In 1992, Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent was forced to resign because he hadn’t acted sufficiently hard-line in negotiations with the players’ union. At that time, George W. Bush ran the American League’s Texas Rangers. Dubya really, really, really wanted to replace Vincent as Commissioner, and he apparently lobbied his fellow owners mighty hard in the hope that they would choose him for what he obviously thought would be the coolest job in the world.
The owners negotiated among themselves to determine the best choice for the next Commissioner. Then they negotiated a while longer. And a while longer. And a while longer. After working on it for a year or so with no end in sight to the impasse, Bush finally gave in to the pressure he’d been undergoing from the Texas Republican party and threw his hat into the ring as a candidate against Governor Ann Richards in the 1994 election.
George W. Bush probably would have been a pretty good Commissioner. He opposed (and may even have voted against) the wildcard, doesn’t particularly like the designated hitter, and was in general a savvy baseball owner. Had he been made Commissioner, it’s highly unlikely that he and his minions would be occupying the White House today. Even better, it would have kept the horrid Bud Selig out of the Commissioner’s office, which would have been a tremendous boon for baseball.
Bush’s baseball ownership history is instructive. After Poppy was elected President, Dubya used his and his father’s Yale connections to put together a syndicate (mainly from Cincinnati and New York) that bought the Rangers from family friend and fellow Texas oilman Eddie Chiles for $89 million in 1989. At that time, the Commissioner was Peter Ueberroth, architect of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, mastermind of the late-1980s baseball owner collusion scheme, and a fellow Yalie. Bush only put up $500,000 himself, and even that relatively small stake was borrowed from a Texas bank, perhaps using as collateral his proceeds from ditching his shares of Harken Energy a bit earlier. Bush became the club’s managing general partner, which meant that he was the public face of the Rangers, the one who attended baseball meetings and cast votes in the decisions of Major League Baseball. For that, he paid himself a nice little $200,000 annual salary. Dubya put in another $100,000 the next year, and added $6302 to his investment in 1992. He was instrumental in pressing for a new publicly-financed stadium for the team; The Ballpark in Arlington was built in time for Opening Day in 1994.
After he upset Richards to take the governorship in 1994, Bush resigned his post as the managing general partner of the Rangers, but retained control of his equity stake in the team. His $606,302 investment had gotten him 1.8% of the club’s stock, but Bush also had a side deal in which he would gain an additional 10% of the stock (plus accumulated interest) if the Rangers were sold. Which is what happened in 1998, while Dubya was preparing for his gubernatorial reelection. The buyer was Dallas billionaire Tom Hicks, head of media oligarch Clear Channel Communications and heavy contributor to Bush-related PACs. The price paid by Hicks was $250 million, and the net profit to George W. Bush (enhanced by a subsidy enacted by the Texas legislature at the urging of the Governor) was a tidy $14.9 million. Just another example of how bidness happens in the world of Texas oil, I guess.
Sadly, we’ll never know how different things might have been under Commissioner Bush ... would that the baseball owners had cottoned to him back in 1993.
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Posted by N in Seattle on 01/08 at 10:42 AM
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