The Emperor Has No Clothes, part 2
When John Harrington returned to the Red Sox front office in
January 1981, the Sox were jointly controlled by three general
partners: Jean Yawkey, Haywood Sullivan and Buddy LeRoux. Since
any two of the general partners could combine to impose their
will on the third, the situation was inherently unstable.
Out of public view, Red Sox ownership was bitterly divided.
Yawkey and Sullivan wanted to run the club as Tom Yawkey had,
fielding the best possible lineup regardless of cost. Buddy
LeRoux and Rodgers Badgett, the largest limited partner, had
other ideas.
Badgett wrote Mrs. Yawkey a pointed memo insisting that
''the return or yield on investment, tax shelter and
other more tangible benefits of our investment should be accorded
by far the greatest weight” in Sox business decisions. An
indignant Yawkey responded that her objective for the Sox had
always been clear: “namely, to produce a
championship-caliber baseball team using all resources
available."
Since Yawkey and Sullivan could outvote LeRoux, and Badgett had
no vote, the dissenters appeared stymied. LeRoux secretly
explored the possibility of buying the Cleveland Indians and
moving them to Tampa. LeRoux and Badgett then negotiated to sell
their interests to communications magnate David Mugar and his
partner Carl Yastrzemski. Upon learning of these negotiations,
Yawkey and Sullivan immediately claimed that the partnership
agreement entitled them to buy LeRoux’s interest for
themselves. They pressured Albert Curran, the Sox general counsel
and a LeRoux ally, to resign his position. Curran did, but
immediately closeted himself with LeRoux and Badgett to plot
their next move. What followed was one of the ugliest incidents
in Boston sports history.
June 6, 1983 was Tony Conigliaro Night at Fenway Park. Conigliaro
was Boston’s tragic hero. The youngest man ever to hit 100
home runs, Conigliaro (a hometown boy born in Revere and raised
in Lynn) sustained a horrendous beaning in August 1967. The
incident virtually ended his career, as lingering vision problems
stalled several attempted comebacks, but Conigliaro remained a
huge local favorite. Early in 1982 he auditioned for a spot in
the Sox TV booth. Two days later he suffered a massive heart
attack and lapsed into a coma. Now Conigliaro lay bedridden in a
nearby hospital, his insurance exhausted. As all New England
watched, Conigliaro’s friends and admirers gathered at
Fenway to celebrate the 1967 “Impossible Dream”
season -- and to help keep Tony alive.
Buddy LeRoux shattered the mood. At a hastily arranged press
conference before a roomful of astonished reporters and former
players, he announced that he had taken control of the Sox from
Sullivan and Jean Yawkey. LeRoux explained that he, Badgett and
Curran, who collectively owned 16 of the 30 limited partnership
units, had voted to reorganize the partnership with LeRoux as
managing general partner. For his first official act, LeRoux
fired Haywood Sullivan as general manager, replacing him with
Dick O’Connell. His audience gaped.
LeRoux spent half an hour explaining his plans for the team. When
he was through, and before the media could catch its collective
breath, publicity director Dick Bresciani announced another press
conference. In came Sullivan, Harrington and their attorneys.
Denouncing LeRoux’s actions as an illegal coup, they
insisted that the Sullivan/Yawkey faction alone spoke for the
Sox. And Tony Conigliaro lay in his hospital bed, nearly
forgotten amidst the chaos.
As the battle for control of the Sox headed to court, AL
president Lee MacPhail announced that until the litigation was
resolved, the league would continue to recognize the authority of
the Sullivan-Yawkey faction. Manager Ralph Houk expected to be
fired if LeRoux won control. Caught in the middle, the players
didn’t know what to think, but the distractions took their
toll. The Sox, who had been leading the division with a 28-22
record when LeRoux made his announcement, went 50-62 over the
rest of the season to finish sixth, with their first losing
record in 17 years.
The Sox had become the laughingstock of baseball for the first
time since the Harry Frazee era. With two “owners”
and two “general managers,” the club was paralyzed.
Both sides pressed for an immediate trial.
At that trial, John Harrington was the star witness. His
overlapping roles as vice president of Yawkey Associates, vice
president of the JRY (Jean R. Yawkey) Corp., trustee of the Jean
R. Yawkey Trust and player relations consultant to the Red Sox
had allowed Harrington to participate in all the infighting. Now,
testifying for Sullivan and Yawkey, he walked the court through
the Sox ownership dispute. As Harrington testified about the
correspondence between the feuding parties, the effect a
LeRoux/Badgett victory would have on the Sox became frighteningly
apparent.
Badgett made clear that to him, profits would always be more
important than pennants. "When each player's contract
comes up for renegotiation, it would seem that the general
partners should be well aware that under an overall, long-range,
plan there is a price beyond which the club cannot go under any
circumstances.” Yawkey responded that “producing a
first-class product, a competitive, championship-caliber baseball
team, managed properly, will result in profits to all . . . Cash
distributions, the investments for the future, the won-loss
record, the fan attendance, the club standing, can hardly be
viewed by anyone familiar with the baseball industry as
disappointing operating results.”
Sox fans cheered Mrs. Yawkey’s sentiment. But some were
troubled when Harrington testified that he, not LeRoux, had first
contacted David Mugar about investing in the Sox – and more
eyebrows raised when Mugar contradicted a key part of
Harrington’s testimony.
According to Harrington, he warned Mugar early during his
negotiations with LeRoux that he would never acquire any part of
the Sox. If Mugar made an offer for LeRoux’s shares, he
told Mugar, Sullivan and Yawkey would exercise their right to buy
the stock themselves.
Mugar unequivocally denied having such a conversation with
Harrington, and his story rings truer. A warning from Harrington
would have alerted Mugar that his negotiations with LeRoux were a
waste of time, since the talks would only set the price Sullivan
and Yawkey would pay for LeRoux’s stock. Why would a
businessman continue to negotiate under those circumstances?
But the court didn’t have to address this conflict to
resolve the dispute. Sullivan and Yawkey prevailed on a
straightforward application of partnership law: limited partners,
such as Badgett and Curran, had no right to interfere with
management of the Red Sox partnership, by majority vote or
otherwise.
In December 1985, Badgett, Curran and LeRoux sold their 16
limited partnership units for $17 million. Jean Yawkey and three
other partners bought ten of the shares, with the Red Sox
repurchasing the other six.
Two years later LeRoux sold his general partnership to Jean
Yawkey for $7 million -- a sale which gave Mrs. Yawkey effective
control of the Sox, with two votes to Haywood Sullivan’s
one. If the Yawkey/Sullivan/LeRoux troika had been inherently
unstable; the new arrangement potentially heralded a one-woman
dictatorship
Sure enough, the Yawkey-Sullivan alliance soon deteriorated as
Yawkey outvoted her GM on all disputes. In the January 27, 1991
Boston Globe, an anonymous insider fingered Harrington as
the source of the problems. "Nobody really knows what
happened between Mrs. Yawkey and Sullivan," said the source.
"When Harrington showed up, that's when things got worse
between the two sides.”
Jean Yawkey died on February 26, 1992. She and her husband had
owned the Sox for fifty-nine years. But her JRY Corporation still
owned two of the three general partnership units -- and the JRY
corporation was controlled by one John Harrington. The era of
Harrington’s unaccountable authority had begun.
Copyright © 1999 Doug Pappas. All rights
reserved.
Originally published in the May 1999 issue of Boston
Baseball.
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