigrants, Amerigo Morsani, in 1926. Their first child, Patricia, came along the following year, followed by Frank in 1931, Paul in 1932 and Timothy in 1944.

Making a living never came easy to Amerigo, who left school before finishing the sixth grade. A skilled laborer, he earned $1 a day to pound kegs in Detroit where he met and married Helen. Then came the depression and he became a welder, helping to construct the first railroad cars that carried automobiles across the country.

Helen spent her life rearing the children and running the Morsani house. It was a full-time job as the children grew up. Amerigo's welding skills led him to pipeline construction and took him far from home every April until the first snow flurries in October. He kept to that schedule, sending his paycheck home to the family from wherever the work took him, until he retired at age 62. Meanwhile, Helen worked hard to see that no matter what else, her children would be educated in school and in the ways of the Methodist Church.

"My mother was an inspiration to all of us kids," Frank says. "With my father gone, her role was a dual role."

The family moved every few years, making stops in Michigan, Oklahoma, Illinois and Iowa. Indoor plumbing and electric lights were alien to the Morsanis until 1939. Even when they settled on an Oklahoma farm in 1946, the nearest phone was seven miles away. "During the planting season," Morsani recalls, "we walked a mile and a quarter to catch the school bus, which we rode 35 miles to get to school. Then I'd take a different school bus at night to work the fields. Momma would pick me up and take me home."

Frank started working on and off the farm at an early age, selling the Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, Cosmopolitan and Collier's door-to-door for a nickel apiece. He also worked as a paperboy and shined shoes in a barber shop. Every summer starting when he turned 14, Frank traveled with Amerigo, learning the trade as a welder's helper.

"We never really thought about playing," he says. "It's like the word 'vacation.' I was 30 years old before I knew what it meant. We never took a vacation; we were working." Those rare summers when he didn't go off to join Amerigo, Frank ran a baling crew, putting up hay for local farmers.

Frank attended a dozen schools -- some twice -- but remained popular enough to become president of his sophomore, junior and senior classes in Ramona, Oklahoma, until he went to Tulsa. In 1949 he graduated in a class of 17 from Tulsa's Will Rogers High School. (Morsani returned to Ramona in 1988 to deliver the commencement address.)

The future new-car dealer bought his first automobile, a '37 Ford, in 1950 for the princely sum of $300.
* * *

Morsani attended Oklahoma A & M, paying "every nickel of my way," he says. As a freshman he delivered lumber and unloaded freight cars in the morning and sold art supplies in a bookstore after school.

"I generally had three jobs at a time," Morsani recalls. "I had 7 o'clock classes six days a week. I went to school on Saturdays until noon. I went from one job to another to another, then I'd attempt to study. Obviously, I didn't make very good grades." For fun, he'd occasionally attend football and basketball games, maybe a wrestling match.

"Being around machinery, being on pipelines with my dad, I loved equipment," he says. "My goal was to get my associate degree and go to work for Caterpillar or International Harvester as a rep and then help people fix their equipment. I had some talent for that. I could fix anything."

Hard work didn't impress the battery of vocational tests Morsani took at the end of his freshman year. "They advised me that if I got through college, I'd be in the lower 10 percentile. Their advice to me was to leave school and go back to the farm."

Such a conclusion deeply hurt his self-esteem.

"I used good judgment, though," he says. "I walked out, went down the street and joined the U.S. Navy for four years."

Military life turned out to be easy for Morsani, who already led a disciplined existence.

"In the military, I was successful. We were always taught to be neat, clean. I already shined my shoes every day for school, even though they didn't stay shined very long. I knew how to iron, I knew how to sew. I can still G.I. the john. I can't stand for anything to be dirty," he says.

Morsani dreamed of joining a Seabee naval construction battalion but the military put him aboard an aircraft carrier. "I had never seen an airplane engine but now my job was to repair them," he recalls. Morsani served as a metalsmith and hydraulicsman aboard an aircraft carrier off the coast of Korea from December 1950 until June 1952. He spent the next two years at Moffitt Field near San Francisco handling mechanical chores for an experimental aircraft squadron and putting on air shows all over country.

While in the navy, Morsani married his high school sweetheart, Carol Walsh, whom he met during his senior year at Will Rogers High School. Following his discharge, the Morsanis moved briefly to upstate New York, then went back to Oklahoma. Morsani re-enrolled at Oklahoma A & M (later Oklahoma State) and carried 27 hours each semester, including Saturday classes, working as a 50-cents an hour mechanic after class and as a cab driver at night to pay the bills. When he graduated in the summer of 1957 with a bachelor's degree in trade and industrial education and two associate degrees in automotive and diesel technology, Morsani had a 3.7 grade point average, far better than the aptitude tests predicted seven years earlier.

