Can the Philadelphia Phillies build a winning team the old-fashioned way? David Montgomery is betting the franchise on it.
By Samuel Hughes | Photography by Bill Cramer
Sidebar | Field of Dreams: If They Build it, Will They Win?
The game is on the line, and Curt Schilling is tying his shoes. Fidgets spread through Veterans Stadium. Though the Phillies are ahead 3-2 in the top of the sixth, their barrelchested ace has had a rare spell of wildness, giving up a walk, a single and another walk to load the bases with Los Angeles Dodgers. There are no outs. The count is 3-0 to Dodger catcher Todd Hundley as Schilling kneels on the mound to slow the game’s suddenly pounding pulse.
From my seat high in the 700 level, I am imagining David Montgomery C’68 WG’70, the Phils’ president and CEO, watching intently from his seat by the telephone in the executive box. Having caught a game there with him a few nights before, I know he’s a pretty even-keeled guy, but I can’t help projecting here, because if I were him I’d be chewing on the phone cord. It’s only the first week in May, and his team is only one game below .500, but they’ve lost four in a row, and after 11 losing seasons in the past 12 years, their once-robust fan base is looking downright anorexic. The Phils are still reeling from the announcement that their new closer, Jeff Brantley, who had pitched brilliantly in the opening weeks, is likely to miss the rest of the season with a shoulder injury, and every other pitcher not named Curt Schilling has a big, invisible question mark on the back of his uniform. And in area bars and sports pages, the Phillies’ management has been savaged for not signing at least one high-priced, free-agent pitcher.
Like, say, Kevin Brown, who happens to be pitching for the Dodgers this afternoon. His evil slider helped the Florida Marlins win the World Championship in 1997 and the San Diego Padres win the National League pennant in 1998, and when his contract with the Padres expired over the winter, normally steely-eyed executives fell all over themselves trying to win his favor. Eventually, he signed a seven-year contract worth $105 million with the Dodgers, who are now owned by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Group. The Phillies are owned by a group of investors whose pockets have bottoms, and it is fair to assume that if the team drops this one, more than one sportswriter and more than a few fans will again compare their relatively low major-league payroll ($26-$31 million, depending on your accounting method) to that of the Dodgers (somewhere around $79 million) and draw the seemingly obvious conclusion that the Phillies are too cheap or poor or staid to win.
But when Schilling stands up and peers in for the sign from catcher Mike Lieberthal, something happens. The restless crowd of 34,608–roughly twice the year’s average, thanks largely to today’s marquee pitching matchup–begins to cheer: some yells and rhythmic clapping at first, then a roar as Schilling throws a strike, then louder clapping and louder roars as he pours it on, firing strikes now, and punches out first Hundley on a split-finger fastball and then Todd Hollandsworth on a 93-mile-an-hour heater. And when he gets Adrian Beltre on a hard grounder to second-baseman Marlon Anderson, the stadium explodes. Even my six-year-old son, absorbed in his free Phillie Phanatic beanie baby, claps and yells. The momentum swings back to the red pinstripes. The Phils go on to win 12-3. The large crowd leaves happy. Kevin Brown does not.
So, I ask Montgomery later: What was going through your mind then? I mean, that was a crucial moment, right? Kind of a must-win game, with Brantley out and the four losses and the big pitching matchup and all? Right?
There’s an uncomfortable pause on the other end of the line. He doesn’t want to ruin my story, but he doesn’t really want to be drawn into my hyperventilating, either. “The reality is that those moments crop up all season long,” he says finally. “I don’t think it’s right or proper for me to overreact to any one game. These moments come and go, and I believe that the organization clearly lives for another day–whether Schill won that one or didn’t win it.”
Of course, he’s right. At that point, they still had 138 games to go–this season. And though they would go on a tear for the next week and a half, vaulting over the Mets into second place in the National League East before slipping back to third by the end of May, there would be any number of games in that period that also had that must-win feel–but were, in fact, just little upticks and downticks on the long graph of the season.
