Gillick's True Nature Shines Through Bob's Backstop for May 3, 2005

The city of Toronto has an inferiority complex that puts Baltimore’s to shame. Montreal is the cosmopolitan city, the European Capital of North America. The city of cobblestone streets, horse-drawn carriages, and fine cuisine. Toronto is the city that boasts the third-largest Chinatown in the world, the place that stands in for one northern U.S. city after another in second-rate Hollywood productions. Clean, boring, American.

 Labatt’s was once headquartered in Toronto, and appropriately so in the minds of many Canadians, for Labatt’s was to Molson’s what Miller High Life is to Budweiser. When the Montreal Expos came into being, it was hometown Molson’s who assumed the beer sponsorship and part ownership in the club. Molson’s was a driving force behind the Olympic movement, as they had been in Montreal hosting Expo ’67. (The name of the World’s Fair was no accident, by the way.) The subsequent need of a new stadium that would later house Les Expos was part of the master plan – a plan that would enable the Expos to gain a stranglehold over baseball in Canada, and all the beer commercials that followed on TV as well as parched fans in the stands.

 When the Toronto franchise was established, however, Labatt’s entered the fray as the majority owners of the club. Although early returns were not promising, Labatt’s saw a chink in Molson’s armor. The state-of-the-art stadium the Expos were now calling home turned out to be anything but. The roof that was key to the project wasn’t in place, and when it was finally put in play, it didn’t work. Meanwhile, Montreal itself was awash in a sea of red ink. The Games had been a huge money drain on the municipality and the community, a huge gamble that did not pay off. Jobs began to disappear, and the real estate market crashed as speculators who had hoped for a new Montreal found themselves turning over their properties to the banks, who couldn’t resell them. Unemployment soared.

 Labatt’s backed the fledgling Toronto franchise to the hilt. Money was spent on scouting and player development. A bright young man, Pat Gillick, was eventually put in charge, and the Blue Jays began to win. For a few years, they were often known as the “Blew Jays” and their GM as “Stand Pat”, as the team parlayed division titles into playoff losses, and became known as a conservative outfit who didn’t make a lot of deals down the stretch.

 That changed at the turn of the nineties, however. The Jays began play in a huge new edifice, SkyDome. No one had ever seen anything like it, nor would they likely to again. The government of Toronto and Labatt’s put their forces together to create a hotel/entertainment/baseball complex that would not only out-Astro the Astrodome, but make the downtown triangle of the CNN Tower, the SkyDome, and the Canadian Exposition shell on the lake a Mecca for tourists from all over Canada, and the world.

 The Blue Jays had to have a team worthy of such a Xanadu, and so they began to no longer Stand Pat, but to trade away young talent at every deadline, or assume contracts other teams no longer wanted. The extra pushes helped the Jays to finally break through and win back-to-back World Championships.

 The Expos were no slouch during this time, but they just could not stand before the onslaught of SkyDome and the nearly four million fans that flocked to experience it, and the Blue Jays, each season. It appeared that in the battle for the baseball hearts and minds of Canada, the Expos were coming in a gallant but distant second.

 So all was well in Pat’s world.

 Well, not quite.

 The Blue Jays began to get old in the mid-90’s. Some players traded for left for Free Agency and fatter American paychecks with a better exchange rate and less taxes. Robbie Alomar, one of the team’s biggest stars and prima donnas, decided he was bored and didn’t want to play in Toronto any more, basically laying down and quitting on the team his last season there.

 And Pat? Well, Pat had seen the writing on the wall. He had loved having the bottomless pockets of the pennant-hungry Labatt organization backing him up, but many factors, including the massive debt load of SkyDome, bedeviled the company. The continuing depression of the Canadian dollar, and increased taxes on liquor needed to support the health system, had already sunk Moosehead, the nation’s number three brewer. Now Labatt’s was faced with a similar dilemma. They sold the company to Interbrew, a huge Dutch conglomerate.

 One of the first things the Interbrew folks had done was to sit down with Pat Gillick. They had examined his organization, found it fat, satisfied, full of Gillick yes-men. They told him he would have to pare his staff down, let go some of his lap dogs. The Blue Jays would no longer have one of the largest payrolls in the majors, because they weren’t making any money. And, unlike Labatt’s, making money was what Interbrew was all about, not civic pride, or beating out Montreal.

 So, Pat got out. He said he was tired, and wanted to retire. So he left, and the press and fans focused not on what he had left behind, but instead on what a terrific GM he had been.

