The Extra 2% (5 page)

“I said, ‘I won’t shake hands, but let me introduce myself,’ ” Dodge chuckled. “Lurie said he was having trouble getting a stadium deal. I said, ‘Let’s talk. Who knows, maybe one day we’ll have a deal, and we’ll look back at this first meeting and laugh.’ ”

Lurie made his fortune in real estate before buying the Giants from Horace Stoneham in 1976 for $8 million. The Giants had suffered through lean years for much of the 1970s and ’80s, only to win the 1989 National League pennant and play in that season’s Bay Bridge World Series. Despite that brief success, the Giants’ home stadium remained a major albatross. Candlestick Park was a dump, a drab ballpark whose unique location on windy, bitingly cold Candlestick Point in south San Francisco made it a dreadful place for a baseball team to play.

The opportunity seemed too good not to explore. The Giants met the four criteria that St. Pete targeted in a team that might be receptive to relocation: a divided market, an unsatisfactory home park, a lack of support from local governments and citizens, and decreasing revenue.

By August 1992, negotiations had greatly intensified. All the major parties gathered at Bob Lurie’s office in San Francisco. With Morsani out of the picture, Tampa businessman Vince Naimoli was now heading the new St. Pete ownership group. After so many failed attempts to secure a team, this looked like the moment St.
Pete had been craving for decades. Problem was, nobody was saying anything. The two delegations eyed each other like wallflowers at an eighth-grade dance, unsure who would, or should, make the first move.

Dodge broke the ice. “Let’s do a deal,” he blurted.

Lurie looked around the room, eyeing Dodge, then Naimoli. “Let’s do it,” he finally replied.

After ninety minutes, the two sides reached an agreement in principle. The Naimoli group would buy the Giants for $111 million and move the team to St. Petersburg for the 1993 season. It took just an hour for Lurie and his attorneys to draft a memo stipulating that a deal had been reached. The parties filtered out, Dodge making a quick pit stop on his way out. A few seconds later, Lurie sidled up to an adjacent urinal. The two men exchanged knowing smiles.

A couple hours later, Dodge, Naimoli, and company arrived at San Francisco International Airport, then breathed a sigh of relief when they found no members of the press waiting for them. Despite the extreme measures taken to preserve secrecy, Dodge’s many attempts to recruit a team to St. Pete had put local media on high alert for the past half-decade. His suspicion turned out to be well founded. Word got out that a private plane transporting the St. Pete ownership group was on its way back from San Francisco and that there would be news. By the time the plane touched down at Tampa International, twenty media members were waiting—at 4:00
A.M
. Dodge didn’t comment as he strode through the throng. An hour later, though, he called a few key media contacts and told them there’d be a press conference that afternoon.

“I get a call at like five or six
A.M
.,” recalled Marc Topkin, national baseball writer for the
St. Petersburg Times
. “We had just moved into a new house, my family was away, so I was sleeping on an air mattress. I hear the phone ringing, I don’t know where the phone is because I plugged it in at the end of one of those eighteen-hour days when you don’t know what’s going on. So I hear the
phone ringing, and it’s Rick Dodge. I’m like, ‘Hello?’ And he says: ‘We just bought the fucking Giants!’ ”

When word got out that a deal had been reached, MLB’s reaction was a mix of anger and resignation. Commissioner Fay Vincent and most of the National League’s other owners hated the pending move but seemed prepared to let the deal go through. People in San Francisco weren’t nearly so accepting. San Francisco mayor Willie Brown lobbied Congress, demanding that MLB block the move; the league’s antitrust exemption allowed baseball owners to make any decisions they wanted—including blocking franchise moves—without the threat of being sued on antitrust grounds.

As the 1992 season wound down, the pending move hit Bay Area Giants fans hard.

“My most searing memory was the final day of the season,” recalled Mike Deeson, senior reporter for WTSP-TV in Tampa. “They had an a cappella group of women sing the anthem at Candlestick. There were so many die-hard Giants fans there, and they were just breaking down. Grown men had tears streaming down their faces.”

Neither San Francisco’s grief nor St. Pete’s jubilation would last long. Lurie was eager to sell after a referendum for a new San Francisco baseball stadium failed, and the Naimoli group was eager to buy the team and move it to Florida. But Major League Baseball, for all its saber-rattling, preferred to exhaust all local possibilities before voting on a franchise move. National League president Bill White came out opposed to the Giants’ relocation, prompting league owners to delay their vote until the Giants had exhausted all possible local ownership scenarios.

On November 10, 1992, National League owners voted 9–4 against the Giants’ sale to Naimoli and his partners. In their stead, a new San Francisco ownership group stepped up, led by Safeway grocery store maven Peter Magowan. The price was $100 million—or $11 million less than the Naimoli group had offered.

Naimoli and the St. Petersburg city attorney filed lawsuits against the city and county of San Francisco (for tortious interference)
and Major League Baseball. Florida’s attorney general also filed suit against MLB, challenging baseball’s precious antitrust exemption. As long as the league maintained that status it could thwart any attempt by a city to attract a team from another market. That MLB was now digging in its heels struck Dodge as the height of hypocrisy.

“What was so ironic was that you had the commissioner arguing that teams are not allowed to relocate,” Dodge said. “And of course Bud Selig had stolen a team from Seattle and brought it to Milwaukee. It made them look pretty bad.”

The case would eventually migrate to Capitol Hill, where a special committee was assembled to review MLB’s antitrust status. There, Dodge would absorb another shot of cruel irony, the kind that only Major League Baseball could deliver. Sitting on the committee was none other than Wisconsin senator Herb Kohl—the same Senator Kohl who’d been part of the ownership group handpicked by Major League Baseball to bid for a Tampa Bay expansion team, only to have the group balk at the asking price. You couldn’t make this up. To no one’s surprise in Florida, the committee took MLB’s side in the dispute.

