It was 1971, and Al and Anne Harazin were in Macon, Ga., and suddenly this whopping career gamble was looking like a pretty horrible idea.
The ballpark was falling down. It looked as if it hadn`t seen paint since the Civil War. The local owner was a dentist who stood them up, and the big man in town was a mayor, Ronnie ”Machine Gun” Thompson, who earned his nickname by riding around in a Jeep, gun in tow, looking to quiet racial unrest.
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Al Harazin had come to Macon to see about running a new Double-A franchise for the Baltimore Orioles. He was 28, a labor lawyer in the biggest firm in Cincinnati with a serious case of baseball wanderlust. Partnership and big bucks were soon to be his, but his dream was to run a ballclub.
Harazin had grown up in Chicago, a diehard Cubs fan.
”I was a bleacher bum before there were bleacher bums,” he says, smiling. ”I still feel like a traitor when I go to Wrigley.”
Today, at 48, Harazin is not only the New York Mets` new general manager but front and center in the whole baseball world, which is what doling out $29 million contracts will do for you.
Before heading to Macon, Harazin talked to Dick Wagner, a friend who was the No. 2 guy in the Reds` front office. Harazin told Wagner he wanted to forget law and get into baseball. Wagner told him it was the dumbest idea he`d ever heard, and in Macon, Wagner sure seemed right.
”My wife is looking at me, I`m looking at her, and we`re thinking,
`Let`s go home,` ” Harazin says. ” `Maybe baseball isn`t for us.` ”
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The Harazins decided to give it a day and checked out another site, Asheville, N.C., where the response couldn`t have been more different. Local business leaders greeted them. The Chamber of Commerce promised support. The mayor was a great guy, and unarmed.
Before long, the Harazins were investing their life`s savings-$10,000-to buy 51 percent of the Asheville Orioles. Harazin paid himself $8,000 per year. His wife, a teacher by training, earned $4,000. Labor law had given way to taking tickets, mopping bathrooms, tapping kegs and helping the one-man ground crew whenever it rained.
”Few people in life have the courage to go out and do just what they want to do,” says Charles Lindberg, managing partner at Harazin`s old law firm, Taft, Stettinius and Hollister. ”Out of the blue, buying a minor-league baseball club? Wow. That`s a turn in the road.”
Al Harazin has been with the Mets since 1980. That was when Frank Cashen, who calls him ”the brightest all-around executive in the game today,” lured him away from the Orioles. It was Cashen who got Harazin started, after Harazin heard about the Double-A opening and talked his way into a meeting. The meeting was scheduled to last 10 minutes and went four hours. Frank Cashen was impressed.
Ten weeks ago, Harazin took over for Cashen as Mets GM. The move came at the close of a debacle of a season, at the gate and on the field. It has been some 10 weeks.
Harazin has corraled a widely coveted manager, Jeff Torborg, who was already under contract to the White Sox. Signed Eddie Murray for $7.5 million. Won the Bobby Bonilla Sweepstakes for $29 million. Traded Kevin McReynolds and Gregg Jefferies for former Cy Young award winner Bret Saberhagen.
No matter what one thinks of the cost-effectiveness, the moves were unarguably swift and bold, and quite surprising to Met-watchers who took Harazin to be an unassuming corporate type, a thin guy in a suit whose premier skills were poring over fine print and crunching big numbers.
Those who go way back with him are not surprised at all. They talk of a hard-working guy with boundless enthusiasm and a first-rate mind. He gambled with his own career. So what`s a contract offer?
Lou Gorman, the Boston Red Sox GM who worked with Harazin for four years with the Mets, says with a laugh, ”He made me look good for signing (Roger)
Clemens for $21 million. He`s not afraid to stick his neck out.”
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Harazin`s manager in Asheville was a fellow named Cal Ripken Sr. His batboy was Cal Ripken Jr. ”You knew he was going to be successful in whatever he did,” Ripken Sr. said of Harazin.
At Taft, Stettinius in Cincinnati, he was known not just for his diligence and thoroughness but for the terrific rapport he had with clients, which was why one partner nicknamed him ”Sunshine.” Harazin also was a mainstay on the firm`s softball team. Had the proverbial gun. More than once, the lawyer at first base went home with a raw, red hand.
