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When the San Jose stadium proposal failed, the eyes of baseball fans
in Northern California turned 3,000 miles eastward. They cast nervous glances
toward St. Petersburg, Florida, and wondered how that city's assistant city
manager would deal with the news that the Giants were still unloved and
unappreciated in California.
By now, anyone in America who followed a baseball team in economic
straits knew to worry if Rick Dodge's name made the local sports pages. Because
his answer to every team's problems was the same: "Move to St. Petersburg."
But few people believed Bob Lurie would really move or sell the team. Every
time he lost a stadium vote, he swore the Giants would relocate but he never
followed through. He threatened to sell the team, briefly, in 1985, and backed
off.
Lurie had become Chicken Little, always crying, "The sky is falling! The sky
is falling!" and it never did.
Except for that one time.
* * *
Shortly after baseball approved Nintendo's purchase of the Seattle
Mariners, Jack Critchfield wrote a letter to Giants owner Bob Lurie.
"San Francisco was our last shot," Critchfield says. "Right after we lost the
Mariners, my comment to the media was that unless the San Jose referendum
failed, it could be another 18 months to two years before we got a ball
club."
Fortunately for Critchfield, the San Jose referendum did fail.
Making him almost giddy was Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent's declaration of
Bob Lurie's options. In St. Petersburg it was read as a declaration of open
season on the Giants, better than a gold-plated invitation.
"It was music to our ears," Rick Dodge says.
"I wrote him immediately, introduced myself and told him what my role was,"
Critchfield says. "I told him I knew what he had been through and I was sorry
that he lost the referendum but there was another bay area 3,000 miles away
that would be very happy to receive him if he wanted to relocate the team. I
said, 'When you sort out how you want to handle this, I'd like to discuss it
with you.' "
Lurie received the letter and left the next day for a brief vacation in
Europe. When he came back, he called Critchfield.
"I'm about to announce to the press that I'll take the first really good
offer," Lurie told Critchfield. The Giants owner said it didn't matter where
the offer came from anymore, he just wanted to sell the team. He wanted out of
baseball.
Critchfield and Dodge went underground to put together the pieces of a
quick-strike ownership group. They went back to the men who had weathered the
Mariners storm, Vincent Naimoli, Mark Bostick, Rex Farrior Jr. and Lance
Ringhaver.
They didn't go into detail at that point about what role Naimoli might play,
but he made it clear he had cash to invest. "At that point I never seriously
considered him because the Mariners were going to move with the original
ownership in place and all we were supposed to do was to provide a few limited
partners. I had all kinds of those waiting in line," Critchfield says. "When
the opportunity came with the Giants, I called Vince and introduced him to
Bostick and Farrior, who were the two solid people remaining from the attempt
to bring an expansion team here."
Naimoli was one of the Tampa Bay business leaders who secretly came forward in
late 1991, eager to participate in an acquisition of the Mariners. He and
Critchfield had never met, but everything Critchfield heard about Naimoli was
positive. In fact, Critchfield put Naimoli on the board of directors of Florida
Progress in April 1992.
"He is a very quiet gentleman. He came in and said he didn't want any
publicity but if there was an opportunity for him to invest in baseball -- and
he was in a position to do that -- he would like to," Critchfield recalls.
Born in Patterson, New Jersey, on September 16, 1937, to Ralph and Margaret
Naimoli, Vincent Joseph was a late bloomer following a long collegiate career.
He went to Notre Dame University on a ROTC scholarship, graduating in 1959 with
a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering; he earned a master of
science degree in mechanical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of
Technology in 1962 and an MBA from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1964.
From 1965 to 1977, Naimoli was a general manager and vice president of
operations for the Continental Group Inc., a packaging manufacturer; he spent a
year as president and chief operating officer of Allegheny Beverage Corp.; and
was senior vice president and group executive of Jim Walter Corp. from
1978-1980.
The 1980s, when "Greed is good" became the mantra for an entire generation of
young executives, was an extremely profitable time for Naimoli. He became
senior vice president for Anchor Hocking's packaging products group in January
1981 and rode the company like a rocket. By June 1983 he had risen to become
president and chief executive officer of Anchor Glass, adding the title of
chairman of the board of directors in September 1986.
When Anchor Hocking spun off Anchor Glass in a 1983 management buyout, Naimoli
guided the second-largest U.S. manufacturer of glass containers to even more
profitable days and the publicly held company treated him like a king. Not that
he needed more money; Business Week reported that Naimoli earned about
$20-million from his investment in the buyout.