I should know this. I’ve been through it all before, for more years than I care to admit. But unlike Montgomery–who has been a fan for as long as I’ve been alive, who has worked for the Phillies for almost three decades now and who has become what the pros call a “good baseball man” as well as a good businessman–I still react viscerally to these things.
I am cautiously bullish on the team’s long-term potential, though, an outlook that is somewhat at odds with many of my fellow fans. Montgomery has been getting a lot of calls lately from, shall we say, emotional shareholders–fans, sportswriters, even the outspoken Schilling–to buy (free agents) and sell (the franchise) and otherwise go for a quick killing. One can hardly blame them for their impatience. For most of the past 15 years, they’ve had a very poor return on their psychic investment, and the more skittish have gotten out of the market altogether–the Phils’ season-ticket base is down more than 9,000 from the post-pennant high of 1994.
But while they don’t really want to hear about long-term strategies, there are plenty of people in the densely populated Philadelphia area who would love to buy what the Phillies would also love to sell: a winning team. Barring key injuries–and the one to Brantley could be one of those–that does not seem far off. As I write this, the Phils’ starting lineup has been one of the most potent in the majors, their bench remarkably productive, their glove-work often artful, and the pitching staff–well, it’s still pretty much Question Mark and the Mysterians, except when Schilling and Paul Byrd (plucked off the Atlanta waiver-wire last summer) are on the mound. They’re also a fun team to watch, with some exciting young players–third-baseman Scott Rolen, catcher Mike Lieberthal, right-fielder Bobby Abreu and center-fielder Doug Glanville EAS’93, to name a few–and a certain esprit de corps. Their farm system has been revitalized, though it’s still some years away from providing them with a steady stream of stars. Nobody expects them to win their division this year unless the Atlanta Braves ($73-million payroll, great farm system) suddenly defect to Cuba, and even a wild-card berth has to be considered a long shot. But they’re a team worth following again–if you’ve got the, um, Right Stuff.
Montgomery has been with the Phillies for 28 years–starting as a member of the sales department and gradually working his way up into the executive offices. He has only been in charge of the franchise for two years, though, and given its sorry state when he took over–the Phils had the worst record in baseball and one of the worst farm systems in the majors–one should really judge him by the team’s angle of ascent or descent. Right now, the Phillies appear to be on the ascendant. Whether the angle is dramatic enough to win back their hard-bitten fans is another question.
“I really believe they are turning things around,” says Frank Dolson C’54, longtime sports columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer and now a scout for the New York Yankees [“Alumni Profiles,” May/June]. “I don’t know if they’re going to make the playoffs–it would be a long shot, even though at this moment they’re right in the mix. It’s questionable whether they’ve got the pitching. But the fact is, they’re a legitimate, competitive ball club now, which is something they haven’t been for a while. Give Dave the credit for it. He’s the guy who would take the heat if they were still lousy.”
Well, actually, he’s taking some heat anyway. That’s partly owing to his conservative, low-key style, which some apparently misinterpret as lackadaisical. It’s also partly owing to the perception–which does have some basis in reality–that when the leaves turn brown, the teams that keep playing are usually lavish with the green.
“I know there are people in Philadelphia in my former business who are always knocking Dave for being too tight with the purse strings,” says Dolson. “You know–let’s see what happens with this club he’s put together. You can look 90 miles to the south to see what Baltimore’s done. They’re spending $75-$80 million in salaries, and they’ve got a last-place ballclub now that was under .500 last year. Just spending $80 million doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to be in the World Series. Or the playoffs. Or out of the cellar, for that matter. Brains do figure in somewhere–and so does running the thing right.”
“We’re sort of building equity in the term Phillies,” Montgomery was saying a few nights before, as the Phils were locked in a scoreless tie with the Cincinnati Reds. Equity is a rather odd bit of Whartonspeak to be tossing about in a ballpark, though it’s a legitimate word for the CEO of a corporation. He was talking about the organization’s new approach in the farm system, making sure the young players in their six minor-league teams are all getting the same caliber of instruction. It’s a theme that crops up repeatedly in discussions with Phillies executives. Montgomery, it’s clear, wants everyone to be reading off the same page.
