Managing the Impossible
Starting with nothing but the force of his entrepreneurial leadership, Omar Minaya took the orphans of baseball and made them winners -- a lesson in grit.
Baseball is the only business in America that -- by virtue of a Supreme Court decision -- is exempt from the antitrust laws. But even the Supreme Court can't exempt baseball from the rules that govern the rest of business. Each team faces the same inexorable challenges that other businesses face: the need to recruit and train superior personnel (team-building, literally), the imperative of developing differentiated strategies, the daily mission of instilling a corporate culture. Then there are budget realities. You don't have to tell Omar Minaya about those. When Minaya took over the Montreal Expos, he inherited an organization that had few resources and no hope. In the course of the previous year, the team had lost its TV contract; the owner had fled to Florida; and, to top it all, Major League Baseball had announced that the Expos had been chosen for contraction -- a polite way to say the team was going to be squeezed out of existence. It was like being named CEO of a company that was one step from the auction block. And, as is often true in business, when you start asking questions, things don't get better.
When Minaya inquired about the number of positions he had to fill in the Expos administrative ranks, what he discovered flabbergasted him. A fax from Expos administrative assistant Marcia Schnaar told the tale in stark terms: Minaya had precisely six employees -- and dozens and dozens of vacancies. His response, Minaya says, was, "What is this? A joke? This has gotta be a mistake." Only then did Minaya realize that he'd taken over a team that had been gutted, stripped of its infrastructure. His entire staff consisted of two administrative assistants, a media relations director, the head trainer, a minor league pitching coach, and the assistant farm system director.
Over the next month Minaya would go on to hire close to 100 new staffers: major- and minor-league coaches, minor-league managers, trainers and equipment men, farm-system administrators, scouts -- the works. It was, he recalls, "a complete -- and thorough -- makeover. Not by choice but by necessity."
And yet, six months later, against all odds, Minaya and the Expos surged to the top of the baseball world. To the shock of many who expected the woebegone team to roll over and play dead, Minaya's squad hit the infield running on opening day and didn't look back. And then, in midseason, the rookie general manager stunned the baseball world by acquiring a 20-game winner in a bold deal that no one expected from a team operating under a death sentence. Trades are the baseball equivalent of high-stakes negotiating, and this swap was Goldman Sachs-worthy; it catapulted Minaya to the fore of baseball's intimate fraternity of general managers, a club Minaya had long struggled to join. Suddenly, baseball's old guard took notice that Minaya was young, smart, and a hustler. He worked on four and five hours of sleep. He kept a cell phone glued to his ear and a carefully plotted agenda in his head. And he refused to accept the inevitable. To those who look to baseball for more than sport -- for life lessons -- Minaya's miracle is a case study in overcoming business adversity.
Like a motivated executive vice president always on the prowl for that elusive CEO job, Minaya had been training for this role most of his adult life. He'd interviewed for the GM slot with seven teams in seven cities over the previous three years -- but "always seemed to come in second." More than once he suspected he'd been interviewed merely for show, so that baseball, which had never had a Hispanic GM, could claim to be making progress on diversity.
At only 43 and senior assistant general manager of the Mets, Minaya was getting impatient, even frustrated. He knew there was talk that he had no administrative experience. What had especially galled him was a newspaper story "that followed me everywhere I ever interviewed for a job." The reporter had quoted an anonymous Mets executive as saying that while Minaya was a strong evaluator of talent, he lacked administrative skills. It was the "kiss of death" that had kept many other assistant GMs from reaching the highest rung -- and Minaya knew it. It was probably the reason he had lost some of the plum positions he'd sought: Seattle, Los Angeles, Anaheim. The first was a perpetual contender, the other two had rich corporate parents. But when the call finally came on February 8, 2002, it was not from Fox or Disney: "Mr. Minaya, would you hold for Commissioner Selig?"
Allan H. Selig, better known as "Bud," was calling to make a pitch on behalf of all 29 ownership groups in the game: "Omar, how'd you like to be general manager of the Montreal Expos?"
Montreal?
The Expos had averaged a catastrophic 95 losses per season for the previous four years. And their fans had abandoned them: Attendance had plummeted to 642,748 in 2001 -- the lowest in the majors. Plans for a new downtown baseball park -- a business and urban-planning strategy that had revitalized teams like Baltimore with its celebrated Camden Yards -- had been abandoned. It got so bad that you couldn't watch the team on television. The Expos not only didn't have a French-language TV contract, they didn't even have an English-language one. Then-owner Jeffrey Loria spent most of his brief tenure in Montreal trying to move the team elsewhere.
The nadir of this farce seemed to have been reached in the fall of 2001 when Major League Baseball -- led by Selig -- signaled its intention to "contract" at least two teams, one from each league. The two "small market" teams chosen for this dubious distinction: the Minnesota Twins and the Montreal Expos.
But a judge in Minnesota upset the works, signing an injunction that effectively put off contraction until at least 2003. So MLB had to go back to the drawing board, and what followed was bizarre -- even in the Byzantine annals of baseball. One of the game's most storied franchises, the Boston Red Sox, was on the market. After months of contentious bidding, the Sox were sold in December 2001 for a record $660 million to a group of bidders headed by John Henry. But Henry owned the Florida Marlins and MLB wouldn't sign off on the deal until he disposed of them. So he sold them -- for $158.5 million -- to none other than Jeffrey Loria, letting him bail out on the Expos. But who was going to buy a Montreal team that had fewer fans than Saddam Hussein? The other 29 MLB owners, that's who. They paid Loria $120 million and floated him a loan of $38.5 million to match the price he had paid for the Marlins. This valued the Expos, despite their slide toward oblivion, at more than twice what they were worth when Loria paid $12 million for his original 24% stake in the team two years earlier. Recapping the scoring, Henry had the Sox, Loria had the Marlins, and, well, Bud Selig had the Expos.