In 1987 and 1989, Naimoli topped the Tampa Bay Business Journal's
survey of the area's highest-paid executives. He earned $631,149, down 17.6
percent from 1988. Of course, Anchor was struggling as well; in 1988, the
Fortune 500 company reported its first loss, sinking $8.5-million into the
red.
The problems with Anchor began with its acquisition of a rival, doubling
Anchor's size but throwing the glass container market into disarray. A
debilitating price war followed. The October 1987 stock crash took another bite
out of Anchor's aggressive growth strategy, increasing its debt and making it
vulnerable.
Indeed, it was. Despite Naimoli's initial attempts to block it, a Mexican
company, Vitro S.A., succeeded in buying out Anchor Glass. Not that Naimoli
suffered in the deal: he pocketed another $20-million.
Long-term investors in Anchor also did very well in the buyout. Anchor's stock
traded for nine cents a share when Naimoli took over; when Vitro bought the
company, it paid $21.25 a share.
In the wake of the buyout, Naimoli and his brother-in-law, J. Edward Young,
opened Anchor Industries International to advise clients on business management
and acquisition.
For all his wealth and business acumen, Naimoli's greatest accomplishment was
overcoming the stuttering that plagued his youth. And his greatest thrill was
being invited back to Notre Dame in 1989 to be an honorary head coach in the
football team's annual Blue and Gold Game. Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz, known
for his list of 100 things he wants to do in his lifetime, was impressed by
Naimoli, who had a list of 107 things.
Holtz told the St. Petersburg Times that Naimoli was "a low-key kind of
guy. He doesn't bask in the limelight. But he has a lot of class, a lot of
integrity." Naimoli (who declined to be interviewed) gave his alma mater
$3-million in 1990 to build a new business school.
And the New Jersey native was a lifelong Giants fan.
* * *
Meanwhile, a baseball team owner, acting as an intermediary, called
Dodge and directed him to contact Giants executive vice president Corey Busch.
Busch was given the assignment by Bob Lurie to try to execute the sale of the
team. He was already well versed on the Tampa Bay area but wanted to tour the
Florida Suncoast Dome to counter the stadium's P.R. with his own impressions.
Before coming to St. Petersburg July 9, Busch traveled to a number of other
potential relocation cities, including Buffalo and Washington, D.C. Critchfield
sent a limo to pick him up at Tampa International Airport and take him to The
Don CeSar Beach Resort on St. Petersburg Beach, a mile north of Dodge's home.
When Critchfield and Dodge showed up to take Busch to dinner, the Giants exec
said something that surprised Dodge, whom he had not met before.
"I know you have been through this a lot," Busch said. "I know it must be
challenging to keep your enthusiasm high. But I have some news for you that I
think you will find very exciting."
With that, they drove up the beach to Bruno's Trattoria Italiano, a favorite
haunt of Busch's hosts. The trio made small talk during dinner, sidestepping
the topic that was on all their minds. It was Busch who finally broke the ice.
"You've got an opportunity," he said. "If you act quickly, I think you can get
the Giants. Bob has exhausted all efforts. He is going to sell the franchise.
He is prepared to sell it to the first legitimate, bona fide bid he has. I
think that if you can send an offer that is bona fide and real and move
quickly, we can relocate and have it done for the 1993 season."
No mixed messages, innuendo or subtleties about it. Busch was right up front.
So, too, was Dodge. We don't want to be anybody's patsy. What can you do to
assure us that this transaction will occur? "We've got people of real
substance that spent a lot of money trying to secure the Mariners," Dodge told
Busch. "We don't want to go to them unless this is genuine."
Dodge welcomed Busch's interest but proceeded carefully.
"On at least three occasions," he says, "I went back to Corey and said, 'I
want you to reassure us and go back to the commissioner and reaffirm that this
whole deal is being structured under his permission and his guidance.' Each
time, Corey said, 'I talked to him today and we have his support and approval
to proceed.' I said to Corey that we'd do everything and anything to make this
happen but we were going to be on the inside, following the direction of
baseball in regard to this transfer."
The next day, Busch met St. Petersburg Mayor David Fischer and toured the
Dome. It was less a walk-through than a tire-kick, lasting almost four hours.
Busch was impressed with the Dome. "It's a very impressive ballpark," he told
reporters. "For a building of this size, it creates an intimate atmosphere."
The Giants official insisted St. Petersburg was not a pawn to get something
better out of San Francisco. "If we were going to use the possibility of
leaving to leverage something, we would have done it 10 years ago," he said.
