Hey Joe

Joe Garagiola Jr., the eldest child of Hall of Fame broadcaster Joe Garagiola Sr., has worked as George Steinbrenner’s legal counsel for the New York Yankees, a sports/broadcasting agent and an attorney, and he served as the first General Manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks. I asked him: Did working for the Bronx Bombers help prepare him to run a baseball team?

“If someone tried to get tough with me, I’d tell ’em, ‘I worked for George Steinbrenner, what are you gonna do,’” he answered.

Garagiola Jr. was fresh out of law school and sending résumés out with no success. He had interned with the Yankees the previous summers, so he sent one to the club. Then, “out of the blue,” Steinbrenner’s assistant called and said The Boss wanted to meet with him. The Yankees’ in-house counsel had left to work for MLB, so there was an opening. He met with Steinbrenner in Tampa and was hired before he even took the bar exam.

His first task for the Yankees, however, didn’t require him to be a member of the bar. He typed a clause in Reggie Jackson’s contract dealing with matters such as bonuses and prohibited activities.

“This was in the pre–word-processor days. I took typing one summer when I was gonna start high school—one of the more valuable skills I ever acquired,” he said. (He was eventually admitted to the bar in New York, Arizona, and California.)

There is another “employee” who worked with Steinbrenner that Garagiola has a connection to: Seinfeld’s George Costanza. For the multi-episode arc when Costanza was an employee of the Yankees, Garagiola said the Seinfeld staff must have visited the stadium, because Costanza’s office was very similar to his own, down to the color scheme.

But, getting back to reality, another of his early duties was negotiating with the city for the renovation of Yankee Stadium. The team shared Shea Stadium while their home in the Bronx was updated and repaired. “I spent a lot of time going down to City Hall and hashing things out with various city commissioners and deputy mayors because the deal with the Yankees had been made by the previous mayoral administration. And so the then-current administration, which was Mayor Abe Beame, was in terrible financial straits, and they were going to be extremely tough in terms of their obligations under the lease,” he said. “I spent a good portion of my time arguing they were obligated to do certain things and then arguing that they weren’t doing them—and that kind of back and forth.”

Other assignments included working with the various unions that represented the ushers and ticket-takers, plus the city dealings. “That was one of the things. It was always something new,” Garagiola said.

After working with a group to procure a team for Arizona, Garagiola was tapped to be the club’s first GM—a job his employment history qualified him for. He had learned to negotiate as an agent and attorney and, of course, he grew up with the game.

Before the Diamondbacks played their first game, Garagiola learned that Matt Williams, then with Cleveland, lived in Arizona and wanted to play there to be close to his family.

“That deal took weeks,” he said. “The Cleveland GM knew Williams wanted to be traded to Arizona, but he wasn’t going to give him away.” Why did it take so long?

“I think it’s like any trade; it’s just a matter of getting the pieces to fit. [Cleveland GM] John Hart and I had many hours of conversations about it. During the ’97 season, Roland [Hemond], our executive VP of baseball operations, and I were in Cleveland and met with John. He was very sympathetic to Matty’s situation, but by the same token, Cleveland in ’97 went to the World Series and Matt Williams was one of their key players. So, as good a guy as John is—and he is a great guy—if he was going to make a deal and move one of his pieces, he was going to have to get something pretty good in return, and it just took us a long time to get there. As sympathetic as John was to Matty on a personal level, he couldn’t just let him walk because he had a baseball team to run,” recalled Joe Jr.

(The Diamondbacks acquired Detroit third baseman Travis Fryman on November 18, 1997. On December 1, Garagiola traded Fryman, pitcher Tom Martin, and cash to Cleveland for Williams.)

We had somebody hustle over to the arena with a Diamondbacks jersey and present it to him during a break, only to get a severe scolding from the Commissioner’s Office for announcing a trade before the Expansion Draft was over.

Unlike some previous expansion teams that targeted big names past their prime, the Diamondbacks’ strategy was to acquire players who still had gas in the tank: he traded for Williams and Devon White, and signed free agents Jay Bell, Andy Benes, and Gregg Olson. The following year, he signed Steve Finley. In their second season (1999), the Diamondbacks won 100 games and made the playoffs, but lost to the Mets.

“The Devon White trade is kind of a funny story.” Garagiola continued, “We did that deal while the Expansion Draft was going on, and then found out that Devon—who lived in Phoenix—was across the street attending a Suns game. So we had somebody hustle over to the arena with a Diamondbacks jersey and present it to him during a break, only to get a severe scolding from the Commissioner’s Office for announcing a trade before the Expansion Draft was over.”

Garagiola later signed Randy Johnson and stole—er, traded for—Curt Schilling from the Phillies. With that duo at the top of the rotation, the club won the NL West and made it to the World Series against his former employer, the Yankees.

