Second of three parts

Good morning!

After the Oakland Athletics won the 1988 World Series, National League president Bobby Brown asked Steve McKelvey if in his spare time he could do the following season’s umpire schedule. It was, he said, “The most exasperating assignment I ever had.

“It was all done by hand, no computer. You had the crew and the schedule, and I’d randomly put a crew with a series and no matter how many times I tried to do it, I wound up with with a crew umpiring more games with one team than another team.

“There were other variables, a crew could only see so many teams within a certain time frame, they had to be distributed geographically and one or two other things would always be out of synch. I gave up after a month, I couldn’t do it.”

It still rankles him. Asked if he knew who finally did solve the Rubik’s Cube he said, “No, but I know they played the next season. They must’ve turned it over to someone with more free time on their hands.”

Salary arbitration and free agency are a compromise between the players and owners. Players can file for salary arbitration after their third year of MLB service and for free agency after their sixth year. McKelvey was a consultant to the Players Relations Committee and sat in on several salary arbitration hearings.

“During a break, I was sitting next to one of Scott Boras’ players and asked him, ‘How do you like Scott Boras?’ ‘I don’t know, I just met him today,’ he said. He’s got like 70 people working for him.”

The two sides remain at loggerheads, and McKelvey’s seen it from both sides. Today he’s an agent with the DiaMMond Management Group, then he was doing whatever he could to curb high salaries.

“I researched how players performed after their free agent signings compared to before by using simple statistics like batting average, on-base percentage and earned run average,” he said.

He showed his findings to the head of MLB’s Player Relations Committee Lee MacPhail: “In summary, 61 percent of the players during the past three seasons—1983-85— have had significantly subpar performances in the season directly following their signing as a free agent.”

Inexplicably, MacPhail showed McKelvey’s report to Hal Bodley at USA Today whose article on Nov. 15, 1985, was headlined: MacPhail: Long contracts can bring long healing time

The document helped MLB Players Association director Donald Fehr win a $180 million judgment against the owners for collusion.

“They didn’t take it out of my salary,” joked McKelvey, who still has the typewritten report in the same faded red binder he gave to MacPhail. 

Years later he assigned the same project he did for MacPhail to one of his students in the UMass sport management program and told him to use today’s analytics. “Same result,” he said, “free agents don’t perform as well during their first year with a new team.”

Leaving corporate America

Working in New York City was a corporate roller coaster for McKelvey. He left MLB for other marketing jobs in 1991 and was ready for a bus ticket home after 9/11.

In 2002 he was offered a teaching position at UMass that eventually became a full professorship teaching sport law and marketing in one of the seven departments that make up the Isenberg School of Management.

Named for the sports marketing pioneer who founded the International Management Group in 1960, the Mark H. McCormack Department of Sport Management is ranked as the best post graduate program of its kind in the world. “We don’t have people who have backgrounds, we have people who have PhDs — in marketing, in law, in economics… that’s critical,” said McKelvey.

McCormack wrote a 1984 bestseller, The Terrible Truth About Lawyers and What They Don’t Tell You at Harvard Business School. He had a larger than life persona. He was Arnold Palmer’s lifelong friend and business partner, devised the world golf rankings, was named the most powerful man in sports in 1990, and was posthumously inducted into the golf and tennis halls of fame.

Seven years after he died of a heart attack in New York City, UMass put his name in front of the Department of Sport Management. “They gave us money to put the department in his name and keep his legacy alive,” said McKelvey. “Thirty-thousand of his legal boxes are on the 25th floor of the Du Bois Library. That was an absolute coup on our behalf to UMass.”

Dozens of McCormack School graduates work in Major League front offices, including Cleveland’s  president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti, Detroit Tigers assistant GM Rob Metzler, Yankees’ manager of minor league operations Nick Avanzato, and Houston’s amateur scouting coordinator TJ Tullis.

Another grad, former Red Sox general manager Ben Cherington, is currently the GM of the Pittsburgh Pirates. 

Said McKelvey: “We’ve been responsible for creating the single largest pipeline of front office baseball talent in the world.”

Chip Ainsworth is an award-winning columnist who has penned his observations about sports for decades in the Pioneer Valley. He can be reached at chipjet715@gmail.com.