It’s probably the combination of his Wharton background and fiscal conservatism that has prompted the local Fourth Estate to paint him as a steely, buttoned-down executive more concerned with getting the team into the black than into the playoffs. (One has gone so far as to compare him to Ebenezer Scrooge.) Sportswriters often have their reasons, but from a human standpoint, at least, the portrait seems almost comically severe. Based on the grand total of one evening spent in his company and a bundle of interviews with associates–some disinterested, some not–I will put my reputation on the line and say that if Montgomery is not in fact a warm, down-to-earth, good-humored man who genuinely likes people and genuinely loves baseball, then he’s one hell of a Method actor.
He is not, as he cheerfully acknowledges, a colorful font of sound bites, and it’s clear that he finds all the questions about his club’s payroll distasteful. Unlike former Phillies CEO (and current chairman) Bill Giles, who enjoyed schmoozing with the press and stirring things up in the papers, Montgomery avoids the limelight as much as possible. But apart from the occasional disgruntled sportswriter, most observers say his touch with people is as real as his facility with numbers.
“The thing about Dave is, he has excellent people skills,” says Ruly Carpenter, who owned the Phillies for the first decade of Montgomery’s employment. “He’s a good listener–able to communicate with anybody in the organization, from the top echelon down to the guys who sweep the stadium. He’s also very good at controlling his emotions. He’s always the same, regardless of what’s going on on the field.”
That steady hand and those people skills should not be dismissed as nice-but-irrelevant. They have enabled him–or rather, his general manager, Ed Wade–to bring some first-rate baseball men back to the organization after years of personality-driven exile during the Giles era, and to make some long-overdue personnel changes based on their recommendations.
The charge that he wants to get the team into the black has some truth to it, but that’s a more complicated issue.
“People don’t like to hear that the guy running their team is a smart businessman, but it does help,” says Douglas Myers WG’92, author of The Scouting Report: 1997 and an upcoming book about the Chicago Cubs, Essential Cubs. “They might not think it does, especially when he makes unpopular decisions–everybody wants short-term, no one wants long-term. But if he indeed is true to his word, and puts that revenue back [into the farm system], and won’t be satisfied with just filling a stadium with a little lousy team, then I think he will look like a very wise baseball man, not just a good businessman.”
Paul Hagen, who covers the Phils for the Philadelphia Daily News, is less impressed by Montgomery’s business acumen. “I’m not one of these people who thinks you should just go out and buy a championship,” he says, “but I do know that you have to spend money to make money in baseball–particularly in Philadelphia. It seems to me that Dave would rather improve five games a year for four years than improve 20 games this year. And in this day and age, I don’t think you have five-year plans anymore. Plus, you’re in the entertainment industry. You’ve got to give people a reason.”
The Phillies hope to end up in the black this year after several seasons in the red, and having raised ticket prices and trimmed the fat from their major-league payroll, they may be able to. It’s not the fan-friendliest timing, but as Montgomery points out, the Phils have upped their spending considerably in a variety of not-so-visible ways, and they know that in a few years they’ll be paying a lot more for their young nucleus than they are now. Although Forbes magazine recently claimed–based on a formula derived from some available numbers–that the Phillies turned a $4.5 million profit last year, Montgomery says the magazine, which did not have access to the team’s books, was actually “off by 15 million bucks.”
“We did pretty well financially until 1994,” says Giles, “but whatever money we made we always put back into acquiring better players. Since ’94, we’ve managed to lose quite a bit of money.” The following year, incidentally, was the last time that the Phils made a big splash in the free-agent market, giving a four-year, $20-million contract to Gregg Jefferies–who turned out to be an expensive disappointment.
For all his Wharton background and facility with numbers, Montgomery wishes that people “would look at individual players as components of a team” without worrying so much about their salaries.