Ford Motor Company's Lincoln-Mercury division hired Morsani and enrolled him in its management training program. He was a little older, a little wiser than his peers in the program and Morsani excelled. Ford sent him to Detroit, where he helped produce owners manuals. From there it was on to Jacksonville, Florida, first as a trainer of mechanics, then as a sales rep to dealers. He then went to Fort Lauderdale as service manager of a Lincoln-Mercury dealership. The same company owned a dealership in Camden, New Jersey, where Morsani worked for 18 months. He became general manager of the Camden dealership and stayed until May 1969. An opportunity arose to manage and be part-owner of a Lincoln-Mercury dealership in Englewood, California, and assist in the management of a Volkswagen/Porsche dealership in Beverly Hills.

But California didn't agree with Morsani, and neither did the man he worked for.

It was the first exposure Morsani ever had to alcoholism and he didn't like it at all. "If you never worked for a confirmed alcoholic who gets drunk at 10 o'clock in the morning, you haven't lived," he says. "I didn't need that. He was so drunk, he'd be gone three weeks at a time on a tear. It was awful. He was drinking straight vodka out of a bottle."

Across the country in Tampa, Homer Herndon, a friend of Morsani's, was very ill. Herndon, who owned the Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, Toyota and English Ford dealerships in Tampa, always hoped Morsani would come to work for him. He got his wish on August 20, 1970, when the Morsanis stopped living like Gypsies and put down roots in Tampa.

Sadly, the two men spent less than a year working together. Herndon died August 3, 1971. Within 90 days, Morsani bought out Herndon's widow.

"I paid $270,000, which was a lot of money," he recalls. "My deal when I came here was that I got 12 percent of the company, which equaled about $15,000. I borrowed $240,000 from the bank. I borrowed $5,000 from my brother, I borrowed $10,000 from an employee. That's how I started in business."

Becoming his own boss for the first time at the age of 40 didn't seem late to Morsani. His brother-in-law was a thoracic surgeon who didn't start operating until age 40. "I've used my brother-in-law as a criterion for business," he says. "A fine surgeon doesn't start operating until he's 40. I'm not so sure in business it's not the same way. You're not equipped until you reach that point. You've had a lot of experience and situations in handling people. Business is simple; it's the people you have to deal with that make it hard. You have to learn to get along."

Morsani got along quite well. His Precision Enterprises opened a new Toyota store in 1973 and a new Mercedes-Benz building in '75. Then he started buying other companies, operating 20 automobile agencies around the country over the next 15 years. He also owned an advertising agency and a general contracting firm. Florida Trend magazine estimated that Precision Enterprises grew from a $4-million company in 1971 to a $300-million company in 1989.

Staying put gave the Morsanis a chance to become part of the community fabric, first through the Methodist Church, where Frank and Carol taught Sunday school, and then through the Rotary and the Tampa Women's Club.

"When I came here," Morsani recalls, "I said to the Tampa Chamber of Commerce, 'I'm the new fella in town, if you've got something I can do, I'll try to do it.' We go through life as the takers in society. Then we have another phase that enables us to be givers. I think those of us privileged to have some financial resources bear some responsibility to not only support things with our financial resources but with some talents, some organizational abilities. You're not entitled to any accolades for what you're supposed to do in life. It's a basic philosophy. Some people don't believe that. They think you do that for ego. But I never do things for those reasons."

Involvement quickly led Morsani to positions of influence. He became vice chairman of the board of directors at the University of Tampa, chairman of the Super Task Force for Internationalizing Tampa Bay and chairman of the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority. During the early '80s, Morsani served as a delegate to the White House Conference on Small Business. President Ronald Reagan appointed him to the Small Business Administration Advisory Council and he was elected president of the United States Chamber of Commerce.

"Mother wanted someone in our family to be a missionary," Morsani says, "so I guess we always thought we had a mission in life. We always equated our work with doing for others."
* * *

Another Frank "Kick Me" Morsani story picks up the thread of the Washington Senators.

Not Calvin Griffith's Senators, though. The team that Morsani ran smack into in 1988 was the one created in Washington when Griffith took his Senators to Minnesota.

The second incarnation of the Senators lasted just 10 years in the nation's capital before latter-day team owner Bob Short packed up the pinstripes and moved his club to Arlington and renamed them the Texas Rangers.

After a few seasons, Short sold out to Eddie Chiles. But advanced age and health concerns forced Chiles, 77, to put the Rangers on the market in 1988. One of the men approached to make a bid was Frank Morsani, president of the Tampa Bay Baseball Group.

