Stadium For Rent: 20. Wish I May, Wish I Might

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

20. Wish I May, Wish I Might

"Baseball is trying to teach us a lesson.
We built a stadium and said,
'We're next! We're next!'
They don't want to hear any of that."
-- Jack Lake, Retired Publisher, St. Petersburg Times

If nothing else, the prolonged baseball effort in Tampa Bay offered local advertising firms a national platform for their creative staffs. "Join The Team" was the most successful, but Tampa-based Paradigm Communications hit paydirt in the fall of 1991 with its "May The Team Come True." Ironically, it began as a pitch for the team that beat St. Petersburg in the expansion contest.

"We were working on a possible presentation to be advertising agency for the Florida Marlins," Paradigm president Dan Furlong says. "Somebody came up with the image of a baseball glove with the fingers crossed. And someone else said, 'That would be perfect for Tampa Bay.' "

Two days later, the agency came up with the line, "May the Team Come True."

An entire campaign fell together -- for Tampa Bay. "From a creative standpoint," says Furlong, "it worked a little backward." Paradigm inadvertently backed into a campaign -- visual depiction, catchy tagline -- without a paying client.

Yet the agency proceeded.

Coming off the region's disappointment in losing out to Denver and South Florida for an expansion franchise -- and with the Seattle Mariners a distant prospect -- Furlong wanted to pump life back into the dreams of local sports fans. A baseball fan himself, he decided to shoulder the cost of launching a "May The Team Come True" campaign himself and spent $10,000 out-of-pocket for T-shirts, posters and newspaper ads in the sports pages of the St. Petersburg Times and Tampa Tribune.

"It had a public service element," he says. "And it was a chance to profile our ability to do great creative."

When the campaign was ready to go public, publicist Beth Walters wanted to alert local baseball experts about what Paradigm was doing. She called Joe Henderson at the Tribune, who directed her to Rick Dodge. "It wasn't as though we needed anyone to say it was all right," she says. "But Dodge was busting his ass. I thought we should call him."

The ads were ready to go. But Paradigm didn't want to upset Dodge's work, so Walters pursued the elusive assistant city manager by phone to the annual winter baseball meeting in Miami Beach.

"When he called back, he told me that the city was told by the powers-that-be to lay low, they didn't want a rivalry between Tampa Bay and Seattle, that it would jeopardize things," Walters says.

Dodge noted that, of course, private parties were under no such restriction. He provided Walters with Smulyan's home address and phone number so she could send him a package of "May the Team Come True" T-shirts, ads, posters and the following letter:

Dear Mr. Smulyan,

The opportunity to help in the realization of a dream shared by so many in the Tampa Bay area is one we couldn't let slip through our fingers. That's why, in the spirit of this agency and our community, we took on (unsolicited) the "Team Come True" campaign.

In the same spirit, this might give you a little hint as to the great home our hometown might be for you.

So we have our fingers crossed. Keep yours crossed too. Who knows, Tampa's "Team Come True" may just be yours.
Sincerely,

Daniel R. Furlong

A total of 20 billboards, 500 posters and 700 T-shirts carried Furlong's message.

Adweek spotlighted the campaign. And while "May the Team Come True" didn't pull the Tampa Bay sports community out of its post-expansion trauma, it did help propel the dreaming deep into its second decade.

Smulyan admired the Paradigm effort. It represented precisely the unsolicited enthusiasm lacking in Seattle.

"I loved the T-shirts," Smulyan says. "I liked them so much I wore them. Not in public, of course, but it was a brilliant campaign."
* * *

Rich Hickman thought that the perfect promotional tool for the city in the sun would be a postcard promoting the Florida Suncoast Dome. "Having a great time! Wish you were here!"

Six days before the start of the 1991 baseball winter meetings at the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach, St. Petersburg's director of marketing and public information got to work.

At a cost to the Join The Team interest fund of $3,600, Hickman's team printed 25,000 postcards. Five-thousand were cut and printed for immediate use, promoting the Dome's vital statistics -- including 22,000 anxious season ticket reservations holders -- for a baseball relocation. These were handed out liberally at the winter meetings. The remaining 20,000 were left uncut, awaiting a future positive message to be printed on the reverse.
* * *

The usual contingent from St. Petersburg made the scene in Miami Beach for the winter meetings.

While Rick Dodge ricocheted from suite to suite, buttonholing baseball owners and league officials at every opportunity, PSA Chairman Cecil Englebert was talking up the Dome's merits in the lobby of the Fontainebleau. St. Petersburg's party boys, Bob Stewart and Bill Bunker, made the scene in the exhibit hall. To anyone standing still, the city councilman and executive director of the sports authority passed out Hickman's postcards touting the Florida Suncoast Dome.

