Stadium For Rent: 25. Make The Check Payable To Bill White

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

25. Make The Check Payable
To Bill White

Oct. 5. Walter Shorenstein didn't care for George Shinn during the North Carolinian's first two visits to the West Coast. But by the third time around, he warmed up enough around the NBA team owner and began to think Shinn was the right man for the job. He wasn't as smart or as wealthy as Grousbeck, but he did take the responsibility for saving baseball off the developer's shoulders.

Unfortunately for Shinn, his third visit to San Francisco marked the beginning of the end in his bid to control the Giants.

Shinn's third visit was preparatory to a planned trip to New York in which the San Franciscans would officially launch their bid to keep the Giants. To the utter dismay of his partners, Shinn made a presentation in Walter Shorenstein's conference room on Monday, October 5, that disclosed his plan to strip the team of its top talent. His philosophy was bottom-line oriented, something he thought the ultra-capitalists of San Francisco would appreciate: slash expenses by dumping million-dollar ballplayers onto the open market and rebuild the Giants on the cheap with minor leaguers. The team would still be called the San Francisco Giants, but it wouldn't necessarily have Will Clark, Matt Williams or any of the other high-priced players.

Although the men in the room who heard this proposal were shocked, it was only another example of how they didn't do their homework on Shinn. He ran one of the NBA's most successful franchises by starting lean, focusing more on winning at the box office and the concession stand than on the court. Shinn's Hornets were consistently mediocre but the fans loved being able to see favorite college players like Rex Chapman and J.R. Reid turn pro at home in Charlotte. And Hornets games were events, not questions of winning and losing.

Furthermore, the San Francisco investors had little room to criticize Shinn's plan. Not one of them was willing to risk more than $5-million of his own money on the Giants and even at that, they insisted that Shinn be responsible for all losses. Stripping the team to its bare bones -- on top of the city's deep lease concessions -- was the only way to make baseball work in San Francisco. Didn't they hear a word H. Irving Grousbeck had said?

Leigh Steinberg, the superagent who won multiyear, multimillion-dollar contracts for Will Clark and Matt Williams, wasn't there when Shinn made his presentation. But when he heard about it later, he wasn't the least bit upset. In fact, he gave Shinn credit for his approach.

"There was a big market for those players," Steinberg says. "It was more important for me to have the Giants in San Francisco. It wasn't necessarily important that those particular players had to stay there if the team owner didn't want them -- if that was the only way to keep the team in San Francisco. We needed to keep the team. If the team moved to Tampa Bay, keeping Clark and Williams would have been irrelevant. Those things just happen in sports. Sometimes the team makes a choice to go to a lower-paying, younger roster. And while on the one hand it makes it less attractive for our higher-paid clients, on the other hand we have younger baseball players so opportunities open for them."

What Shinn may not have known was that Shorenstein, Steinberg and Jordan had been working on a Plan "B" all the while they were supporting the North Carolinian's efforts. Not wishing to get "Grousbecked" again, they put together additional investors who could step in to cover Shinn's piece of the nut if something prevented him from stepping to the plate. It seemed to be a no-lose proposition: if Shinn did the deal, great; if he didn't, his money would be replaced by more local bucks, an anticipated plus in the eyes of baseball.

It's a good thing the organizers were thinking ahead.

Reaction to Shinn's proposal was uniformly negative. In a city which prided itself on being the best -- symphony, opera, ballet, skyline, football team, bridge, sourdough bread, chocolate -- a second-class baseball team was not acceptable. In their minds, that wasn't the Giants. The Giants were Will Clark and Matt Williams. The Giants were Willie Mays, Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda and Bobby Bonds in San Francisco, Bobby Thompson and John McGraw in New York. The Giants meant fielding a competitive team. The Giants were not a collection of interchangeable Joe Slobotnicks. These businessmen were full of civic pride; wasn't that why they were in this? In their minds, it would be bad enough to invest money when they really didn't want to, but investing in a second-rate business at a better than market rate with no hope of return was totally unacceptable.

Making the decision to cut George Shinn adrift -- which is what they clearly had to do, seeing as how he had no understanding for the way San Franciscans did things -- was infinitely easier because many of the investors had come to doubt Shinn's ability to produce $50-million. There was also feedback coming from Major League Baseball that the presence of George Shinn undercut the essence of the local argument.