“When you narrow down to a 25-man payroll, you’re missing a great deal of the true picture of where the organization’s going,” he says. “Last year, we ranked third or fourth in spending on player development. There’s a reason for that; we had a high draft pick and some other things. But there are many baseball [dollars] spent outside of just the payroll number.
“The fact that Scott Rolen this year makes a million, and in two years makes $5.5 million, doesn’t make him any different as a player,” he points out. “And right now, we’ve gone the direction–intentionally, because we think it’s the right direction–of building the nucleus of what we think are talented young players. Where they are in the salary cycle today, and where they’ll be in a year or two, are things you’d better be aware of and plan for. And hopefully, over time, we will build fan identification with this nucleus.”
Trying to break even should not be a crime for a baseball team, or any other business. But in a time when Major League Baseball has taken on a crazy, Gold Rush quality–when huge corporations and multi-millionaires buy teams and dangle hundred-million-dollar contracts in front of free-agent stars in order to bring home a championship, then dismantle their championship teams like car thieves in a chop shop–the Phillies’ approach has a retro quality. Their goal, as they put it in one of their commercials, is to “get good and stay good.” The means to that end involves sound fundamentals, organizational consistency, long-term investment–and patience.
“What happens in sports is–people tend to make rash judgments,” says Robert P. Levy C’52, a former member of the Phils’ ownership group. “We’re all guilty of it. Guy pops up four times, you say the son of a bitch can’t play. David doesn’t do that. He’s very, very methodical; very, very thorough; and when he makes a decision, it’s usually a good one.”
“The key with David is patience,” agrees Dallas Green, the Phils’ senior advisor, who has held almost every important job in baseball. “He understands the problems, but he also understands that there are no quick solutions, and patience is something we’re all going to have to have. And he’s the leader in that category.”
It’s a laudable quality in a CEO. It’s not one for which Philadelphia fans are famous.
But Montgomery is not easily fazed. The key to a franchise’s success, he insists, “is customer services. If you’re consistent in your treatment of fans, over time, they reward you with their loyalty.”
Especially if you win.
In a sense, Dave Montgomery has been preparing for this job from childhood. He grew up in the Roxborough section of Philadelphia, and can give a detailed description of the route he followed to make the 20-minute drive to old Connie Mack Stadium. When he was four, his parents bought their first TV in order to watch the Phils play the Yankees in the 1950 World Series. (The Whiz Kids lost in four games.) His longtime friend and first roommate at Penn, U.S. Attorney Michael Stiles C’67, remembers going to a Phillies game with a group that included Montgomery, whose attempt to win an informal hot-dog-and-ice-cream-eating contest left him lying on the Connie Mack concrete, moaning piteously. Montgomery spent a lot of evenings listening to his “beloved Phils” on the radio, and as a Penn freshman, he was in the stands that fateful night in September 1964 when the Reds’ Chico Ruiz stole home against the then-first-place Phils, triggering one of the most famous late-season collapses in baseball history. History is not a Phillies fan.
Montgomery, now an alumni trustee, was a history major at Penn, but it was his “math aptitude” that helped get him into Wharton’s MBA program, where he steered clear of finance and accounting and ended up in marketing, hoping to become what he calls a “business generalist.” He was also a sports generalist, ardently following Penn football and basketball, and after earning his MBA in 1970 he began interviewing with the city’s professional sports teams while coaching football at Germantown Academy. His young players there included the son of former Whiz Kid Robin Roberts, a connection that helped get him an interview with the Phils.
“I went from the initial meetings with the Scott Papers and the Quaker Oats of the world,” Montgomery recalls, “with all these structured series of interviews, to meeting somebody who talked to me for about two minutes and said, ‘Well, when do you want to start?’”
That was Bill Giles, in February 1971, as the Phillies were preparing to move into their bland new home–Veterans Stadium in South Philadelphia. Giles, then the Phils’ vice president for business operations, was looking for salespeople at the time. “Dave had a Wharton and baseball background,” he recalls, “and Robin Roberts introduced me to him and said he was a great guy. I said, ‘That’s enough for me–let’s put you to work and see what you can do.’”