Baseball's annual meetings work best for those who recognize faces. Only the minor league bosses wear name tags. Reporters have pins that just say "Working Press." You either recognize the big league owners, execs, managers, coaches and players or you don't.

Virtually everyone in attendance was male and white. The few women to be found were vivacious and sometimes scantily clad, engaged to hawk products and services.

The exhibit hall is instructive, bargain-laden and tacky all at once. Where else to get samples of the latest developments in AstroTurf, warning track technology and glow-in-the-dark sports novelties? Get comfortable in the latest in stadium seating. Take a swing in a high-tech batting cage. Buy a gross of homer hankies. Sidle up to Morganna the Kissing Bandit, the Famous Chicken or Miami Maniac. Or buy novelties promoting minor league teams such as the Peoria Chiefs, Madison Muskies, Butte Copper Kings, Carolina Mudcats or Yakima Bears.

But the real curiosity each year is discovering which cities will show up to tell their story to baseball in an effort to seduce a big league or minor league team. This time around only the Sacramento (California) Sports Foundation paid the price of a booth for the chance to sell its soul.

"We want the exposure," executive director Ron Radigonda said. "It's a great opportunity for us to be seen. We've had a lot of people stop by and talk, a lot of minor league people, a few major league people. They ask, 'Why are you here?' To get the message out. We're coming from a city that's still in a growth mode -- Sacramento is the 19th largest market in the U.S. -- and we're currently without a franchise. One of the problems is people don't understand the geography of the Central Valley and Sacramento. We say, 'Where [San Francisco] the bay starts, we end.' "

Radigonda is playing a role known well to his predecessors in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Denver, Buffalo and Washington, D.C., as he struggles to distinguish his metropolis.

"I think we're players," he said. "One of the things we saw in the Major League Baseball expansion is baseball said that they want to go into virgin territory. You have to prove you can support a team -- we've done that with the [NBA] Kings. You need a state-of-the-art facility. We're going to take care of that. The Catch-22 of all time is where we are right now. There are plans to build a stadium without a team. But then you run the risk of what happened in St. Petersburg. It scares a lot of people. It scares the people in government a lot more than the entrepreneurial people because they're used to taking enormous risks.

"We're trying to temper the risks by being flexible," Radigonda said. "Successful stadiums can be built in phases. We see it as economic development for our community."

Sports boosters in Sacramento wondered what they can do to get their city, California's state capital, to be looked upon favorably by pro sports. Baseball, they thought, is watching.

"It is a mentality," Radigonda said. "One of the main reasons Sacramento has the Kings -- when Bowie Kuhn was the commissioner, we talked to baseball. They told us the best way to show you can sell tickets is not with an NFL team. It's an NBA team. If you can draw well for 41 home games, that's one of the ways to prove you can support baseball. So that's one of the reasons the Kings were purchased. The team had sold out every game since 1985."
* * *

A few aisles over from the Sacramento booth stood the display for a Seattle-based company called Ebbetts Field Flannel. Jerry Cohen's company took its name from the ballpark where the Dodgers played in Brooklyn until fleeing for Los Angeles in 1957.

"I was born the year the Dodgers left," Cohen said. "We lived about a mile from Ebbetts Field."

Ironic that a man who moved to Seattle in 1986 and named his business for a lost baseball franchise on the East Coast would grow up on the West Coast only to see the team of his adulthood threaten to leave.

"I feel a little bit like those Brooklyn fans might have felt," he said. "I go to a lot of games."

It didn't help when St. Petersburg's Bob Stewart and Bill Bunker dropped by.

"The Pinellas Sports Authority guys were around," Cohen's friend, David Keller said. "I gave them grief. They were wearing Mariners pins and they gave us Sun Ghost Dome -- uh, Suncoast Dome pins."

Keller grew up in Seattle. He was 12 when the Pilots left the city for the beer barrels of Milwaukee, pinstripes and a new start as the Brewers in 1970. "I know what the effect would be on a 12-year-old child now," he said. "Ken Griffey Jr. is a God in Seattle."

Still, Keller knew the history of the Mariners did not bode well for the team's continued presence in the Pacific Northwest.

"The Mariners were born out of the settling of a lawsuit," he recalled. "Instead of generating the kind of excitement St. Petersburg has, the Mariners were born out of, 'Oh, here's a team.'

"I guess I'll be going to minor league games in Tacoma next year. It'll be bad for Seattle: the two-time loser syndrome."

Neither man condemned St. Petersburg for attempting to woo their team away.

"I don't direct my anger at Tampa Bay," Cohen said. "We've had this negative history of baseball in Seattle and years of mismanagement. That's what angers me. If the ownership has financial problems, I can deal with that. What bothers me is the city being blamed. The city did everything the ownership asked in support of the club. It's a sad thing for baseball when 2-million in attendance doesn't count. The rep for Seattle not being a good baseball city is not deserved.

