Managing the Impossible

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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.

Suddenly thrust into the awkward position of having to operate a franchise he wanted to shut down, Selig called Minaya. He didn't have many incentives to offer the prospective GM: no long-term contract, no golden parachute. The best he could do was a one-year deal. After all, there was no telling where the team would be in 2003 -- or even if there would be a team. But for a single season in the sun, Omar Minaya could be a major-league general manager -- if he was willing to take the job on those terms. Selig gave him some time to think about it.

Minaya didn't take long to get back to Selig: "I promise you I won't make you look bad for giving me this opportunity."

If Selig sounded incredulous -- "Omar, are you sure you want to do this?" -- it was because of the speed of Minaya's decision and perhaps because he knew things Minaya didn't. But Minaya would learn soon enough.

It turned out that when Loria fled Montreal, he had invoked Napoleon's scorched earth policy, taking pretty much everything that wasn't nailed down. Minaya had no computers, no scouting reports, few employees -- and 72 hours before training camp was scheduled to open in Florida. He was faced with "thirtysomething contracts to do -- and with no one to help me out." The pressure, Minaya remembers, was "unbelievable, especially knowing that CNN, CBS, Fox, and all the other networks would be there with their cameras to watch this fiasco." He mimics a TV reporter: "Oh, let's go see. This is going to be a joke."

But it was now that Minaya's 20 years of training began to pay off. Working out of a small space in the umpires' offices of Major League Baseball's Manhattan headquarters, he began speed-dialing his many contacts, looking for leads and references. In retrospect, the most important call he made was to Tony Siegle.

At 61, Siegle was a baseball lifer. Starting out as the scoreboard operator at the old Houston Astrodome, he had had the kind of career that makes real estate agents happy, serving as assistant general manager of team after team across the country. But where Minaya was known for player evaluation and development, Siegle was a master of baseball administration. He was the alter Omar, reveling in the haggling and the arcane rules. While Minaya had been bent out of shape by the newspaper story that questioned his management experience, he recognized that there was some truth to it. And unlike business leaders who refuse to admit their weaknesses, he understood what he had to do. "Tony is everything I'm not -- and just what I need," says Minaya. "When Tony said yes to the offer to be my No. 2, I knew I had a big part of my problem solved."

One down, and, oh, about another 100 or so to go. Minaya was grappling with the challenge that every turnaround CEO faces, the art of prioritizing: "I'd go to sleep at midnight, wake up at 4, take care of what had to be done at the moment. I'd just let the phone ring." It got so bad, he says, that his wireless retrieval service couldn't handle the backlog of voice mails. At the end of each day, at 8 or 9 in the evening, Minaya and Siegle would "review what we'd accomplished, decide what we had to accomplish the next day, and prioritize all over again."

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