And finally, as if that wasn't enough, the bad publicity generated about Shinn and Stolpen by Alan Taylor Communications reached a point where it was impossible to ignore, whether there was any truth to the accusations or not.

"To be truthful," Steinberg says, "the bad P.R. was so constant and so bad and there was no mechanism for response. We didn't ever want to antagonize Lurie. And what were we going to say? Part of {the bad P.R.} came from Corey Busch and Lurie, part of it came from the P.R. firm and part of it just came from partisans in the press. When you call somebody a charlatan and come up with daily stories that assassinate their personality or character it's tough. It seemed to me that they did to Shinn what George Bush did to Michael Dukakis."

Shorenstein emerged from the three-hour meeting and faced reporters alone. "We will make an offer in the next few days," he said. Shinn was not available for comment.

Oct. 6. Bill White rewrote the rules again in Atlanta, telling St. Petersburg Times reporter Marc Topkin that the San Francisco group must not only make a bid competitive on a dollar basis with Tampa Bay but it must also have a new stadium plan and working capital to finance team operations.

Naimoli was pretty fed up.

"Oh, is that the latest?" he asked Topkin sarcastically. "They can do what they want to do."

Oct. 10. George Shinn and the San Francisco investment group confirmed what was long expected: he was out of the San Francisco bid. Sounding a lot like H. Irving Grousbeck, Shinn pronounced the Giants' financial records "disastrous" and expressed concern that the baseball team's weak position could imperil his NBA franchise.

"I don't have any fault with George Shinn," Frank Jordan says. "He acted in good faith. Everything he did and promised here, he followed up on. My communications with him were very open and honest."

Elsewhere, Editor & Publisher, the weekly journal of the newspaper industry, revealed a rift among reporters and editors at the San Francisco Chronicle with regard to its coverage of the Giants' off-the-field games. Several reporters wrote in-house memos of complaint about the editing of news stories to reflect a pro-Giants slant. Both the Chronicle and Examiner took heat from the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for slanted coverage.

Sportswriter Bruce Jenkins confirmed that an entire column of his was killed following the announced deal to sell the Giants to a Tampa Bay group. Written in the form of a "Dear Bob" letter to Lurie, it began:

This is the common man speaking. Get out of town, and get out now. No, no -- not the team, or the fans you just sold down the river. You're gone. You're about as San Francisco as Stalin . . .

You're a bum. You're nothing. Weaker than damp, one-ply toilet paper . . . My God, look what you've done. The Tampa-St. Petersburg Giants. You've taken one of the most storied franchises in American sports, playing in the best city in the country, and moved them to a humidity-tortured sweatbox populated mostly by 88-year- olds and losers in cut-off jeans . . . .

Oct. 12. San Francisco investors finally went to New York and made their offer for the Giants to the National League -- $95-million, $20-million less than the Tampa Bay group promised in its August 6 contract.

Standing on the sidewalk in front of the National League's office on Park Avenue, Peter Magowan announced to the press "a deal to purchase the San Francisco Giants for $95-million."

The figure was deceiving, as was the premature wording of the announcement, because the new ownership proposed to keep a $12.3-million fee due Lurie, which was his share of the Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins expansion fees. The Tampa Bay deal allowed Lurie to keep the money in addition to the sales price. By some calculations, the expansion money made the Tampa Bay offer worth $127.5-million, the San Francisco bid, $82.5-million.

But $95-million was a compromise between the Shorenstein and Steinberg camps. Shorenstein felt $80- to $90-million was as high as the group should go. That was what the team was worth in San Francisco, warts and all. But Steinberg felt $100-million was the magic number, close enough to be competitive with Tampa Bay's offer when Lurie's loan was factored out. The group agreed on $95-million as the bet and $100-million as the raise.

Peter Alden Magowan, a member of the Giants board of directors, emerged as the new leader of the San Francisco group in much the same way Lurie himself surfaced in 1976. A personal friend of Larry Baer, he had attended the first potential investor meeting in which George Shinn was introduced, but stayed in the shadows out of loyalty to Lurie.