Montgomery took over a ticket-sales beat from the late Richie Ashburn, the Phils’ announcer and former Whiz Kid, who was about to head south for spring training. Ashburn handed him a big stack of index cards with a name and a phone number scrawled on each one and told him there were a “lot of good leads there.” The fourth number Montgomery dialed got him through to Laurel Hill Cemetery.
The Phils were owned by the Carpenter family back then, and though they were pretty terrible (again), Ruly Carpenter was laying the foundations that would transform the team into a powerhouse by the end of the decade. Between 1976 and 1983 they would win five division championships (51/2 if you include the strike-split 1981 season), two National League pennants and one World Championship, largely on the strength of a great farm system that produced such home-grown talent as Mike Schmidt, Greg Luzinski and Bob Boone.
Montgomery was the Phils’ director of sales when they won the franchise’s only World Championship in 1980. The day after the Series ended, he was about to get onto the float that would take the team and its brass down Market Street and Broad Street to Veterans Stadium for a very-long-overdue victory parade and chest-thumping. He had been feeling strangely washed out since the climactic moment the night before, as though the roaring adrenalin and frantic pace that had marked the pennant race and the playoffs against the Astros and those six hard-fought Series games against the Kansas City Royals had swept everything away.
“I was standing next to [Phillies’ announcer] Chris Wheeler, and I said, ‘I don’t know, that’s not really me,’” he recalls. “It was not my style to be out front on a float. But I finally got up on it, and I still remember as we turned the corner onto Market Street, seeing the joy on the faces of all those thousands of people. The fan in me exploded along with everybody else.”
It was a reaffirmation of his chosen vocation as well.
“We all run into these points where we say, ‘Am I doing the most meaningful thing?’” he says. “I’m not in a position where I can deliver world peace or cure a disease or anything like that. But seeing what happiness this game can bring to people’s lives made it all worthwhile.”
The following year, Carpenter–appalled by the lavish contracts some of his fellow owners were handing out to second-tier free agents, and convinced that the game was heading for financial ruin–sold the team for the then-record price of $30 million to an ownership group headed by Giles, who immediately appointed Montgomery as his executive vice president.
“After two or three years, I could tell he was the main man to groom to take over my role,” recalls Giles. “I thought he could easily take over after four or five years. Of all my lieutenants at that time, he had the potential to be something special. He was very bright and hard-working, very good with numbers and with people, and fun to be around. He even slept in my bed one time–but I had a golden retriever between us.”
Although the Phils did win the pennant in 1983 and again in the magical freak-season of 1993, the franchise declined fairly steadily–first through a series of ill-advised trades and the departure of some key baseball people, then through some crippling injuries and a woefully neglected farm system. Montgomery became the team’s chief operating officer in 1992, and in 1994, the ownership group made him a co-general partner, giving him a percentage of ownership and signalling his eventual ascension.
By June 1997, the eventuality had arrived. The Phillies had the worst record in baseball, and a deeply frustrated Giles had reluctantly concluded that he would be better off putting his energies into getting a new, fan-friendly stadium for the team. (See sidebar on page 30.) On June 20 of that year, he announced in a press release that he was turning over the reins to Montgomery, who quickly made it clear that the days of quick fixes were over, and that the Phils were going to rebuild with younger players.
Though the Phils have played approximately .500 ball during his two-year reign, it will be a while before anyone can really begin to assess the Montgomery Era. But in the view of Paul Hagen, it’s wrong to assume that Montgomery is a “new face riding in to save this franchise.”
Montgomery, he says, “has been the ultimate insider for 20 years, so to suggest that somehow he had nothing to do with everything that happened before he took this title, I think, is a little false.”