Dodge detailed the financing arrangements for outfitting the stadium as
provided by Florida legislation. Tampa Bay's demographic profile was discussed,
with emphasis given to the thousands of season-ticket reservations on hold.
Much of this was old news to Busch, who had thoroughly studied St. Petersburg's
1990 NL expansion application.
What most people don't know is that Busch visited St. Petersburg twice. His
first trip, to tour the stadium, was covered extensively by the press. The
second, secret visit took place about a week later. Busch came in late on a
Saturday night, broke bread with the Critchfields, Dodge and a date at the King
Charles Room of the Don CeSar, then spent six hours meeting with the Tampa Bay
ownership group and an accountant from KPMG/Peat Marwick.
"That meeting was real nuts and bolts about what the Giants were going to cost
-- revenues, expenses and time," Dodge says. "It was the process of our
partners starting to establish what they would offer for the club and exploring
with Corey what he thought Bob would take."
Busch also used the meeting to deliver his own ownership proposal, detailing
what his expectations were in the proposed transaction and what he would hope
to do.
"His primary role was representing Mr. Lurie to determine if this was a
viable market," Critchfield says, "but Corey hoped to structure something
whereby he would be the lead investor; he would be the managing general
partner."
"As he came back and met with our investors," Critchfield says, "it turned out
that his ability to produce the amount of money necessary to take the lead role
wasn't really there, so that fell apart and we went back to dealing directly
with Bob Lurie."
Critchfield and Dodge were disappointed; they thought it would be to St.
Petersburg's advantage to have Busch involved. But they understood Naimoli's
need to be comfortable with his partners and, as events were moving so quickly,
he didn't have time to reach that level with Busch. Busch, who would have
entered the deal as a sweat equity partner with the potential of bringing his
own investors to the table, had very strong ideas of what the deal required and
Naimoli's ownership group had some pretty strong ideas of its own. Still,
Naimoli went back on at least two different occasions to try to structure a
deal that included Busch.
Busch's visit put a Tampa Bay bid into play, with or without the Giants exec
on the inside.
"You knew Lurie wasn't going to take less than Smulyan got in Seattle," Dodge
says. "That put the floor in the deal -- $106-million. On the upper scale, he
said if someone offered him $125-million he would sell it today, so you knew
the price was somewhere between $106- and $125-million. We went through all the
bid-buy strategies. Do you start very low? Bob Lurie was worth $400- to
$500-million. This was a guy who had a sterling reputation for being a tough
negotiator but very direct and with no hidden agenda. There was a sense that
you better be real close to the right price the first time. The ownership group
established a price and then some increase in that price and a ceiling."
Almost daily for two weeks the Naimoli group discussed the parameters of the
deal amongst themselves and in telephone calls and correspondence with Lurie.
What was the asking price? What were the conditions? Did he want to remain a
partial owner?
Dodge was very cautious not just with Lurie but with his hometown moneymen.
Still touchy about being burned by Steve Porter and the Kohl brothers during
the 1991 expansion effort, as well as Abe Gosman's grandstanding, he made damn
sure his latest team could play in the big leagues.
"We had some very serious conversations with the general partners about this,"
Dodge says. "Vince Naimoli and Rex Farrior we knew. Same with Mark Bostick and
Lance Ringhaver. It wasn't just money with them, it was reputations. We knew
that once they signed their names on a document, if it required more money or
whatever it required, they would deliver it. They also understood what happened
to us before and and none of them wanted to live with the wrath of the
community. They knew what the community would do if someone let them down
again."
They agreed on the need to shore up the financial side with additional general
partners and provide the necessary equity to make a very strong offer both to
Lurie and to baseball.
During the months that St. Petersburg played footsie with the Seattle
Mariners, Critchfield received correspondence from two Valley Forge,
Pennsylvania, businessmen, Vincent Piazza and Vincent N. Tirendi, as well as
telephone calls from their attorney. Piazza, a boyhood friend of Los Angeles
Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, owned a string of 30 automobile dealerships and
a golf course. Tirendi ran the duo's computer company, Phoenix Technologies,
which serviced most of the nation's brokerage firms. It grew from four
employees in 1988 to 1,000 employees in 1992 and took in revenues in excess of
$100-million. They once attempted to buy the Pittsburgh Pirates and the San
Diego Padres; Piazza's son Mike was a catcher with the Dodgers' top minor
league affiliate, the Albuquerque Dukes.
A Pennsylvania native himself, Critchfield invited them to St. Petersburg for
an introductory meeting. Tirendi already spent six months a year in Clearwater
and was building a new luxury condominium on Sand Key.
