We opened that season on the road, winning two out of three in San Diego against the Padres. Heading back to Atlanta after that encouraging start, I wanted to make sure our home opener was a big, fun event. Helping matters was the fact that we were playing the Cincinnati Reds, the team that had just won the dramatic 1975 World Series. That night, after the Reds and Braves lineups were introduced, I ran out to a microphone on the field and gave the entire stadium a pep talk. Then, with a full marching band behind me, I led the fans in singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” I’m sure some of the players didn’t know what to make of the whole scene but our fans ate it up.
These ceremonies caused the game to start a little late but before the first pitch I took my seat down next to the field. Many owners sit upstairs in glass-enclosed suites but I thought watching a game in a suite was like kissing a girl through a window. I wanted my seat in the front row, right next to the home dugout. So there I was sitting field-side and in the bottom of the second inning with no score, Ken Henderson, our outfielder, came up to bat. We had acquired him in the off-season and there was a buzz in the stadium when he stepped to the plate. In his first at bat with the Braves he hit the team’s first home run of the season. The crowd —me included—went absolutely wild. I was so caught up in the excitement that without even thinking I jumped over the wall in front of my seat and ran onto the field. By the time Henderson rounded third I was standing at home plate with the other players ready to shake his hand! Not being a big fan I didn’t think that what I had done was all that unusual but by the time I made it back to my seat I could sense that I’d created a stir. Henderson’s homer wound up being the Braves’ only highlight that game and we lost 6–1. Still, the opener that night gave our fans a feeling that this season might be different.
Braves fans might have enjoyed my on-field activities on opening night but when we played those same Reds on the road, I realized that some of the other owners weren’t quite as enthusiastic. Cincinnati gave me field-level seats that I’d requested but when I got there I found a security guard with his back to the field, facing me. The Reds front office placed him there specifically to keep me off the field and they notified our promotions department that if I went on the field in Cincinnati, I’d be arrested. Welcome to Major League Baseball!
I went on many road trips in those early days and made a point to meet with as many of the other teams’ owners and executives as I could, in part to get to know them but also to learn the business and figure out how to do a better job of running our franchise. On one trip I realized other teams put out onions and relish for hot dogs and hamburgers, but in Atlanta, we only had mustard and ketchup. I ordered that we add onions and relish. In every business I’ve ever been in it’s been clear that doing even the smallest things to take care of your customers is essential and running a ball club was no different.
I found that hanging out with the players was just like spending time with my sailing crew or the guys at our TV and radio stations. I was still in my thirties and a few times in spring training I even went out on the field with the guys and did calisthenics and wind sprints. Since most games were at night, when I traveled with the team we all had a lot of time to kill during the day. Some of the players liked to play poker, and on occasion I’d join them. These were low-stakes, nickel-and-dime games—if you were lucky you’d win $10 or $20—but everyone had a great time. When word of this got around the league, Chub Feeney, who was National League president, told me to knock it off.
“Owners aren’t supposed to play poker with the players,” he told me.
“Why not?” I asked. I wasn’t trying to challenge him, but I truly didn’t understand.
“It just isn’t done,” was his reply.
This all seemed wrong to me. There was clearly a huge gulf between players and the team owners. It was like they were on different teams and the owners didn’t treat their players as equals. When I first came in the clubhouse the guys were saying “yes, sir,” and “no, sir” and I said, “You call me Ted just like everyone else.” At the owners meetings everyone complained about how the players were taking them to the cleaners and the union was too powerful. I’d ask them why didn’t they get to know their guys any better? Go out and have a beer with them or invite them over to your house for a party? Who knows—maybe if they had tried that in the past, there never would have been a union in the first place.
