Change Up by Buck Martinez

Author:Buck Martinez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2016-03-22T16:00:00+00:00

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HOW PAT GILLICK BUILT THE BLUE JAYS

When Pat Gillick accepted the job to become the Toronto Blue Jays’ general manager in 1978, he had a clear vision of how he wanted to build the franchise: the Dodgers Way.

Long before Gillick began his Hall of Fame career as a baseball executive, he was a player chasing a dream like the rest of us. He was born into a baseball family, the son of minor-league pitcher Larry Gillick and actress Thelma Daniels. Gillick grew up in the Los Angeles area and followed his father into the game. He became a talented southpaw pitcher and earned a spot on the team at the University of Southern California, which won the College World Series in 1958.

It was the same year that Walter O’Malley, Brooklyn’s biggest villain and baseball’s most forward-thinking profit seeker, moved his storied franchise to the West Coast. Los Angeles had become the second-largest metropolis in the United States. O’Malley, the Dodgers’ owner, saw a lucrative business opportunity in moving his famed Boys of Summer from the sacred but outdated Ebbets Field to a giant parcel of open land next to the converging freeways of L.A.

O’Malley didn’t see only expanded profits at the gate, he also sought the potential gold mine that was broadcast television at a time when most major-league owners were reluctant to embrace the medium. The move left a giant scar in Brooklyn, while it reminded the romantics that baseball was, above all else, an entertainment business. Loyalty would always be overshadowed by dollar signs.

But prescient as he might have been in making his team a cash cow, O’Malley was much less knowledgeable about how to build a winner on the field. That was Branch Rickey’s area of expertise.

From the mid-1920s through the early ’40s, the Dodgers were owned by a group made up of the heirs of former owners Charles Ebbets and Edward McKeever. The two factions each owned half of the team and couldn’t agree on anything, so to keep the franchise from falling into total chaos, a tiebreaker vote was added to the board of directors: George McLaughlin, president of the team’s primary lender, the Brooklyn Trust Company. In 1938 McLaughlin brought former Cincinnati Reds executive Larry MacPhail to Brooklyn, and as president and general manager, he set the Dodgers’ financial house in order and overhauled their lineup. In 1941 they won their first pennant in over 20 years.

The following year, MacPhail departed to accept a commission in the U.S. Army, and his on-again, off-again friend Branch Rickey took his place. The Dodgers needed new legal counsel, so at McLaughlin’s recommendation, Rickey hired O’Malley, then a New York bankruptcy lawyer. After the 1944 season 25 percent of the Dodgers’ stock was sold to four people: O’Malley, Rickey, John L. Smith (president of the Brooklyn-based Charles Pfizer chemical company) and Andrew Schmitz, who quickly sold his shares to the other three. Within less than a year, the trio had also bought out the Ebbets heirs, giving them overwhelming control over the franchise.

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