"I do think the business community is being asked to do more than it cares to do," he said. "The amount of season tickets our corporations have is pathetic. Boeing has a lot. But we're talking about a community with companies the size of Weyerhauser and Microsoft."
* * *

Native Sun Sportswear's "Tampa Bay Mariners" shirts grew out of months of speculation about the relocation of the Seattle franchise to the Florida Suncoast Dome.

The St. Petersburg company's shirts were objects of curiosity at the winter meetings, where -- despite being kept out of sight -- everyone knew about them and wanted one. The company kept a handful of the Mariners Ts under the table for viewing only by request.

George Mitcheson got a call from somebody in Seattle who wanted to buy a few of his shirts. "Could you give us a break on 500 shirts?" the caller asked. He wanted to take the shirts and put a big red circle with a slash over "Tampa Bay Mariners" in an effort to drum up support for keeping the team in Washington. Mitcheson said that wasn't what he had in mind. "I don't want to do anything to help you keep the team there!" he told the caller. "And I don't want to do anything to give our community a black eye."

Mitcheson's company makes its money printing shirts for minor league baseball teams across North America as well as other licensed sports and corporate products. As Mariners fever gripped Tampa Bay in the waning months of 1991, he used down time in his company's art department to design the "Tampa Bay Mariners" logo -- the Sunshine Skyway Bridge across the face of a baseball -- printing 1,000 T-shirts. They didn't take long to sell out.

"This place is just starved for baseball," Mitcheson said. "The interest isn't going away. A team will come here. I'd bet my life on it."
* * *

There was only one burning issue for baseball in Miami Beach: Would the Seattle Mariners be the first team since the Washington Senators moved to Texas in 1972 to relocate? And if so, which of the game's eight or nine other financially strapped franchises might be the next to pack its bags in search of bigger bucks and greener playing fields?

Every cigar-smoking geezer in the hotel held forth on what Jeff Smulyan should or would do. The Mariners owner found the Seattle and Tampa Bay press following him to dinner, to his room and to the door of public rest rooms. Only Rangers owner George Bush, the president's son, was flanked so closely.

Amiable to the end, Smulyan never came unhinged by the attention. A radio man by trade, he shrugged off the reporters as only doing their job and patiently gave non-answers to their incessant questions.

During his one and only full-fledged press conference -- with AL president Bobby Brown at his side -- Smulyan said he briefed other AL owners on his plight and reiterated his intention to either sell or move the Mariners as soon as possible.

"This is in the hands of Seattle," Smulyan said, cutting off the Tampa Bay issue. "Seattle has about 100 days to buy this baseball club. For the next 100 days the ownership of the club is available to someone who is willing to operate in Seattle, Washington, under the existing lease. No one else.

"This issue is in the hands of the people of Seattle. If they want to own this team they can, and then it will be between the City of Seattle and the ownership and Major League Baseball. We do not want to be the owners of the Seattle Mariners in Seattle.

"I think Mr. Hill has got to start working on a solution to make baseball work in Seattle and not threaten to litigate against me or the American League or the commissioner of baseball or anyone else. The key is you must find a solution to baseball in Seattle. I didn't find it. George Argyros didn't find it. The Seattle Pilots didn't find it. The community is going to have to have to find a solution because no one else has and no one else can. You cannot litigate successful baseball in Seattle."

Brown reiterated Smulyan's dismissal of litigation as a negotiating ploy. He danced around the issue of relocation as premature but noted that the Mariners could not continue to operate under the existing conditions in Seattle and that, furthermore, the AL did not enjoy the prospect of forcing Smulyan into bankruptcy to satisfy litigation. To avoid bankruptcy, Brown said, the league would look at every conceivable option.

Outside the press room, Rick Dodge was besieged by reporters following Smulyan's conference. Describing Tampa Bay as "a spectator in the process," he truthfully denied having met Smulyan, although no one believed him. Keeping a less-than-convincing poker face, Dodge repeated his oft-stated contention that Tampa Bay's cards might contain another joker today, but every day brought him closer to a full house.

"If you believe in karma," Dodge said, "maybe the opportunity will come our way this time."

He said that the Florida Suncoast Dome could be ready by Opening Day 1992 -- for the Mariners or anybody else who might like to call the stadium home. "Strange things happen in the pursuit of franchises and we're going to be open to the very last minute if we need to act," Dodge said. "We have seen remarkable things happen in very short periods of time so we're not going to take anything for granted and we are not going to give up either. We are confident we are going to have Major League Baseball in Tampa Bay at the Florida Suncoast Dome. We just don't know which team and when."

