Baseball
John W. Henry grew up a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, especially their star Stan Musial. After acquiring his fortune, his first foray into professional sports was in purchasing a AAA minor league team – the Tucson Toros of the Pacific Coast League in 1989. He was also one of the founders of the Senior Professional Baseball Association (a winter league in Florida composed of retired Major League players). Henry co-owned the winning team in 1989–1990 – the West Palm Beach Tropics managed by former Boston Red Sox Impossible Dream (1967) manager, Dick Williams. He sold his interest in 1990 and the league went out of business the following year. In 1990, Henry negotiated to purchase the Orlando Magic NBA team, for a short time was the lead general for an expansion team which became the Colorado Rockies, headed a group attempting to land an NHL expansion bid for South Florida which ended up going to Tampa Bay, pre-dating South Florida's more successful NHL expansion bid soon after by Wayne Huizenga. Subsequently, Henry negotiated to buy the Miami Heat and later the New Jersey Nets.
Henry entered Major League Baseball with his purchase of a small interest in the New York Yankees in 1991. Henry became the sole owner of the Florida Marlins in 1999, purchasing the Major League club from Huizenga for a reported $158,000,000. In January 2002 Henry sold the Marlins in a multi-franchise deal to Jeffrey Loria then owner of the Montreal Expos (now the Washington Nationals). Simultaneously, Henry led a purchase of the Boston Red Sox with partners Tom Werner and the New York Times Company from the Yawkey Trust headed by John Harrington. Henry, as principal owner and, Werner, as chairman, assembled a front office team headed up by Larry Lucchino with the express goal of "breaking the Curse of the Bambino." He accomplished this feat in the 2004 World Series, against his former childhood favorite Cardinals, and again in 2007, against a franchise with which he had pre-expansion involvement, the Rockies. He is also responsible for saving Fenway Park from the wrecking ball. The previous Red Sox owners had planned on building a new Fenway Park next door, but Henry chose to keep and renovate (including new seats over the Green Monster) the current Fenway Park, which celebrated its centennial in 2012.
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Famous quotes containing the word baseball:
“I don’t like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, but it isn’t exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.”
—Bowie Kuhn (b. 1926)
“When Dad can’t get the diaper on straight, we laugh at him as though he were trying to walk around in high-heel shoes. Do we ever assist him by pointing out that all you have to do is lay out the diaper like a baseball diamond, put the kid’s butt on the pitcher’s mound, bring home plate up, then fasten the tapes at first and third base?”
—Michael K. Meyerhoff (20th century)
“Compared to football, baseball is almost an Oriental game, minimizing individual stardom, requiring a wide range of aggressive and defensive skills, and filled with long periods of inaction and irresolution. It has no time limitations. Football, on the other hand, has immediate goals, resolution on every single play, and a lot of violence—itself a highlight. It has clearly distinguishable hierarchies: heroes and drones.”
—Jerry Mander, U.S. advertising executive, author. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, ch. 15, Morrow (1978)