 But Pat wouldn’t stay “retired” very long. He just had to wait until he found his next Labatt’s…and he did, in the person on one Peter G. Angelos, the owner of the Baltimore Orioles, a man that had the Yankees on his mind.

 Many fans look back at Gillick’s time with the club as their chance at the ring, that Angelos unfairly ran off Gillick and Davey Johnson with his ham-handed interference. Still, it’s common knowledge that Gillick and Johnson together ridiculed the team owner in the Orioles’ offices, which is something most of us would not tolerate in an employee, no matter how talented. There was established an “us versus them” mentality between Gillick’s staff and the owner who signed the checks. Gillick virtually ran Frank Robinson right out of the front office, stonewalling him and giving him nothing to do.

 Then, there was the Mid-Season Assessment of 1996. The team was foundering a couple of games below .500 at the break, and Gillick had decided to dump a couple of the team’s players, said to be Bobby Bonilla and David Wells. Interestingly enough, however, the players most frequently rumored to be the return for these two were second-level prospects! Since the Orioles didn’t need to dump salaries (they were selling out nearly every game), why was Gillick contemplating this move?

 Davey Johnson didn’t get along with either player, especially Bonilla. While I would agree that a manager should have players he can work with, there are many cases of players and managers co-existing on winning clubs that couldn’t stand each other. Still, for whatever reason, the deals were on the verge of being made, when owner Angelos pulled the plug, stating that they weren’t out of the race and he wasn’t going to throw away the team’s chances for some prospects that might never pan out, as well as to let down the fans that had bought thousands of tickets expecting a team to compete for the playoffs.

 Gillick, being the good soldier he was, took his case to the press, letting them know what had happened. Amazingly enough, though the Orioles eventually did make the playoffs and won the first round, Gillick largely dodged criticism, because Angelos had interfered, and Gillick was, well, he was Pat Gillick, Architect of Two World Champions.

 Gillick did reload again the next season, and the addition of Jimmy Key, et al, did enable the Orioles to take the division, though not without considerable drama on an ongoing basis. Davey Johnson decided to ignore his boss’s ideas of what was acceptable working hours, and also picked a fight with the team prima donna, the same Robbie Alomar that had been a slacker his last season with the Blue Jays. (Alomar would not quit on the Orioles this season, however. He waited until the last year of his contract to totally disrespect new manager Ray Miller and dog it for most of the year.)

 We all know what happened with Davey, but that’s another story. Gillick had another year on his contract. For whatever reason, he ignored the same age issues that had led to the downfall of his Toronto clubs, and reloaded the Orioles for 1998 with players way past their primes like Doug Drabek and Joe Carter. Basically, it appeared Gillick was phoning in his last season.

 The Orioles had continued their miserable record in farm development under Gillick, so the club was left with nothing in the hopper upon his leaving. Incredibly, some turned this back onto Angelos, pointing out the 1996 trade embargo instilled by the owner, ignoring the miserable return on the two stars that would have been traded. Once again, Teflon Pat Gillick’s reputation remained not only unsullied, but enhanced, though he had left one club at the first sign of not getting his way, and left the second in total collapse with his Jurassic Park “retooling” of 1998. He continued his undercutting of his previous employer as he allegedly informed Dan O’Dowd of the “Angelos & Sons” braintrust behind the Orioles as O’Dowd was about to interview for the GM position a couple of years later. Angelos was furious when O’Dowd brought it up at their meal meeting, presumably because he knew where the “concern” had come from. (Of course, this turned out to be Gillick doing Angelos and O’s fans everywhere a big favor.)

 Again, Gillick “retired.” Actually, it appears he was just waiting for the next fat wallet, which he thought he found in Seattle. Again, baseball was abuzz. Gillick was back in the game! He took the Orioles for Aaron Sele, and mocked the club in public as he did so. (Trouble is, Sele was never more than so-so, but everyone just sort of forgot that. Once again, Pat had gotten the best of his former boss.)

 So what is Gillick’s legacy in Seattle? Not what he intended, but very much in line with the man’s real personality. Gillick didn’t really retire in 2004, as he claimed. He actually expected to still run things, along with Mariners President Howard Lincoln. That’s why he championed the hire of Bill Bavasi as the team’s new GM. Bavasi was a journeyman pick who would be a yes-man and take the blame if things didn’t go well, but Gillick would still get credit if things went swimmingly. (See: Hart, John, and Fuson, Grady,)

 So what was Gillick’s genius plan for the M’s, who had come close several times but was partially stymied by the owners’ reluctance to part with the money for post-season extra pieces? He was going to build with offense and grit, picking up team leader types who would help hard-nose the team back to contention.