"We established a relationship," Critchfield says. "At that point, I indicated
that I didn't think there was going to be an opportunity if we made a move for
the Giants. But, I said, 'Please don't give up on it, I may be back in touch.'
I thought at that point we had an adequate local group. As it turned out, we
needed to shore that up. We checked them out and they were for real, so I had
Mr. Naimoli meet with them in Pennsylvania. That meeting went extremely well
and that was the marriage of the managing general partnership."
They joked that any deal that had three Vinces in it had to be special. More
important, they were three guys who made their money the hard way, coming up
with nothing and earning everything they had. That kind of blue-collar attitude
appealed to Naimoli.
* * *
Friends joked that Walter Shorenstein, chairman and owner of Milton
Meyer & Company, owned half of San Francisco. And he did control a bit of
real estate, 10-million square feet or 25 percent of the building space in the
city, making him a force with which to be reckoned.
Shorenstein, a native of Glen Cove, Long Island, moved to the San Francisco
area in the mid-1940s with the Army. When his military career ended he stayed
in the bay area and became a broker.
As his real estate holdings multiplied (Forbes estimated his assets at
$3-billion in 1991), he bankrolled a long list of liberal Democratic
politicians going back four generations and was a major factor in Democratic
Party politics. Whether it was John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter or Lyndon Johnson,
he played a prominent role. He was among the biggest fundraisers in Northern
California for Democratic politicians.
"He's even better than E.F. Hutton," a fellow Democratic fund-raiser told
the New York Times. "When Walter Shorenstein asks, they not only listen;
they respond."
Even in the worst real estate market in decades, Shorenstein found ways to
make a killing in 1992. He sold a 50 percent interest in a partnership that
owned BankAmerica's headquarters tower and two adjoining buildings in downtown
San Francisco for $380-million. To put the price in perspective, Shorenstein
bought the property from BankAmerica in 1985 for $660-million. The Wall
Street Journal reported that Shorenstein's partnership showed a $50-million
pretax gain on the sale.
Shorenstein had a box at 49ers football games and had a general interest in
sports, although he was not a guy who would ever have owned a team. He entered
the Giants picture in the role of civic power broker at the request of San
Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan.
But Shorenstein's interest was not solely civic. It was framed against the
backdrop of ongoing competition among a bunch of guys who grew up together in
San Francisco and sustained a lifetime rivalry. Shorenstein and Lurie were two
of its most accomplished players; their rivalry played into everything that
happened once Shorenstein got involved in preventing Lurie's team from moving.
Shorenstein thought of himself as major league, but he thought less of Lurie.
There was no love lost between the two of them. It was more like "the nerve of
you to think you can take our team out of the city."
* * *
As a boy growing up in Western Massachusetts during the 1930s and
'40s, H. Irving Grousbeck was a loyal baseball fan who used to fall asleep at
night listening to radio broadcasts of any one of a half dozen teams, depending
upon how the skip bounced distant AM signals off the clouds and through the
atmosphere. The Boston Braves and Red Sox, New York Giants and Yankees, the
Brooklyn Dodgers, it didn't matter. He was a baseball fan.
Being an avid listener and student of the game never rubbed off on Grousbeck
where it mattered, though, at the plate.
"I had more zeal than talent," he recalls. "I played in high school and I
played some in college. But I was no factor at all in their record and really
wasn't much of a baseball player."
Grousbeck graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1956 and earned
an MBA from Harvard Business School four years later. In 1963, he and a partner
started Continental Cablevision in Boston. Grousbeck was president.
Continental Cablevision succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its founders.
So much so that by the late 1970s, Grousbeck was in a position to be a bidder
for his beloved Red Sox.
"When {Sox owner} Tom Yawkey died, I took some very preliminary steps toward
forming a group," Grousbeck says. "I talked to a bank with the idea that we
might get to the point where we would put a bid in for the team. It had been
stated that the team would be sold. We hadn't done much when it became clear
the team was not going to be sold and that Yawkey's widow, Jean, was going to
carry on with her two children and Haywood Sullivan, so nothing came of
that."
Grousbeck eventually left Continental to teach at Harvard Business School and
he sold some of his interest in the cable company. Privately held Continental
had become a very big business (revenues of $570-million in 1992) and selling
some of his stock made Grousbeck a very wealthy man, worth an estimated
$100-million by 1992.
In 1985, Grousbeck left Harvard and Boston for Stanford University and
California. The plan was to spend a year on the West Coast teaching a course on
new business ventures, but the lifestyle agreed with Grousbeck and he elected
to stay.
That same year, Grousbeck was presented with a second opportunity to buy a
baseball team: the San Francisco Giants.