Be that as it may, Montgomery has shown himself willing to make key changes–or at least to allow them to be made. His appointment of Ed Wade as general manager has met with almost universal approval, as has Wade’s decision to bring back such horsehide sages as Dallas Green, Lee Elia and Paul Owens. This past winter, at Green’s recommendation, some unproductive personnel in the farm system were fired and some highly regarded ones (such as Steve Noworyta) hired. The Phils significantly increased the budget for the annual summer draft, allowing them to sign some promising young players. And after years of near-total neglect in Latin America and Asia, they have staked some new claims in those deep lodes of talent.
Baseball America, which recently ranked the Phils’ system 21st out of the 30 major league farm systems, nonetheless indicated that it was a system on the rise, noting that the Phils’ excellent 1998 draft picks, “plus a complete makeover of the club’s development staff and philosophy, have injected energy into an underachieving system.”
“I’d say their [farm] system is definitely on the upswing,” says managing editor Will Lingo. “In the early-to-mid-nineties, it was probably regarded as one of the lesser systems in baseball, because the team didn’t put enough resources into scouting and player development. Now they’ve rededicated themselves in that regard.”
Still, it will probably take a while for the public’s perception to change. Especially after the Phils’ first-round draft pick in 1997–a Florida State standout named J.D. Drew–refused, following a year-long holdout, to sign for what the Phillies offered. The fact that they offered him a multi-year package worth (with options) up to $6 million, the highest ever offered to a draft choice at the time, was not enough. Drew eventually went back into the draft and signed with the St. Louis Cardinals for a reported $7 million over four years (plus another $1.5 million in incentives). “The Phillies did not understand the market,” gloated Drew’s agent, Scott Boras. “The St. Louis Cardinals did.”
After a slow, injury-plagued start with the Cardinals this season, Drew was sent down to the minors. But the contract he signed once again raised the stakes: The Phils’ number-one pick in 1998, slugging first-baseman Pat Burrell, ended up demanding $8 million for five years, knowing that the team faced a public-relations disaster if they got spurned and outbid again. This time, they paid.
“It was a gamble that didn’t work,” says Dolson of the Drew incident. “I certainly don’t blame them for refusing to pay the money he demanded–I’ve seen too many cases of young players with ‘can’t-miss’ labels who do miss. And it’s entirely possible that he never wanted to come to Philly in the first place. So it was a mistake made with the best intentions–they drafted the best prospect out there. But they seem to have recovered nicely” in the 1998 draft.
To Dolson, Montgomery’s approach of building up the farm system and bringing in young players makes a lot of sense–as does his willingness to tap the expertise of people like Dallas Green and Lee Elia.
“Bringing those people in, to me, is more important than X number of dollars you spend on some free agent who may or may not help you,” he says, adding that the subsequent shakeup in the farm system was a “huge plus” for Montgomery. “It took somebody to step in there who was willing to make changes. And it’s apparent now that the changes were for the better. ’Course, they couldn’t be for the worse.”
Down on the field, Schilling has just notched another strikeout on the Schill-o-meter–the invention of a loyal group of fans who hang large Ks (baseball parlance for “strikeouts”) high in the leftfield stands every time their hero whiffs an opposing batter.
Schilling, one of the premier starting pitchers in the game, and a relative bargain at $5.5 million a year, has also been loudly challenging the team in the press to spend more money on free-agent pitchers–or sell to somebody who will. I mention this to Montgomery, who is seated beside me in the executive box, keeping score.
“Yes,” he responds. I press him, feeling positively boorish.
“We really respect what Schill does on the field,” he says finally, “and we admire his competitive nature. The job we believe we have to do is to create this young nucleus and build on it. Some people always gravitate to free-agency as what I would describe to be the short-term fix. But it can have long-term implications. And one of the things that we think would be wrong, and where we would betray the fan base that we think we’re beginning to build, is to put the retention of this nucleus in jeopardy because of commitments to some free agents.”
Better to get younger players through an improved farm system and judicious trades–and then hang on to them, he argues, pointing with justifiable pride to the trades that brought Glanville and Abreu to the team.
“A player,” he adds, “probably has the luxury of looking at today and not worrying too much about tomorrow. It’s not a luxury we have as far as making decisions overall for the good of the organization.”