In the bottom of the ninth in Game 7, the Diamondbacks trailed by a run but—helped by an errant throw by Mariano Rivera—rallied to score two and win the championship.

“After the World Series, I got a very warm note from Mr. Steinbrenner, congratulating me. He said that as tough as it was to lose the Series, he was very proud that he had given me my start in baseball. Years later, I had the opportunity to tell Hal Steinbrenner how much his father’s confidence in me meant to me at the time and, for that matter, always would,” said Garagiola.

Currently, Garagiola Jr. is Senior Director of Special Projects for the Diamondbacks. But this isn’t a ceremonial post or one where he visits groups to rustle up ticket sales.

“I was very involved in the construction of our new academy in the Dominican Republic, a project I worked on for over two years. It’s ironic that it’s built on the same site as our original academy. In fact, we were able to save some of the original buildings and outfield walls,” he said.  His next assignment will involve rehabbing Bank One Ballpark, noting, “it’s 30 years old and needs work.”

Earlier, he helped save the Cactus League, which was down to only a few teams.

Enter Arizona’s then-Governor, Rose Mofford.

“Rose had been a great fast-pitch softball player in her youth. I love to tell the story about how one of her Arizona teams traveled to New York and played indoors at Madison Square Garden. So when this was brought to her attention, she immediately grasped the significance of it,” said Garagiola.

Mofford asked a friend, Dwight Patterson, to head up a task force to address teams leaving spring training sites in Arizona. Patterson asked Garagiola to work with him.

The governor led a delegation to New York to meet with Major League Baseball, including the commissioner.

“The message we got was, ‘We like having two sites for spring training—Florida and Arizona. I think that’s a good thing, but we are not going to tell any team it cannot move. So, if you can’t solve your issues out there and convince teams to stay, and they leave—well, that’s on you,’” Garagiola said.

The task force raised money from local communities for an impact study that found the Cactus League’s economic effect was equivalent to Phoenix hosting a Super Bowl. Eventually, a tax on rental cars provided a fund for cities to rehab or build spring training sites.

Today, spring training sites are evenly split between Florida and Arizona, with 15 teams in each.

Of all the things Garagiola has done – including working for Major League Baseball on disciplinary issues and building an expansion team that made the playoffs in its second year and won a World Series in its fourth – he says of keeping the Cactus League alive and well: “I’m probably as proud of my part in that as I am of  anything that I have done out here.”

It sounds hokey to say he has baseball in his blood. Not only was his father a professional ballplayer, but his mother, Audrie, was the organist at Sportsman’s Park, the Cardinals stadium. When the team was home, he would accompany his mom to the booth where she played the organ. So he had baseball on both sides. (His parents met at a skating rink: his father had a date, but saw his mom playing the organ. He asked her out, but she said no. He kept at it “and persistence won out,” says Joe Jr. The younger Garagiola met his wife of 53 years in eighth grade; they have four children and two grandchildren. His son is the radio voice for the Diamondbacks.)

Along with co-hosting NBC’s “Game of the Week” on Saturdays, Joe Sr. was a radio announcer for the Cardinals.

“In the spring, we would all go down to Florida. My mom would get assignments from my teachers and off we’d go to spring training—which, I can tell you, is a pretty sweet gig to get out of St. Louis in February and March and go down to St. Petersburg,” he recalled.

(For many seasons, Joe Sr. was a TV color commentator for Sunday Diamondbacks games. Joe Jr. didn’t hire him.)

But he and his dad share a few things. Like his father, he’s a member of a Hall of Fame: his dad is in the broadcasting wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, and Joe Jr. is a member of the Arizona Sports Hall of Fame. They also have World Series rings—Joe Sr. with the 1946 Cardinals and Joe Jr. with the 2001 Diamondbacks.

“Was I destined to work in baseball? Well, I certainly never felt any pressure from my dad to ‘follow in his footsteps.’ As I’ve often said, he was a World Series hero in his hometown at age 20, so he didn’t need to have any vicarious baseball experiences through me.

“I guess I’ve always been drawn to the game and have been fortunate to have had a variety of experiences—from working for a club, to being an agent, to being involved in the creation of a franchise, to winning a World Championship, to moving on to the Commissioner’s Office, and finally to returning to a club. In my office, I have the press release announcing my joining the Yankees. It’s dated August 30, 1975, so this summer marked 50 years. It has, as they say, been quite a ride.”

NOTE: The oldest living MVP recipient, Bobby Shantz, turned 100 on September 26. Shantz won the award while pitching for the Philadelphia Athletics, going 24–7 with a 2.48 ERA. He is the last living MLB player to have appeared in the 1940s—and the last living player to have played for Connie Mack. In 1957, when MLB introduced the first Gold Glove Awards, Shantz won that inaugural honor and then won the award every season through 1964, the year he retired.