Behind Harazin`s buttoned-down exterior lurks a bit of P.T. Barnum, a guy who loves to traffic in ideas. Two months ago, when Bonilla was just on the wish list, Harazin called in Jim Ross, the club`s marketing director, and excitedly began tossing around marketing scenarios if Bonilla were to become a Met.
”He was about three or four or five steps ahead of where a normal guy`s mind would`ve been,” Ross says. ”Al has always got ideas.”
One winter in Asheville, Harazin`s house was headquarters for a platoon of college kids, whom he hired to call every soul in the phone book, A to Z, to sell season tickets.
In Baltimore, he recruited area business leaders to help sell ticket plans. Sales doubled in the first season and, 12 years later, the program is still going strong.
He also came up with an Opening Day promotion called ”The Longest Home Run.” The plan was to send the Opening Day ball to Cooperstown, then have a marathoner run the ball the entire 386 miles to Memorial Stadium. It would require covering just over a marathon (26.2 miles) a day for 14 days.
Four days in, the runner pulled an Achilles` tendon. Rather than scrap the whole deal, Harazin recruited longtime Orioles PR man Bob Brown and several others to keep the run alive-along with himself. They split the day`s runs into 13-mile segments.
”I don`t know that you would call it running,” Harazin said. ”Maybe trotting.” Harazin, a quarter-miler in high school, recalls one leg in the Poconos, near Mountaintop, Pa., the highest point in the state. He had about a mile to go on the day`s trip when he looked ahead and saw a long, brutal uphill stretch. ”I said, `Oh, I think I`ll stop right here today and let Bob pick it up in the morning.` I`m not sure he`s ever forgiven me.”
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It was a wonder Harazin got out there at all, given the psychic wounds from one of his last competitive runs in a fraternity competition at Drake University, which he attended before transferring to Northwestern.
The race was the 440. His competition was a bunch of very fit varsity basketball players. Harazin, whose training consisted of a few runs, decided his only shot was starting fast. ”I`m running, doing great,” he says.
”Through 220, still great, I`m leading. At 330, I`m still here. I`m into the stretch, going good, and all of a sudden the finish line looks to be moving farther away. I`m starting to lean a little bit.
”They tell me about 10 feet in front of the finish line, I went down nose-first. Passed out cold. Had cinders on my hands, cinders on my knees. I literally ran myself into the ground.” Harazin smiles and says, ”I ran a great 430.”
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There`s another story Harazin tells on himself. He has a severe allergy to nuts. One day in Baltimore, he went for a piece of coffee cake. He didn`t see any nuts, was assured there weren`t any, but there he was a short while later, eyes swollen shut, breathing with difficult and a rash spreading like a juicy rumor. The itching was unbearable, set off by the slightest irritation, so Harazin did the only sensible thing, taking off all his clothes. He worked in the raw for the next three hours, until his wife arrived with the needed medications.
”She tapped on my door, walked in, and there I was, sitting at my desk without a stitch on,” he says.
He is on a non-stop nut-watch now, and keeps track of many other important details, too. He loves details. During one game last summer, he sought out Ross for a discussion on how they would accommodate expansion teams on an already-tight out-of-town scoreboard.
”Who knows why, at that point, he was thinking about whether we would have room for an expansion score in 1993?” Ross says. ”His attention to every little thing is almost scary.”
Bonilla might vouch for that. Not only did Harazin send him a Mets jersey with his name and No. 23 on it, he sent a Steuben glass apple to Bonilla`s wife, Millie, along with a note saying he was sorry she hadn`t been able to join them when Bonilla and Harazin met for dinner. The same mindset moved Harazin to get on a train and go to Baltimore in the wooing of Murray.
”Gestures mean a lot,” he says. ”I wanted to show them that I had a little more interest than the next guy. You try to separate yourself from the pack.”
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Harazin believes that enthusiasm is the greatest attribute a person can have. ”I`ve always seen myself as somebody who got up in the morning and couldn`t wait to get going,” he says.
He has gotten going plenty over the last 10 weeks, taken risks, hit some front-office home runs. Al Harazin has surprised some people, who do not include Cal Ripken Sr., who could see much of this coming 19 years ago in Asheville, N.C.
”It`s like we tell our own kids: `Do what you want to do, if you can do it,` ” Ripken says. ”Al made a big gamble, but he wanted to be in baseball and he pursued it, worked hard at it. He involved himself with every facet of it. I have a lot of admiration for him.”