Besides, as Ed Wade has been pointing out a lot lately, there are a only a few high-quality arms available each year and 30 teams who want them; as a result, those free agents tend to go to teams that are competitive now, not a few years down the road. And trying to snag one in a mid-season trade can cost a team dearly in young talent. Montgomery and Wade have indicated that once the team is just one or two key players away from the playoffs, they’ll be willing to get out the checkbook. Until then–patience.
The long-term approach is all good and well, says Paul Hagen. “But if they get to the point in four years where they’re where they want to be, but Scott Rolen is so disgusted that he leaves to become a free agent, how have you gained?”
A sobering thought, that. I don’t get to ask Rolen about it directly, but I do track down the estimable Doug Glanville, who recently signed a four-year contract worth $5.57 million. He can’t really speak for anyone else, he says, but he’s quite happy to be playing with the Phillies.
“A guy like Rolen, that’s going to be his decision at the end of his contract,” says Glanville, “and I guess he’ll see, based on what happens up until then. But I think he’s pretty happy with what he’s seen. Seems to me, just like they said, they wanted a younger team that would develop together, and now, within a year, we’ve made some strides. I know I’m optimistic.
“From my point of view,” he adds, “Dave’s been great … When I signed, I just asked for them to be fair. And when my agent got the initial offer, he said, ‘You know, that’s a pretty reasonable opening offer.’ He showed me where I fit in with other players in my class, and he said, ‘That’s showing a lot of good faith.’ So I didn’t feel the need to squeeze it to death. I just told them what parts of the contract I’d like to improve, and he didn’t waste any real time changing it.”
As it turns out, Glanville is the hero of the taut but sparsely attended game, coming through (again) with a two-out, 10th-inning single to knock in the only run of the game. As the winning run crosses the plate, and the players stream out of the dugout, Montgomery’s eyes crinkle with delight.
“There’s your Penn guy!” he yells, slapping me on the shoulder. And for a moment, anyway, he looks like a man without a care in the world.
Like a fan.
SIDEBAR
Field of Dreams: If They Build it, Will They Win?
It’s a good ball game the fans are seeing tonight: an old-fashioned pitchers’ duel between the Phillies’ Curt Schilling and the Reds’ Denny Neagle. It’s also Dollar Dogs Night at the Vet, when the normally overpriced hot dogs sell for a buck–and at one point even come raining down from the sky for free, thanks to a giant hot-dog-shooting cannon wielded by the Phanatic.
The only blue note on this fine spring eve is all those empty seats–about 48,000 of them, out of a possible 62,363. Though the fans’ absence is largely owing to the fact that the team hasn’t been in a pennant race since 1993, there’s more to it than that. Veterans Stadium is one of those depressing “multi-purpose” stadiums built around the National League in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It has good parking, easy accessibility to public transportation and highways–and absolutely nothing else to recommend it. The field is Astroturf; most seats are absurdly far from the field; and even when the team draws a good crowd, there are still acres of empty seats.
Furthermore, the city of Philadelphia owns the stadium, and the Phils’ lease is one of the worst in baseball. According to Phils president and CEO Dave Montgomery C’68 WG’70 (see accompanying story), they have to pay a share of their cable-TV revenue to the city; they don’t get a cut of the parking; they don’t have the money-producing luxury boxes found in newer stadiums; and they have “a very unfavorable split of concession revenue compared to others.” A recent report in Forbes magazine noted that the Phillies took in just $6.5 million in “venue revenues” last year, roughly a quarter of what their counterparts in Baltimore, Cleveland and Denver earned with their new downtown stadiums.
Since cities around the country are building attractive new ballparks in downtown areas to keep their current teams or attract new ones–and yes, the wisdom of that can and should be debated long and hard–it is small wonder that the Phillies are doing everything they can to build a new Field of Dreams. And now that the Pennsylvania legislature has passed a bill guaranteeing $320 million in loans to build four sports stadiums in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, it looks as though it will happen.
