First-year Orioles owner David Rubenstein answered a number of questions from BaltimoreBaseball.com’s Rich Dubroff on Tuesday. Rubenstein, whose group bought the Orioles for $1.725 billion in a sale approved in March, spoke on a number of topics, including his background and the outlook for next Tuesday’s trade deadline. Part 2 of the conversation will run on Friday. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Question: How is it suddenly being a public figure?
Rubenstein: “The people who know who I am now are people who are baseball people or people in Baltimore, perhaps. For many years, I’ve been reasonably well known, I would say, in philanthropic circles or private equity circles. It’s not all of a sudden that I’ve become well known and have to adjust to that fact. The difference is that in the private equity world or the philanthropic world, people aren’t coming up and asking for selfies all the time or signing balls or things like that. I don’t want to make it sound like I went from oblivion to being a public figure because to be honest for many years now I’ve had a TV show on Bloomberg and been on various TV things and [public relations representative Chris Ullman] has done a wonderful job of making me seem better than I am to the press. To answer your question directly, I guess, I recognize that people are happy to see me because we’re winning. If we were losing, I don’t think people would be so happy to see me. When I go to Camden Yards and I throw out hats or baseballs or jerseys or whatever I’m doing, people are happy because they’re getting something for free, perhaps, but also because the Orioles are winning. If the Orioles were losing, I wouldn’t be so popular, so I realize it’s a little ephemeral.”
Question: What was it like taking over a team that was really good? Most times, teams are sold when they’re not very good or in flux.
Rubenstein: “It was better than the alternative, right? If you are going to buy a team and, as you say, spend three or four years trying to fix it, it’s more of a struggle. The team that we bought had done extremely well last year and is doing as well this year, so it’s obviously a more pleasurable experience. I haven’t owned a team that struggled or was in last place or anything like that. I imagine when the previous owners were struggling with the team, it wasn’t very pleasant, for sure.”
Question: Do you find it hard watching games now?
Rubenstein: “I find it easy to watch them when we’re ahead and harder to watch them when we’re behind, so I have had these experiences with another sports team that I’ve been involved with or close to, the Duke University basketball team. As you probably read, I was the Chairman of the Board at Duke University. We won a national championship in basketball when I was the chair, and I lived and died Duke Blue Devil basketball. When the team wasn’t doing well, I had a hard time watching. When the team was doing well, I loved watching. The same is true now. The thing with baseball, and what other people tell me, is there’s always another game tomorrow, so if you’re not doing well, you’ve got to get over it and focus on the next game. But sure, it’s more fun to watch teams when they’re winning and less fun when you’re losing five in a row or something like that. It’s not much fun.”
Question: Has anything surprised you about the business of baseball?
Rubenstein: “I did a fair amount of reading and talking to people before we bought the team, so I can’t say I’m completely surprised by many things, but to some extent, my situation is not unlike Rip Van Winkle. I knew a lot about baseball as a kid and followed the Orioles extremely closely when I was living in Baltimore and then when I went away to college, my mother threw away my baseball cards and all my record books, the Red Book and all the other things about baseball records, and I went into a different career path for a long time. As I’ve returned to watch baseball, I can see that it’s a completely different game than it was when I was a kid. Obviously, the sabermetrics are a completely different kind of animal than the statistics I used to pay attention to. The opportunities and ways to watch games and see how the games are being played on television is much different than it used to be. The national sports environment is different. It used to be that baseball was considered America’s national pastime and in the last 40 or 50 years or so, the NFL, the NBA and a lot of other sports have come along and taken some of the interest away from baseball. Those are some of the changes and obviously I’ve observed them. We’re trying in baseball to get more people to come to the games and younger people to be more attentive to it and trying to make it an exciting experience. Remember, it’s a business, but it’s also a sport, so we want to be competitive and do well, but we don’t want to lose money or basically have an operation where people don’t want to work at it because we can’t afford to pay people what they think they should be paid.”
Question: Have you been able to translate any of the things that you’ve learned in private equity in your business career to running a team?
Rubenstein: “It’s hard to answer that because I don’t want to sound like I’m running the team day-to-day. The team has managements that are running it day-to-day. I’m one of the owners, but I’m not day-to-day running it to the extent that I might be in some private equity situation, though there I wasn’t really running the companies either. I was running for a while with a partner, Carlyle. I think what I learned in private equity is how to judge good people and people who are not as good, how to motivate people, how to treat people with respect, how to get people excited about something, how to become a leader. Those are the kinds of things I learned rather than the ins and outs of baseball or the ins and outs of a balance sheet.”
Question: The trade deadline is only six days away. Mike Elias has said the new owners are very supportive. Are you willing to significantly increase payroll next week to add players?
Rubenstein: “I would entertain anything that Mike Elias recommends. He was the general manager of the year last year in the American League. He knows baseball infinitely better than I do and so I’m waiting for his recommendations. He’s a smart person. He would know what’s realistic and what’s achievable or not, so I don’t want to come in and say, ‘I’ve got a big bag of money and I just don’t know what to do with it, so go flutter it around on some players.’ I want to wait for his recommendations because I’ve worked with him and observed him. He’s very careful, very cautious. I’m going to rely on his recommendations.”