"I hesitate to say this," Morsani says, "because you never know, but we were told he had Alzheimer's. We talked to his advisers -- his attorney and C.P.A. They said, 'Eddie will say one thing one day and something else tomorrow, not even about the same subject.' His normal life was rather confused. That's what we were led to believe."

No one else had been able to put a deal together with Chiles for his 58 percent of the team. The team didn't draw well and needed a new stadium. Chiles went hot and cold about selling but finally accepted that the organization desperately needed money pumped into it and he didn't want to go out on a limb any farther. Economic prospects in the oil patch weren't good. These factors added to Chiles' supposed health problems and the bankruptcy of his Western Co. of North America (following losses of $522-million over the two previous years) made Morsani believe he could close a deal in Texas.

Their first contact was during a Memorial Day meeting at Chiles' Fort Worth, Texas, home. Chiles, his wife and their business advisers met a contingent from the Tampa Bay Baseball Group: Morsani, Bob Humphries, Ed McGinty and Cedric Tallis.

One possible obstacle: Ed Gaylord of Oklahoma-based Gaylord Communications owned a one-third interest in the Rangers and first option to purchase Chiles' shares. Gaylord tried to exercise that option in 1986 -- unsuccessfully -- so Morsani didn't know how the broadcast giant would react to the Tampa group's takeover attempt.

"We worked through Chiles' people, who knew the Gaylord organization," Morsani says. "We were concerned about putting together an agreement without their support but the Chiles people told us, 'We contacted [Gaylord] and they said; Go ahead and put together the agreement because they were [also] interested in selling.' We proceeded on that basis."

Negotiations began in earnest after Major League Baseball ordered Morsani and his partner Bill Mack to sell their 42 percent of the Minnesota Twins to Carl Pohlad.

The talks with the Rangers overlapped the more visible flirtations between Chicago White Sox owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn with the City of St. Petersburg. Morsani proceeded on the assumption St. Petersburg would ultimately fail to relocate the Sox.

Baseball fever in Tampa Bay would never be hotter than in late spring 1988. One of these two promising deals would surely work; what if both came to fruition?

Agreement on a price for the Rangers came early.

"We told [Chiles'] advisors that we would not include any caveat that the team would stay in Arlington, even though privately we said it would," Morsani says. "I wasn't going to put it in the contract, nor was I going to tell the public I'd keep it there because we'd lose our leverage. And we told the commissioner [Peter Ueberroth] that. The commissioner and [American League president Bobby Brown] both knew we'd keep it there. We had everybody wanting to build a stadium."

The TBBG changed its approach from short-term gain to long-term strategy in order to win baseball's fickle heart: Join the club, get the hang of operations and run the team well in its existing location. "Then," Morsani says, "when [baseball] was ready to expand, we'd like to have a team. Or, doing what they did in other places, we'd move the Texas Rangers to Tampa and they could back-fill -- put another team in Dallas. [Examples include the expansion Washington Senators replacing the original Senators when Calvin Griffith took the team to Minnesota; the Kansas City Royals replacing the Kansas City Athletics; and the Seattle Mariners replacing the Seattle Pilots.] We told Ueberroth we had no intention of moving it. We explained our game plan: Buy it, be a part of it. Show we're good folks."

"There was nothing wrong with that approach," Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf says. "Morsani made an offer and signed a contract to buy the Texas Rangers. At the time, he said it was to operate them in Texas. I took his word for that. He felt when expansion came, he could buy a team and move it to Florida."

Q.: Did you meet with Ueberroth?

MORSANI: "Yes. But he'll deny it." (Ueberroth declined to be interviewed.)

At what point did you meet with him?

"We met with him before we even went to Texas. Bill Mack and I did. He told us, this meeting is not taking place."

Where was the meeting?

"At his office in New York."

Who instigated the meeting?

"We did."

For the purpose of . . . .

" . . . . Discussing whether or not we should go forward into the Texas thing. We said, 'We don't want to be blocked out of this thing. If you want us to go forward -- if we know you're looking for new ownership down there -- we'll pursue it.' "

How long did the meeting last?

"About 30-40 minutes. It was the day Ueberroth announced he was going to look for another commissioner for Major League Baseball. He left his office to go to this press conference and came back.

"We talked about moving, about not moving. About strategy if we bought it, how to move it, what the owners would think. We talked about the strategy of keeping it there, we talked about the strategy of moving it. And if we bought it how should the process go? Would he endorse new ownership in Dallas? We didn't want to do what we'd been doing, going down blind alleys. We talked about the Gaylord interest. 'We know Gaylord has an option -- are you going to encourage that, that the owners take the TV guys over us?' "

Did Ueberroth encourage you to go forward and see what kind of deal you could work out?