When Smulyan's press conference was over, he exited through the hotel's lobby and passed within 20 feet of Dodge, but they never saw one another, each was surrounded by a media contingent.

It wasn't supposed to work this way but there were some things even these two couldn't plan for.

"I talked to Jeff in advance of the meetings and he said, 'Why don't you come down and we'll find some minutes to get together,' " Dodge recalls. "We were staying in the same hotel a couple of floors apart. We got down there and I did talk to Jeff -- on the phone. He was getting mobbed. We decided to just wait. The media trailed me all over the place, too."
* * *

Something else happened in Miami Beach: Rick Dodge learned that winning an expansion team did not make a good sport out of Florida Marlins chairman H. Wayne Huizenga when it came to the neverending talk of a team relocating to St. Petersburg.

Not over my dead video rewinder, Huizenga told fellow team owners in a private meeting.

Huizenga figured he beat St. Petersburg fair and square. (Never mind that he hired his pal, Pittsburgh Pirates president Carl Barger within days of being awarded the Marlins.) If he was going to plunk down a $95-million fee just to get into the National League and invest another $30-million to get an undoubtedly lousy team up and running, he wanted some guarantee of at least temporary exclusivity in Florida. It wasn't going to be easy or cheap to build fan support those first few years; an established team that might relocate and start play in St. Petersburg in 1992 would steal the Marlins' bait.

In December and January, the video king threatened to renege on his deal or sue baseball unless a team moving to St. Petersburg paid a compensatory territorial fee to him estimated at $15-million.

Didn't take long for that declaration to leak to the press. Huizenga and Marlins president Carl Barger denied they made such demands but too many baseball insiders confirmed the story for it not to be close to the truth.

"We heard that he went to the commissioner and was very direct about it: 'If you allow Seattle to come here, I am going to withdraw my deposit or sue baseball,' " Dodge says. "I heard this from a couple of different people. People who have been friendly to us in the NL, we saw them shifting to protect Huizenga's supposed interest. We knew it was a serious issue."

Barger was quoted as saying with regard to a possible Mariners relocation to St. Petersburg, "We're not going to take this sitting down."

He wasn't the only one, either. Steve Ehrhart, president and chief operating officer of the Colorado Rockies, was equally pissed off. "There's going to be hell to pay on this," he told the Tampa Tribune's Joe Henderson. "Jeff thinks he can just come in there in a great market and line his pockets . . . while the rest of us are struggling. Well, he can't have his cake and eat it too . . . We were prohibited from dealing with Seattle before we got this team, and we did inquire. We could have bought the Mariners for a lot less than we paid for this."

Huizenga had every right to protect his interests. And baseball owners greedily clung to their individual shares of the video king's expected cash contribution, afraid to contradict this powerful rookie member of the club. But Tampa Bay civic, political and sports leaders kicked up a fury. Screw you, H. Wayne, and the remote control you rode in on. Campaigns to boycott the Tampa Bay area Blockbuster Video stores were plotted. The Hillsborough and Pinellas county legislative delegations looked at ways of punishing Huizenga and Joe Robbie Stadium through legislation. And the bad publicity caromed across the country.

Although it's doubtful they truly had a change of heart, Huizenga and Barger held a press conference at the Florida Suncoast Dome February 7 and bought newspaper ads in the St. Petersburg Times and Tampa Tribune to clarify their position.

"We spoke that day independent of the press conference," Jack Critchfield recalls, "a personal, man-to-man reiteration of what they were saying publicly. They understood that Tampa Bay was not part of their market, that there would be no reason for them to oppose a team here and, in fact, they hoped that Florida had at least one, if not two more. Mr. Huizenga had a genuine concern that he paid too much for the franchise. He is a good man, and his record in business had been one of integrity. What they did was in their best interest. I think they would never have opposed a franchise here had they known it would be public knowledge. The fact that it became public put them in an untenable position and they had to go out and mend fences. They were silent on the issue from that point forward."

Dodge was less enamored of Huizenga than was Critchfield. He heard the video king's words, he just didn't believe him.

"Very impressive guy," Dodge recalls. "He said that he wouldn't object and wouldn't stand in the way and that there may have been some misunderstandings, but it wouldn't be that way in the future. We all kind of looked at each other. Right. Sure. You wanted to believe him but he raised the issue of Seattle in the commissioner's eyes. [Before coming to St. Petersburg,] Barger or somebody claimed that Smulyan had met with us. That got Smulyan in trouble with the commissioner; In fact he got fined. Heavily. When he met with us we assumed Jeff had [the commissioner's] permission. But he didn't inform the American League or the commissioner. The commissioner fined him $100,000."

Smulyan would neither confirm or deny the fine. But Barger was right: Smulyan had finally met face-to-face with representatives of the City of St. Petersburg.

END CHAPTER 20

Acknowledgements