"Bob Lurie had stated publicly that he would consider selling the team and had
talked to various people," Grousbeck says. "By the time I got to talk to him it
was September 1985. We had two or three conversations and he then decided he
would not sell the team so I didn't get very far then, either."
The acid test for Grousbeck in both incidents had been that he would only be
interested in owning a hometown team. The Red Sox were a natural interest while
he was in Boston; the Giants in San Francisco.
"The city that I lived in was what governed my actions," he says. "I knew
there were plenty of other baseball teams that from time to time became
available but I wasn't interested in being an absentee owner. I didn't even
switch allegiances {from the Red Sox to the Giants}; I just added an
allegiance."
Grousbeck's brief contact with Lurie didn't go any further. Their paths never
crossed socially or professionally and the business professor didn't attempt to
develop a baseball network of any sort. As a new Giants fan, he attended half a
dozen games in person each year, watching many more on television. He followed
the four stadium ballots with concern and dismay, but never took an active
role.
When the San Jose vote failed on June 2, 1992, Grousbeck was drafted by
Shorenstein through a mutual acquaintance, investment banker Warren Hellman.
"I don't remember the exact chronology, but I met with Hellman and Shorenstein
and we talked about what their agendas were and how they compared to what mine
might be," Grousbeck says. "We sort of developed a loose understanding that I
would go forward and try to study the feasibility of putting together a group
-- with their help -- to buy the Giants and keep them in the San Francisco Bay
area."
Shorenstein and Hellman introduced Grousbeck to people who might share their
interest in rescuing the Giants.
"We all agreed that the first step was to establish the feasibility of doing
it and only if we could establish that would it make sense to try to find the
capital," Grousbeck says. "We all felt that the capital would flow to a
transaction that seemed feasible. I said from the beginning that I wasn't
trying to make money from baseball but that I wasn't prepared to lead an
ownership group that would knowingly lose a large amount of money over time,
going in."
Everyone Grousbeck talked to had a slightly different agenda when it came to
saving the Giants for San Francisco.
"Walter Shorenstein was doing it, I think, largely as a civic gesture,"
Grousbeck says. "I met with some union people whose agenda was to produce jobs
and avoid losing something that was a source of jobs. At least, that seemed to
me to be the primary item on their agenda. Obviously the city hall people had
their agenda."
As for Grousbeck, he saw himself as a potential managing general partner. Not
the sole investor and not necessarily the majority investor.
Shorenstein needed Grousbeck to take the lead, someone with a bona fide
interest in baseball who spoke the language of the game and would aggressively
pursue the resurrection of the franchise's fortunes in San Francisco.
Shorenstein didn't want the job and neither did any of his friends, a gang of
wealthy Franciscans willing to chip in a few million to save this or that for
good seats, a few lines of ink and political goodwill, but with no interest in
dirtying themselves by actually working in the sport.
Why didn't Shorenstein -- who could certainly afford it -- buy the team
himself?
His son Doug was set against it. The younger Shorenstein felt that they should
use every penny they had in real estate.
Continue Reading?
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Meanwhile, in San Francisco . . .
One. Where Did All My Friends Go?
Chapter 1. About Last Night
Chapter 2. For a Team to Be Named Later
Chapter 3. Is It Later, Yet?
Two. Blame It On Bowie
Chapter 4. The Egg
Chapter 5. The Chicken
Chapter 6. Don't Build It. We Won't Come.
Chapter 7. Taking Away Tom's Bone
Chapter 8. Don't Screw With Mr. Dodge
Chapter 9. Anatomy of a Fast Pitch
Three. We Are the Competition
Chapter 10. Can't Tell the Players Without a Scorecard
Chapter 11. Such a Bargain!
Chapter 12. The Pitch
Chapter 13. Happy Holidays, Mr. Morsani
Chapter 14. The Dog and Pony Show
Chapter 15. That's Not Funny, Pat
Chapter 16. H. Wayne's World
Chapter 17. Deep Pockets, Short Arms
Chapter 18. Heartbreak City
Four. Dream On
Chapter 19. Something's Got to Give
Chapter 20. Wish I May, Wish I Might
Chapter 21. The Gameboys of Summer
Five. Take a Giant Step
Chapter 22. The Artful Dodger
Chapter 23. Do You Know the Way to San Jose?
Chapter 24. Four Guys Named Vincent
Chapter 25. Make The Check Payable To Bill White
Chapter 26. Bottom of the Ninth, Two On, Two Out, Winning Lawyers in Position
Epilogue
About the Author
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