For reasons both aesthetic and civic, the Phils would prefer to build their stadium in Center City. Their first choice is at Broad and Spring Garden streets. While that location would cost an estimated $350 million, some $60-to-$80 million more than in South Philadelphia near the current stadium, the Phils have offered to kick in more than a third of the cost.
Philadelphia Mayor Edward G. Rendell C’65 thinks a Center City location would be good for Philadelphia–as similar stadiums have been for Baltimore and Cleveland–but just how much the city will help fund the higher-priced stadium is still unknown. State Senator Vincent Fumo has vowed to use all of his considerable influence to block the Broad and Spring Garden site, though he has no problems with another site a few blocks to the east. The University is opposed to the other main downtown site, around the 30th Street Post Office. Expect the site-selection and approval process to drag out at least through the summer.
But somewhere, sometime, a new stadium will be built. According to the Phillies’ Web site, it will seat around 45,000 and have “plenty of charm and character and be a part of the fabric of Philadelphia,” in the same way that Baltimore’s Camden Yards, Chicago’s Wrigley Field and Boston’s Fenway Park have become part of the fabric of their cities. Any lingering doubts about the local hunger for a fan-friendly downtown stadium should have been erased by last month’s interleague series with the Orioles at Camden Yards–where almost as many Phillies fans as Orioles fans filled the sold-out stands.
Dr. Kenneth Shropshire, associate professor of legal studies and associate professor of real estate, has studied and written about the business of sports–including the issue of stadiums built with at least some public funding. “As a fan,” he says, “I’d love to see it at Broad and Spring Garden or at 30th Street, but as one who recognizes that there are a number of priorities the city has, it’s a tough call. But I’d love to see a downtown ballpark. There’s a different type of energy, feel and accessibility.”
He casts a skeptical eye on the economic benefits that a downtown ballpark would bring to the city, saying that “it’s really moving the spending from South Philly to Center City.” Since Baltimore already has many other attractions in the area near Camden Yards, he notes, “building the stadium at Broad and Spring Garden will not instantly make it Baltimore.” The Phillies see the matter differently, and a study commissioned by the Central Philadelphia Development Corporation concluded that a Center City stadium would increase the state’s revenues by 54 percent compared to a South Philadelphia site, “due largely to increased spending outside the ballpark.”
Whatever increased revenues the Phillies would get from a new stadium would be somewhat offset by the debt-service they’d be paying–especially on a Center City site. On the other hand, a new stadium would increase the franchise’s value significantly. In December, Forbes magazine evaluated the Phillies at $131 million, 23rd in the majors. The Orioles, with their splendid new Camden Yards, and the Cleveland Indians, with their alluring new Jacobs Field, were valued at $323 million and $322 million respectively.
More important, a new stadium would lead to more revenue for the Phillies, and that, according to Montgomery, will allow them to better compete for high-quality players and hold on to the ones they’ve got. “We believe that if we can resolve our stadium inequality,” he says, “and get back on an even keel with–maybe not everybody, but at least with a majority of clubs, then we can take advantage of our market size.”
Though the Phillies have, in terms of raw population, one of the largest single-team markets in the country, a stadium is not the only source of revenue for a team. Another is national television, but that is a relatively minor income stream for baseball teams. More important is the “local-media market.” While the Phils’ is not quite as large as it seems–the Philadelphia TV market is the nation’s fourth-largest, but unlike the Boston Red Sox, who claim virtually all of New England, the Phils’ TV turf is bordered by the Orioles to the south, the Pirates to the west and the Mets and Yankees to the north–it’s still in the top third of major-league franchises. And Montgomery makes a strong point of denying the charge that the Phillies have claimed to be a “small-market” club in that regard.
“We’d never use that term,” he says emphatically. “Because we’re not. We have an excellent-size market that probably ranks us somewhere from the eight-to-10 slot [out of 30 teams]. And we have a good cable relationship with Comcast Sportsnet. The area where we’re more disadvantaged is the stadium-related revenue. And that’s a significant issue for us.”