 The first piece of the puzzle? Raul Ibanez, who not only had become a decent performer with the Royals, but who had the added attraction of being a player that had previously been with the M’s but was not a favorite of departed manager Lou Piniella, with whom Gillick did not get along.

 He wanted Ibanez so badly that they overpaid and overextended the deal, and forfeited their first round draft pick in the doing. Not that they cared, because Gillick had decided that the draft was a waste. It certainly had been for the M’s. No draft conducted by Gillick and Frank Mattox produced anything stellar. It seemed they actually tried to not draft players. In the year 2000, they didn’t have a draft pick until the fourth round. They seemed to be depending on their lead in international scouting, which had narrowed, and Japanese free agents, who had most recently gone to the Padres, White Sox, Mets, and Yankees. When they did draft players, they were mostly “tools” projects and high school pitchers.

 They have managed to fill out the back of their rotation and their bench with the result of their efforts, but no impact players of note have come through the system in the Gillick years. So, the Grit Approach was the one of choice for 2004. This would take the club back to the top. Spunk. A little hitting. Grit. Determination. A few old fogeys.

 They dumped Mike Cameron, a solid player who wanted to stay in Seattle. They moved Randy Winn to center, where he did his best Bernie Williams imitation. Ibanez, who was a bad fielder, replaced Winn in left. Carlos Guillen, who had an MVP-type year for Detroit, was dumped for…Rich Aurilia. Scott Spiezio manned third base.

 On top of those bad moves, the pieces remaining in place went south, with the exception of Ichiro. Bret Boone saw his coach turn into a pumpkin. John Olerud couldn’t hit any more. Jamie Moyer struggled unexpectedly, and Ben Davis struggled more expectedly.

 So the team went deep into the tank. The front office façade crumbled like the house of cards it resembled. It was just like it had been in the Warehouse years before…decisions were made, rescinded, and made again. No one knew for sure what was going to happen in any particular instance, but everyone had an opinion. Gillick engineered a contract extension early on for Bob Melvin, his handpicked choice for manager (who had been one of the choices passed up by the Orioles upon Johnson’s firing.)

 But Howard Lincoln, seeing which way the paint was drying, jumped ship on Gillick, siding with Bill Bavasi, after the ownership took stock of the team Gillick had wrought. Bavasi said all the right things in public. He, unlike Gillick, seems to be a nice guy with nothing bad to say. Maybe when he sits down in his office behind closed doors, but not till then. He spent the off-season this year purging the front office of the remainders of the Gillick machine.

 Pat Gillick is an arrogant man. He’s coasted on some accomplishments of note, while managing to gloss over years of insubordination, back-stabbing, and making one look good at the expense of others. If there were another revival of How to Succeed in Business (Without Really Trying), he’s your boy.

 The bottom line is, he’s no better or worse than any number of GMs that float around baseball from one job to another. He’s shown a total contempt for the drafting process, ignored defense as a necessary part of a player’s skill set, hasn’t shown anything exceptional in player procurement, has constantly ignored age/performance issues, and sets up little kingdoms and toadies to help prop himself up, as well…and he’s not above leaking material to the press or even giving out a quote or two about how tight-fisted you are, Mister Owner. So that’s what you get when you hire Pat Gillick.

 Last time we looked, Pat was stumping hard for the Washington job, for which they thankfully did not choose him. (Am I the only one who would notice that by taking the Washington job, Gillick would be in a position to “get” the Orioles and Angelos again? Anyone like to place a bet as to how long it would take Gillick to put in a call to Cal Ripken?) Must have been tough on him to get beaten out by Jim Bowden. But, his name is coming up in other places…in Arizona, where he’s buddies with Jeff Moorad. I don’t know about that, though…not enough money.

 I think Pat stays “retired” again until the Nats have an owner. Then, again, Pat might have what he always wants…the spotlight…a place where it’s virtually impossible to look bad…some deep pockets…and a chance to put down someone he doesn’t get along with.

 Be careful what you ask for, Nationals…you might just get it!

It will be interesting to see what Pat Gillick’s final legacy will be. Walter Matthau closed out the film A Face in the Crowd by saying, “In the end, we always find them out.” I’m not so sure this time. I’m not so sure.