Still, St. Pete pressed on with its legal challenges. The city convinced supporters to keep their spirits up, despite setback after setback. Slogans kept changing, but support lingered. “Rally ’Round the Stadium” had been the battle cry when the city broke ground on the Dome in 1986. “Join the Team” was the mantra behind St. Pete’s first expansion effort. When the deal for the Giants fell apart, the city approached the 22,000 fans who had made season-ticket deposits in the event that a team finally arrived. Most of those 22,000 kept their reservations. About 7,000 took their support a step further, pledging a total of $350,000 to cover legal expenses as St. Pete pushed back against MLB and its antitrust exemption. “Join the Fight,” the city implored.

In 1995, the fight appeared ready to pay off, as MLB made the surprise announcement that it would be expanding yet again. The St. Pete group knew that the pressure it exerted had forced the
league’s hand. Other cases had challenged the league’s antitrust exemption in the past, and Major League Baseball managed to keep the exemption intact each time. The more immediate concern was the discovery process that would have ensued had litigation proceeded further.

Major league teams, especially lower-revenue teams, have long claimed that turning a profit can be a momentous struggle. Those claims have helped drive public opinion for new stadium deals: the league claims that teams are losing money and that without a new, publicly funded stadium, those teams will have no choice but to move. Independent studies by
Forbes
have concluded that such claims are overstated, its investigators having produced annual team finance estimates and franchise values that counter the league’s claims. If an antitrust case were ever to go to court, the league would be forced to open its books, something it desperately strives to avoid. With multiple plaintiffs poised to bring those figures to light, granting an expansion team to St. Pete seemed the far easier solution, as it would prompt the plaintiffs to drop their cases.

Still, St. Pete was taking no chances. Launching a new campaign called “Bringing It Home,” the city upped its season-ticket reservation total to 31,000, while also winning commitments for all forty-eight luxury suites in the Dome. Now everyone just had to sit back and wait.

The franchise award presentations would take place at the Breakers, a luxury resort in Palm Beach, Florida. Dodge, Naimoli, and everyone watching and waiting in St. Pete cautiously hoped for victory at last. Prospective team owners had spent months plotting out projected attendance and merchandise sales and accounting for likely expenses, all while budgeting for MLB’s announced $110 million expansion fee. But the league had one more last-minute surprise in store: the expansion fee was now $130 million.

When Naimoli got the news, he was livid. On top of that $130 million, the two expansion teams would have to relinquish their rights to $5 million per year from baseball’s central fund for the first five years of their on-field existence, making the effective franchise
fee $155 million. The league also changed the terms of the already limited expansion draft, forcing the two expansion teams to choose from a particularly thin cast of fading veterans and nonprospects when stocking their rosters. For a brief moment, joining the ranks of Major League Baseball didn’t seem like all that great a deal.

Naimoli huddled with St. Pete representatives, before both sides swallowed hard and accepted baseball’s terms. Still, even after agreeing in principle to MLB’s heightened demands, no one was quite sure what would happen next.

“I remember sitting there with all the owners and the mayor,” said Dodge. “They have us come into the room, and still no one’s said anything. I hear someone yelling at me from across the room.”

It was Jerry Reinsdorf, the White Sox owner who would have taken his team to St. Pete seven years earlier if not for the clock-stopping tactics of Big Jim Thompson and the Illinois legislature.

Dodge looked up, still not sure what would happen. “He throws his arms around me, leans over, and says, ‘Ricky, this one’s for you.’ That’s when I knew.”

More than two decades of negotiating, lobbying, lawsuits, and heartbreak had finally ended. St. Petersburg’s team, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, joined the Arizona Diamondbacks as MLB’s two newest ball clubs. For the Devil Rays’ home opener three years later, the ball used for the ceremonial first pitch was passed from person to person, starting at old Al Lang Field, where the city had hosted so many thousands of minor league and spring training games, and finishing in the new Dome, where Naimoli stood waiting. When the ball arrived in the stadium, the sold-out crowd roared.

That was the last moment when Devil Rays fans would have reason to cheer for a long, long time.

The waiters and guests in linen togas were a nice touch. So were the dozens of staffers dressed as gladiators. Fig trees draped with lights dotted the property, a stunning, exclusive club on the Italian island of Sardinia. Scantily clad dancing girls entertained roving packs of wealthy middle-aged men, many of them able to sneak only occasional peeks with their wives cinched to their arms. The food? Unlimited caviar, mountains of shellfish, mouth-watering desserts. But for all of the night’s excess, one figure became the toast of this historic party. Positioned in the middle of an enormous spread was a giant ice sculpture of Michelangelo’s
David
. Thirsty? No problem. An endless supply of Stolichnaya vodka streamed from David’s meticulously crafted penis.

It was June 2001, and Tyco International chief executive officer Dennis Kozlowski spared no expense for his second wife Karen’s fortieth birthday party. The $2 million gala—disguised as a shareholder meeting to excuse his dipping into company funds—would become known as the Tyco Roman Orgy. Captured in all its gaudy
glory on a camcorder, the orgy would epitomize the overheated lifestyle many CEOs enjoyed during the stock market’s boom around the turn of the century. An exorbitant salary and unlimited perks weren’t enough to slake Kozlowski’s greed. To finance his $18 million New York apartment, $6,000 shower curtain, half the orgy tab, and a lot more, Kozlowski looted his own company with impunity. Four years after “the Vodka-Shooting Penis Seen Round the World,” a jury convicted Kozlowski and fellow Tyco executive Mark Swartz of swindling $600 million from the company’s coffers.