I wouldn’t let the baseball establishment get me down. I had worked my way into the broadcasting and sailing communities and I was determined to do the same in baseball. Fortunately, I had great people around me. In addition to keeping Bill Bartholomay, I was able to retain Bob Hope, the team’s marketing director. He wasn’t related to the famous comedian but Bob did have a great sense of humor. He was constantly generating ideas and I was just the guy to let him run with them. I didn’t even mind participating myself when I could. One time, we held ostrich races on the field. We dressed up in horseracing silks and silly hats and I rode out first to kick things off. Sometimes we even involved opposing players. On one occasion I agreed to an offbeat race with colorful Tug McGraw of the Philadelphia Phillies. We had to push baseballs from first and third base to home but we couldn’t use our hands or feet, just our noses. We got down on all fours and as I pushed my ball as fast as I could, I nudged it off the edge of the grass and on to the rougher base path. I refused to quit and as I kept going I skinned my face raw in the dirt. I beat Tug by about six feet and when I stood up and raised my arms in victory there was blood all over my face. Our fans loved this kind of stuff but I also did it in hopes of making an impact on our players. I wanted them to know I was a competitor—that I would do anything for the team, even if it meant getting down on all fours and bloodying my face.
Having their dad as the team owner was also a lot of fun for the kids. They got to be batboys and girls on occasion and we’d have players over to our house for birthday parties. I did everything I could to keep the relationship between the players and myself, and between the team and our fans, as informal as possible. In our TV ads we called the Braves “The Big League team with the Little League spirit!” and Bob Hope thought it would be fun for our home uniforms to have the players’ nicknames on them instead of their usual names. So instead of “Jones” it might say “Jonesy,” or for the famous knuckleballer Phil Niekro, his jersey said “Knucksie.” Andy Messersmith, our high-profile pitcher, also had a flair for the dramatic and came to me and said, “Hey, Ted—how about giving me number seventeen and making my nickname ‘Channel’?”
What a great idea! Next thing you know, one of the most famous pitchers in the game is taking the mound with “Channel 17” on his back—I loved it! Unfortunately, commissioner Bowie Kuhn didn’t. He told me this was considered advertising and there were league rules against putting commercial messages on jerseys. Oh, well. It was fun while it lasted and we drummed up publicity in the meantime.
Off the field, when it came to the Braves front office I could tell right away that our costs were too high. People were flying first class, staying at fancy hotels—all luxuries that were customary across the league but the kind of expenditures we simply couldn’t afford. I had to make some changes and one of my more controversial ones was the time I fired a guy named Donald Davidson. He had held various jobs with the team but when I came along he was the traveling secretary, and it just so happened that he was only about four feet tall. I had nothing against him personally but I could tell right away that he didn’t particularly like me.
Like a lot of other career baseball people he thought I was just some rich guy who didn’t know what he was doing. When it came to the game on the field, I did have a lot to learn, but off the field I could tell when money was being wasted. For example, when the Braves traveled, Davidson stayed in the huge VIP suites. Seeing the guy who booked the rooms staying in a luxury suite made me angry. Digging into the situation I realized that the traveling secretary basically booked flights, hotel rooms, and bus trips to the stadiums. It didn’t seem like all that much work and at the same time our three TV and radio announcers, who were also on the team’s payroll, hung out all day without much to do. I decided to cut Davidson and assign the travel secretary duties to the announcers.
You would think that dismissing the travel secretary wouldn’t make a lot of news but Davidson had previously worked in PR and it turned out that he had friends at the paper, in the Atlanta community, and all over baseball. People were questioning how I could fire this likable little guy. I told them that I liked him, too (and by the way, he went on to work in baseball for twenty-four more years, eventually passing away in 1990 while working for the Houston Astros), but I believed we needed to make some changes. One reporter asked me how I could justify signing a pitcher to a million-dollar deal, and then turning around and saying I wouldn’t find money to pay for nice hotel rooms. My answer was simple. The million dollars spent on Messersmith could help us win games, put fans in the seats, and pull in viewers. If anyone could show me that bigger rooms for front office staff would help us accomplish any of those things, I’d have paid for those as well.
