men who couldn’t make it 24 months at The Warehouse under his employ. And no one knew Angelos’ idiosyncrasies or bizarre, old-world strategies or (lack of) management style better than Gillick.
Patent dishonesty, mixed messages, meddling children and relatives, and his lack of baseball knowledge or etiquette – sure, other owners certainly had these problems over the years. But the one thing everyone universally complained about regarding Angelos by his baseball “decision makers” was his inability to act quickly in a business that demanded rapid answers for rapidly changing conditions and availability.
Baseball was a round-the-clock, fluid business in the new century.
When an opposing general manager had a trade or a contract or a player available, the decision needed to be made in the next hour, not lost in a pile of paperwork on the desk of a lawyer who was making $20 million per year to win Mesothelioma cases and who thought, by and large, that baseball was a bit of a child’s game.
Certainly “intentional hesitation” had been a large and driving part of Angelos’ dirty little arsenal from his attorney office for years. It was his secret weapon. It’s how he won battles. In the legal space, he fought longer and held out longer than anyone else, often not even bothering to return phone calls. In litigation, that always seemed to net him a better deal and a desperate adversary. Angelos rarely earned mutual respect as a decent person or a man of integrity or accountability, but he always got the upper hand by waiting and frustrating his combatants and that’s how he walked the earth long before he was a Major League Baseball owner.
But, in baseball’s reality of supply and demand, there was no replacing Aaron Sele for the 2000 Orioles and Angelos had his hands full with a far more pricey and complicated negotiation with ace pitcher Mike Mussina as he entered his final year under contract.
Mussina, a very bright, Stanford-educated man, saw the team for what it was at this point – a daily circus anytime the owner got involved. And that was pretty often over the six seasons under the reign of King Peter because by now everyone in the building feared a man who famously never walked into the baseball offices. No decision could ever be made without Angelos signing off on it from six blocks away in the penthouse of his law office. And, oft times, he was hard to find to get an answer. He didn’t use email and only worked via telephone and fax machine. And once you got Angelos’ answer, you weren’t really sure if you trusted it based on the growing number of integrity-based people – from the agents to the broadcasters to the baseball evaluators and scouts to the players – who had left the Orioles feeling lied to, double-crossed or blatantly deceived.
8Meanwhile, Mussina was the team’s most important asset. He was a clean-living, hard-working producer who was among the best in the world at what he did. The first act of Mussina’s career was phenomenal – surpassed by only one pitcher in Baltimore Orioles history, Hall of Famer Jim Palmer. Like “Cakes” was in the previous generation, Mussina was a vision of consistency and excellence. Every year he took the ball 30 times and every time he went to the mound you knew the Orioles had a chance to win. He was easily a Top 10 pitcher in MLB and would’ve been considered a No. 1 – or ace, in baseball parlance – for virtually any club in baseball.
More importantly for Angelos, Mussina loved the Orioles. He loved Baltimore. He had taken a very club-favorable deal four years earlier and left millions on the table, much to the chagrin of the Major League Baseball Players Association, who once admonished him publicly via Tom Glavine. The Braves pitcher spoke for all of the union, who believed that Mussina cost other top-flight pitchers plenty of money when he should’ve been setting the market at the time for all of his MLBPA mates. Remember, these two men were among the many who fought with the owners during the 1994 labor stoppage as MLBPA union reps. It was an endless battle between ownership and the union over money and ideology – but mostly money.
And now it was Mussina’s turn, once again, to get paid the market rate for his work with the Orioles. Angelos had the reins on the negotiations given Syd Thrift’s incompetence and/or lack of true ability to execute a deal with well-heeled agent Arm Tellem. At this point, most agents knew to never deal with Thrift because he was incapable of making any final decision under Angelos. If you weren’t dealing with the owner, you were wasting your time. And as Sele and Reich found out, even when you believed you had a definitive answer and a “deal,” it still wasn’t a binding contract when you’re dealing with someone as slippery as Peter G. Angelos.
At this point, there was no handshake with Angelos that was sacred or secure.
Despite Mussina’s broad understanding of the game’s history and negotiations – his senior thesis at Stanford in 1989 was entitled “The Economics of Baseball” – there was a prevailing opinion that Angelos had the upper hand in this dance because his employee didn’t want to leave. Angelos was looking to exploit that universally held belief all along.
In October 1999, Mussina and his younger brother Mark, who did sports radio at WNST-AM 1570 in Baltimore for a few years, were visiting Tellem in California to discuss the game plan heading into his “walk” year. Mark confided late one night privately to Tellem that he thought that his big brother should find the open market and see what his real value was around MLB. Tellem said: “I wish he’d do that, too. But he wants to stay in Baltimore and we’re going to do what he wants to do.”
Now, entering spring training 2000 with an aging team and an expiring deal, the Orioles needed to sign their best player or deal with the possibility of a bidding war – or even worse, losing a player they couldn’t possibly replace via free agency at any price.
Mussina watched Angelos personally get involved in giving Albert Belle five years and $65 million to be a train wreck and an albatross for every player in the clubhouse. “Moose” was a no-nonsense, conservative guy from Montoursville, Pa. who worked hard, pitched hard, cared a lot about winning and had the pride of a champion. Mussina didn’t like politics at all. For the most part, he kept his mouth shut – as Cal Ripken always demanded in a clubhouse that was policed solely by him – while years of wretched behavior, lies, cover ups and losing surfaced all