"Yes. We asked if we had his support in going forward and he indicated 'Yes.' "

(Ueberroth later denied he ever encouraged Morsani and Mack's plans to move the Rangers. "That's blatantly untrue," Ueberroth told Tampa Tribune reporter Joe Henderson. "Anybody dealing with the Tampa group was told that they would keep the team in Texas. We would never entertain during my term as commissioner the moving of a club. There's no way that Major League Baseball or the commissioner would have approved moving a club out of [Arlington].")

Morsani and Bill Mack struck a deal on August 26 with Eddie Chiles to buy the Texas Rangers for $74-million, including the stadium and 119 acres of land under and around it. Mack would be majority owner with a 60 percent interest; Morsani would get 40 percent and be the managing partner.

Morsani and Mack signed the deal, knowing that Ed Gaylord still could exercise an option to buy the team. (Rangers fans certainly wanted Gaylord to intercede. They hung a banner in Arlington Stadium that read: "Help! Mr. Gaylord -- Eddie's Gone Mad.")

Morsani did not attempt to contact Gaylord to inquire about his plans.

"They wanted us to make the deal with Eddie," Morsani says. "We didn't know that they were turned down before. Baseball turned them down because they didn't want another 'superstation' [Gaylord's KTVT in Fort Worth] having the control. They had enough superstation owners and they didn't want any more. We were told that by various people. We felt we were in a position to move forward."

Morsani, Cedric Tallis and other members of the TBBG traveled to Arlington. Tallis evaluated the players. He and Morsani met with manager Bobby Valentine and the team's front office staff.

"Then," Morsani says, "we sent the contract to Mr. Ueberroth. He had it for weeks and weeks.

"The deal was executed and signed. The commissioner wanted to look at the document prior to us signing it and we sent it to his office for his perusal. We finally signed the document after he had it six weeks to two months. No indication why he held it that long. I hasten to say Bill Mack called him on a regular basis. 'What is the hold up?' We thought we had dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's. The answer was always, 'We are still looking at it.'

"During this period of time, the president of the American League, Dr. [Bobby] Brown, was in Dallas/Fort Worth talking to other people about the possibility of being owners. We knew he was in town; people were telling us he was there. There were minority owners that owned 8 to 10 percent of the Rangers and they were in contact with us on an ongoing basis. We were going to buy the whole thing.

"Finally we got it signed. Mr. Chiles came to Tampa and we had a signing ceremony downtown at the Harbour Island Hotel.

"We weren't happy" about Brown's interference, Morsani says. "We didn't do anything about it. We thought we had a signed contract. We were confused, obviously. We were under the impression they were going to support our position."

Brown didn't generate a buyer. Morsani's friends in baseball advised him not to worry about Brown or the prospect of Gaylord exercising his option, despite Eddie Chiles' declaration at a Montreal owners meeting that he made "a big mistake" selling to Morsani.

A few days later, on Sept. 14, Gaylord announced his intention to exercise his option to buy the controlling interest in the team, stunning Morsani. That's all it took to nullify the Tampa Bay Baseball Group's deal. It seemed an obvious, calculated gesture to end Morsani's run at the team; the owners once again turned Gaylord down flat.

It later came out that Jerry Reinsdorf scuttled Gaylord's bid. Reinsdorf at the time bitterly opposed the influence of superstations such as WTBS in Atlanta and WGN in Chicago, broadcasting their own team's ballgames nationwide via satellite. He vehemently objected to the creation of another superstation team owner. (Reinsdorf soon thereafter changed his mind, just about the time WGN in Chicago started telecasting games featuring Reinsdorf's teams -- the Chicago White Sox and Chicago Bulls -- into 35-million homes.)

"There were so many highs and lows," Tampa Tribune sports editor Tom McEwen recalls. "Frank worked so hard, so long on the thing with such devotion. They may have been closer to the Rangers than to any team because they actually had a say in it. I was in the box watching a ball game with him and Eddie Chiles the night that the deal was done. It was a shock and a disappointment when baseball stepped in there and said, 'No.' "

George W. Bush, son of President Bush, formed a new group and bought the Rangers.

Morsani considered a lawsuit. If he lost, he'd never get a team. If he won, he still wouldn't get a team.

"We were damned if we do and damned if we don't," he says. "I don't mean to overplay the nice guy act 'cause it is not an act. My purpose was to get a team for Tampa. We said, 'We'll swallow one more time but we have demonstrated our ability to purchase. We were willing to pay the $74-million. They knew we were serious."

Morsani announced his intention of pursuing only an expansion franchise in the future. Maybe next time he could do the kicking.

>END OF CHAPTER 3

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