Basically I couldn’t cut everything. The ball club was a complex organization. We had about 125 players on six different teams (the Braves owned all of our minor league franchises) and we had twenty-five scouts looking at players not only in U.S. high schools and colleges but also down in Latin America and the Caribbean. This was complicated because it wasn’t like in pro football where, with a TV and a VCR, you could see just about every player you wanted to, playing for his college team. Here, you had thousands of high schools and a lot of colleges that didn’t get TV coverage. And with the potential for trades you had to keep an eye on players on the other teams across the minors and the majors. Those totaled about 125 teams with twenty-five players per—more than three thousand players. Once I understood how complicated this was I concluded that the general manager I inherited was not up to the job. He was a pleasant guy and had been around the game a long time but I didn’t think he was good enough. I remember him walking me around a minor league complex and when we’d pass a player I’d ask, “Who’s that?” Half the time he didn’t know. The way I saw it, the players were our investment, and as the person running the business, he should be familiar with them. For some major league owners, the teams were just a hobby. After being successful in other fields, owning a team satisfied their egos and gave them publicity. I felt like some of that trickled down through the management ranks and a lot of these guys didn’t work as hard as I felt they should.
I decided to make a change and hired an executive from the Boston Red Sox named John Alevizos to be our new general manager. He really knew the game, but not long after joining us his aggressive style got him in trouble with Bowie Kuhn and our team was fined $10,000. The charge was for something called “tampering.” Alevizos had asked Gary Matthews, a star on the San Francisco Giants, whether he’d like to join the Braves when he became a free agent after the 1976 season. From my business experience, this didn’t seem like a big deal but I learned from the commissioner’s response that you just don’t do that.
Shortly after being slapped with this fine I made matters worse. I’ve never been particularly good at holding my liquor (my friends used to call me “Two Beer Turner”) and at a World Series cocktail party I’d had a few before getting into a conversation with Bob Lurie, the owner of the Giants. I told him that no matter how much he was willing to pay Matthews, I would offer him more. I was speaking too loudly and was overheard by others in the room, including some baseball writers. Lurie filed a complaint with the commissioner and it looked like I might be in trouble. I pressed on, and we ultimately managed to get Matthews and sign him to a contract. Then Commissioner Kuhn called me into his office and told me that because of these repeat offenses he was going to suspend me from the game for a year and take away our first round draft choice.
I replied, “Suspend me, but please don’t take away our number one draft pick!”
He refused, and we had no other choice but to litigate. It took several weeks for the judge to make his decision, and I was getting anxious (although by that time I was planning to race for the 1977 America’s Cup and could have used an excuse to be away from the team for the summer). Meanwhile the team was on a terrible streak. After losing our sixteenth game straight I decided to shake things up. I thought about firing our manager, Dave Bristol, but instead I decided to just give him some time off. After telling the press that Bristol was away on a “scouting trip,” I put on a Braves uniform and served as the team’s field manager.
In the dugout I really didn’t do a whole lot other than crack some jokes and yell encouragement. I didn’t know the signs, so I had to sit next to one of the other coaches and when I thought we should steal or bunt, I’d have to tell him so he could relay the signal. Phil Niekro pitched a complete game that night so I never even got the chance to walk out to the mound. Despite his strong performance, we lost 2–1 but we broke a lot of tension on the club and we ended our losing streak with a win the very next game.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t in the dugout that night. The baseball establishment didn’t like the idea of me managing the team and I received a telegram from National League president Chub Feeney the morning after my debut, telling me that my first game would also be my last. I retired with a lifetime record of zero wins and one loss.
Not too long after, the judge passed down a split ruling on the tampering case. He upheld my suspension but let us keep Gary Matthews and our first round draft choice (which we subsequently used to select future All-Star Bob Horner). As a result, I was free to head to Newport without people wondering why I wasn’t at the Braves games.