When Toronto finally won an MLB franchise in 1976, Paul Beeston had to answer a simple question: How do you start a baseball team?
It says something about how far professional sports have come in the last 30-odd years that the Toronto Blue Jays were once run by 28 people. That includes front-office executives, ticket sellers, marketing department, public-relations office, stadium operations—the whole thing. Paul Beeston was the first of those 28 people hired—as an accountant, no less—when Toronto was granted a major-league franchise in 1976. He remembers a time when the entire organization had an operating budget of less than $5 million. Now the team pays Jose Bautista nearly three times that every season. “It’s a completely different operation now,” Beeston says, chewing on a cigar in the spacious Rogers Centre office he enjoys as the club’s president. It certainly is; maybe the only thing that’s remained the same is Beeston himself, who was instrumental in taking a legal entity titled Metro Baseball, Ltd., and turning it into the multi-million-dollar franchise it is today.
Don McDougall, the former president of Labatt Brewing Company, was the driving force behind bringing pro baseball to Toronto. Along with Peter Hardy, a former Labatt chairman, he doggedly pursued a franchise for years, eventually working out an agreement to purchase the San Francisco Giants for $13.25 million and move them to Toronto for the 1976 season. When that deal fell through, he paid MLB $7.5 million—with the help of CIBC and Imperial Trust—for the rights to an expansion franchise that was slated to begin competition in 1977.
With the franchise secured and Exhibition Stadium fixed up with new seating and facilities to house the team, the next challenge was both simple and complex: How do you create a professional baseball team? “You’re talking about starting completely from scratch,” Beeston says. “We had a fairly long checklist.”
You could spend years just sorting out the business side of the equation: acquiring concessions contracts, selling media rights, setting prices, creating a brand, licensing merchandise and on and on. But Beeston et al. decided their foremost concern was the product on the field. “You have to have something to sell,” Beeston says. “Otherwise you’ve got nothing, and people will see that very clearly.” Peter Bavasi was brought over from the Padres to be the GM, and Pat Gillick, who had worked as a farm director for the Astros and director of scouting for the Yankees, was brought in as assistant GM. While Bavasi was officially in charge of baseball operations, he remained more involved with the business side of the club, while Gillick—who sold the Blue Jays on a vision for a pitching-focused, speedy, defensively sound team—handled the majority of the roster management. “He did the scouting, he put together the team, he did the draft, all of it,” Beeston says. “It’s a tremendous challenge. But he had a clean slate with no expectations and was heavily financed. That’s pretty good.”
Gillick’s first priority was staffing the scouting and development branches of the organization with like-minded individuals with whom he had come in contact during his time in the game and trusted absolutely. That meant giving veteran scouts like Bobby Mattick, Al LaMacchia and Epy Guerrero full-time jobs. “Building a baseball team is like building a house,” Gillick says. “You look for the best architects, the best builders—and then you let them do their jobs.” Maybe the biggest challenge in that critical first year was acquiring talent. The league held an expansion draft, allowing teams to protect 15 players. Of the rest, some had no-movement clauses or 10-and-5 rights that meant they couldn’t be selected. Still others were pending free agents, meaning they could have immediately left the Jays for another team without playing a game in Toronto. Gillick took the best players available, but he was essentially acquiring the 24th or 25th guy on each team’s depth chart. The teams he constructed in 1977 and 1978 were glorified triple-A clubs—the biggest names included Alan Ashby, Ernie Whitt and Ron Fairly, who led the team in home runs in the inaugural season with 19. But at that time, the focus was simply on putting a team on the field, not winning.
And it’s not like Gillick had the option of promoting from within. On opening day in 1977, the Blue Jays had yet to establish a minor-league system. That meant the club had just 41 players in the organization, with a total payroll of $760,000. If there had been a bad string of injuries, Gillick would have likely had to take on a burdensome contract from another team just to get a warm body in the lineup.
The Blue Jays won just 54 games in that inaugural season and didn’t crack 60 until 1980, when they won 67. In fact, the team finished last in the American League in its first five years of existence. But Gillick patiently bided his time, using the draft to acquire pieces that would prove crucial in the future, including Lloyd Moseby and Dave Stieb in 1978 and Jimmy Key in 1982. Meanwhile, he and Beeston continued to funnel money into development at each level of the minor leagues, which helped groom the crop of Blue Jays who helped turn the team around in the 1980s. When Gillick started with the Jays, he figured it would take about 10 years for the team to be a contender. In 1985, one year early, Toronto won the American League East with 99 wins and went to the playoffs. “The most difficult thing about it is keeping your wits about you and not deviating from the plan. These things take time. It’s not all going to suddenly come together at once,” Gillick says. “Everybody now is too impatient. Everybody wants something right now; they want instant gratification. It just doesn’t happen.”
In exchange for their patience, Gillick and Beeston got a pair of World Series championships in 1992 and 1993. The trophies sit in glass cases at the Rogers Centre, just down the hall from Beeston’s office where he pulls a long cigar from a wooden box and searches for his cutter. “It was a different business back then. There weren’t the same television dollars or advertising dollars. We just sold tickets,” Beeston says, kicking his feet up on his desk. “We were just 28 people. Today we probably have 50 in ticketing alone.”
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.