Stadium For Rent: 18. Heartbreak City

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

18. Heartbreak City

Showing up to take his licks was something Steve Porter felt a responsibility to do. If he won, he would have taken a bow; since he lost, he decided to take what he had coming.

"Rick Dodge said to me, 'You know, you didn't have to do this. You didn't have to come down here and be the lightning rod for the whole thing,' " Porter recalls. "My view was I came down here when our group was selected and I came down in June to let everybody know that I wasn't going to slink off and just allow Steve Koff to write a bunch of bullshit."

"When it was over," Dodge says, "I said, 'Steve, you took a lot of shots standing up there that you didn't have to take because your partner walked on you.' He said, 'That was my job. You understand what happened but I'm not going to stand up there and blame somebody else.' I think in Steve's case it was the honorable thing to do. That's what he thinks a stand-up guy does."

Porter saw a certain irony in the way the Tampa Bay press roasted him in those final days.

"I was naive to believe that you could come into a community and, even though the community was not well served by the group it had, I believed that a bunch of newcomers could would work together on a collegial basis to go after something very important for the community. But they did not wish us well for whatever reason. We were carpetbaggers. We were treated like carpetbaggers in the beginning and then we were a necessary evil for a while. When we lost, we were personae non grata.

"The people in the Tampa Bay area who thought they were going to get Major League Baseball with Frank Morsani were in for a rude surprise," Porter says. "We knocked the Morsani group out of the box and we didn't get the team and they are saying that our investors weren't going to come up with the money. What would have happened if, in December, right after the presentations, Frank Morsani filed for bankruptcy and there had not been another group?"

When the bitter press conference ended and the reporters left, Dodge sat with Porter to talk. Then, Porter's son interrupted and hugged his father.

"There was such warmth," Dodge recalls. "My thought then was I never saw that [in Porter] before. His son was there to be with his dad to help him through a difficult time. I really was touched by that."
* * *

Orlando's baseball front man, Pat Williams, was also left out in the cold by baseball's expansion choices.

"We heard that Huizenga made tremendous presentations in New York and in Miami, that he was doing everything right. Miami was coming from nowhere and absolutely acing it.

"We began hearing the St. Petersburg rumblings. No owner that people could relate to, that the media could to talk to. Why were they so hard to reach? Why had nobody met the principals? Nobody could quite get a handle on what was happening. By March, word began to come out that things were not as clear-cut as you thought, that St. Petersburg had problems.

"Contacts meant nothing," he says. "They were interested in somebody who could write the check and keep writing the checks and that once they granted the franchise they'd never have to worry about it again. They don't want to hear from Miami or Denver again. 'Get your fees in on time and then whatever it costs to run your organization, that's your problem. See you in April '93 and let's play ball.'

"I think it was pretty resolved in their minds by April what they wanted," Williams says. "The market size of Orlando in their judgment wasn't quite ready. We kept selling them on the future. 'Do what the NBA did. Catch Orlando before it peaks.' Rather than gamble on what will come, they looked at Miami as a sure thing.

"I refused to let it die. It could have been stillborn back in July 1990 and again in March 1991. I absolutely refused to let it die anywhere along the line. I kept believing. I had convinced myself and still to this day believe that it was six cities -- and Orlando, long-range, had the best future as a baseball city. I couldn't get them to believe that.

"The good was that we could look back and we did everything we could. There was not one more thing we could have done.

"Bill White called me," Williams recalls, "and he said, 'We decided to pick Denver and Miami.' Maybe it was naive -- even the local media was skeptical -- but even up to that point I really believed. My position was that we were hanging in there and battling it all the way and we were going to make it. Probably naive."
* * *

Following the selection of Denver and South Florida as sites of the National League's two new teams, expansion committee member -- and Philadelphia Phillies president -- Bill Giles discussed the process.

Q.: You were on expansion committees before that did not produce teams. What went on in the past?

GILES: "The former expansion committees never talked about specific locations. We just talked about if we should expand and if we did expand, how many teams."

Why was that tabled?

"Basically, we never thought expansion was a good idea. Even now, I don't think people think it was a good idea. But there had been commitments made by all the commissioners and there were people who felt that if we didn't expand, the political pressures would be so great we'd be forced to expand. So rather than get pushed into it we decided to do it voluntarily and have a more orderly fashion in which to do it."

So prior commissioners didn't feel as much pressure as the league felt this time around?

"I suppose that's right. Everybody wanted to keep talking about expansion to keep the Florida and Colorado politicians off our backs. Arizona made some waves at one time that if we didn't expand, they were going to attack the anti-trust exemption."

Was there at all a sense that demographically, at least, the way the country had changed in the last 20 years, that expansion made sense?

"The commissioner felt that way and I felt that way. And I'm glad we ended up with the two parts of the country we did because we're brought Major League Baseball into about the only two areas that didn't have it within a decent day's drive, at least. Arizona is the only area of the country not covered."

What was the resistance to expansion? Dilution of talent?

"Economics, as much and more so than dilution of talent. People don't really feel expansion is good economics. We're going to have to start dividing up all the national licensing and television money with more people and in the long run you really don't gain economically."

So it's a simple economic question for most owners?

"Dilution of talent always seems to work itself out. I'm personally not concerned about that. There won't be that much noticeable. The scheduling is a real bear when you have 14 teams. You can't come up with as attractive a schedule when you have 14 teams in each league."

Did you know anyone in the original three Tampa Bay ownership groups?

"Morsani, I knew. He came to visit me when he first got involved. He did a very dignified sales job on the area and himself. A very impressive guy. The other people, I never even heard of until I got involved."