A New York City native born April 5, 1942, Magowan graduated from Stanford University in 1964, earned a master's from Oxford and studied at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

His grandfather, Charles Merrill, founded Safeway in 1926; his father, Robert Magowan, ran the company from 1955 to 1971. Peter, who had bagged groceries as a teen, rejoined the company in 1968 on the fast track, moving up the corporate chain from Washington, D.C., to Houston, Phoenix, Tulsa and Toronto. Magowan went to Safeway's Oakland world headquarters in 1979 to oversee store operations in California, Nevada and Arizona. That same year, at the age of 38, he was elected a director of the corporation and then was named chairman and CEO. In March 1988, Magowan picked up the title of president as well.

Magowan and Safeway, like Vince Naimoli and Anchor Glass, came to national attention as a result of the corporate feeding frenzy of the 1980s . Magowan teamed with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in a 1986 leveraged buyout of Safeway, which took the company private to prevent a hostile takeover. It created a bonanza for shareholders and trauma for present and former employees, according to Institutional Investor. Forbes called it "The buyout that saved Safeway." Wall Street Journal reporter Susan Faludi saw it differently. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her story of the pain the buyout inflicted on Safeway employees.

Besides Magowan and Shorenstein, the final San Francisco group included: stockbroker Charles Schwab; Donald Fisher, CEO of The Gap clothing chain; KTVU-TV; weight-loss guru and Slim-Fast CEO Daniel Abraham; and nine others. Among those other investors were two men with indirect Tampa Bay ties. David Jenkins was the son of George Jenkins, founder of the Publix supermarket chain, which was headquartered 20 miles east of Tampa. And Harmon Burns, executive vice president of Franklin Resources, was part of a mutual funds management company that purchased St. Petersburg-based Templeton Funds Management in July 1992.

Oct. 14. Major League Baseball's 11-member Executive Council held a telephone meeting to further discuss "refining" the process of choosing between the Tampa Bay and San Francisco bids.

"It's a little complicated right now," Philadelphia Phillies owner Bill Giles told the Tampa Tribune. "I'm still trying to figure it out myself." Giles said the San Francisco bid amounted to an $83-million offer.

In San Francisco, the Examiner reported that the local investment group would put up $50-million in cash, seek to borrow $35-million from a bank and $10-million from Bob Lurie himself.

Oct. 15. The San Francisco group dropped plans to keep the $12.3-million expansion fee, bringing the real value of its offer to $95-million. On the other hand, the bid also called for Bob Lurie to participate in the group with a $10-million loan, similar to the one he had offered the Naimoli group.

Oct. 16. "One day you're elated because you're certain you have it," Rex Farrior Jr. told the Times, "and the very next day you're certain you don't. And then sometimes that happens twice a day."

Oct. 21. St. Petersburg Times reporters Tom Tobin and Jack Reed reported that during a meeting between Vince Naimoli and Wayne Huizenga in Chicago, the Marlins owner complained that he would be financially injured by a second team in Florida. Huizenga said he counted on fans from Tampa Bay and Orlando for financial support. Naimoli offered to do whatever it took to make the situation work. "How can I help you?" he asked Huizenga.

In New York, another extension was granted for San Francisco, plus some friendly advice from NL attorneys. "{The San Francisco group has} given us a proposal and we've told them it has to be altered," Bill White told the St. Petersburg Times.

Those alterations included increasing the bid to at least $100-million and three contingencies including: a requirement that the NL first reject the Tampa Bay contract; that the San Francisco group secure a $35-million loan on favorable terms; and addition time to study the Giants' financial records.

And in a related development, the Naimoli group learned that four "no" votes from NL team owners could kill relocation. And it didn't take a genius to spot four of those: Peter O'Malley of the Dodgers, Tom Werner of the San Diego Padres, Stan Cook of the Chicago Cubs and Jerry McMorris of the Colorado Rockies. Florida Marlins owner Wayne Huizenga promised publicly to vote "yes" but Tampa Bay's partisans assumed he would only do that if there were sufficient other votes to guarantee relocation would be quashed.

Oct. 28. Peter Magowan and his partners raised their bid to $100-million on advice from the National League.

Oct. 30. Sportscaster Al Keck reported the nightly Giants score on Tampa Bay's WTSP-TV. Actually, it was the score of a game between the Tokyo Giants and team of Major League all-stars touring Japan. "We're doing whatever we can to keep people informed," Keck told viewers.

END CHAPTER 25

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