You came in after the presentations in New York. Were you at all familiar with what went wrong with Morsani's bid?

"No. I was told some things. [Bill] Mack evidently had most of the money and he pulled out, is what I heard."

Were you surprised that he was not part of the final group?

"I was very, very surprised when they picked the group they did. Because I thought the Morsani group had a lock on it."

When did you know the Porter group's finances were shaky?

GILES: "We didn't know it on our visit [to the Florida Suncoast Dome]. They convinced us that it was solid. But when we start asking for all the documents showing where all the money was coming from, it wasn't quite what they had said. That was their biggest drawback."

Where had they said the money was coming from?

"[In New York] they gave us a lineup of the people and how much each was going to put in. Then when they sent in their documents, it wasn't as they had advertised. I didn't get involved personally in the details of the economics of it; it was the league office that did that."

Your team trains in Clearwater, the Mets were in St. Petersburg for 26 years. [Former St. Louis Cardinal] Bill White trained in St. Petersburg. Certainly the expansion committee knew the Tampa Bay area.

"I would say this: When certain areas were discussed before the committee was even formed, I was told by different people that they didn't feel the Tampa Bay area would be all that successful."

In what sense?

GILES: "That the majority of people that attended the spring games were not from this area, that they were tourists. And that was true. Only 15 percent of our spring attendance is from Clearwater.

"The other negative was that some people -- including myself -- had some concern about the accessibility of the stadium from Tampa. We were told by some marketers that people that live in Tampa had a psychological barrier to going into St. Petersburg on a consistent basis. I had no idea whether that was true; it was just what some market research people said. We also did some research on the licensing business -- buying T-shirts and caps. Tampa Bay came up near the bottom. On the other hand, the television ratings of Major League Baseball were better in the Tampa Bay area. So that was a conflict of research."

How did the cities stack up in your mind after visiting each of them?

"I thought [Tampa Bay] had a good chance. But that was before we went to Denver.

"Originally, I thought Tampa Bay was No. 1. Then I visited Miami. [At that point] Miami and Tampa Bay would be the two teams we would select. Of course there was that huff from the American League saying, 'We don't want the National League to get both Florida cities because they wanted the opportunity to go to Florida some time later. But that didn't factor into our thinking.

"Washington -- another bias I had was that Major League Baseball belonged in the nation's capital. The two drawbacks there were that you were intruding on Baltimore's territory. But the big drawback was their money group was very, very weak. Much weaker than the Tampa group. They didn't really have solid money involved in it. And the Buffalo group never really wanted it that badly.

"Two or three things turned the tide for Denver. One was the enthusiasm of the town, which was something I should have eliminated from my mind. But they handled our visit very well, with a lot enthusiasm. More important, the limited partnership was very strong. The limited partners committed themselves to put up whatever extra money would ever be needed to keep a team in Denver if there ever became financial problems. That was a big plus for them. And they were able to negotiate the new stadium; the basic design was very impressive. Good location, good seating, good everything. Denver is going to be very successful."

What about Orlando?

"Pat Williams and I were good friends in Philadelphia; he used to work for the Phillies. He and I used to talk a lot. He would call me once a week about what he should do next and what his chances were. Then when he got DeVos to come in, it certainly looked like they had the money. But they didn't have the stadium situation. I was not impressed with the location of where they were going to put the stadium. They were next to the bottom. I'd say Buffalo was on the bottom because of the market and the fact that down deep they didn't think they could support it financially.

"Orlando, in the long run, probably would have been all right -- like in 10 years."

Pat Williams believed that once DeVos agreed to be Orlando's sole owner, that they moved up.

"They gained credibility but they weren't close enough to have the credibility to mean anything.

"But we wanted to keep everybody feeling they had a chance because things were changing rather rapidly, particularly the financial situations. We did not want to eliminate anybody too early in the process."

You deliberately kept people pumped.

"Yeah. That bothered me some, too. I kept suggesting to the committee that we were prolonging the process too much and that if we really saw no chance for Orlando and Buffalo we ought to narrow it to four. But they, wisely, I guess, didn't think that was a good idea."

What was going on between the time of the city visits and the June announcement?

"Very little actually. The league office was verifying the economics of all the deals, the ownership groups, and how much each of them was going to put in. There was very little conversation among the committee. We had two meetings, one in person and one by phone, when we graded and discussed the pluses and minuses. We had eight categories and we rated each city 1 through 10. It was fairly clear there were only three to talk about -- Miami, Tampa Bay and Denver, and the Tampa Bay group really eliminated themselves because of the money situation.

"I only had one call from a fellow owner and he was pushing for Washington. He felt we should be in the nation's capital."

Can you say who that was?

"I think not."

Were you being lobbied by the potential ownership groups?

"Oh yeah, got a lot of letters from business people, got some that knocked other cities, some that bragged about their own. I didn't pay that much attention to the campaigning."

Was there anything that any of the cities did wrong that someone can learn from in the future?

"The only mistake made in presentations was that one of the cities threatened us. They said, 'You have to come here. There's no place you can come but here and if you don't come here, there's going to be trouble.' That was a mistake.

"That was on one of the visits. The guy got kind of emotional and childish, I thought. It wasn't very intelligent."

That was in one of the three cities not considered as a finalist?

"That's right."

Did any one member of the committee lobby for a certain city?

GILES: "[Douglas] Danforth and [Fred] Wilpon, from day one, were very pro-Miami. I tried to push Tampa Bay more than anybody else. And I was ready to fight for Tampa Bay until I was told about the money part of it. I really felt, in the long run, if Huizenga had been in Tampa Bay instead of Miami, Tampa Bay would have gotten the team."