Tom Fitzgerald - San Francisco Chronicle (SFGate)
Larry Baer is a master at working a room. Especially his own room.
It's another sun-drenched afternoon at AT&T Park, and he's on the concourse. Every few steps he pauses to shake hands with a hot-dog vendor, a security guard or a paying customer. He could pass for a veteran politician.
In fact, a former club employee said the Giants "have resembled more of a political machine than a baseball team." Baer has been the No. 2 person in the organization since 1992. No. 2 or not, it's been his machine.
Baer, 51, admits having dreamed of being mayor of San Francisco but says he got over it. "He's got a better job," said retiring president Peter Magowan, whom Baer will officially replace Wednesday when Bill Neukom takes over as managing general partner.
Baer is considered the driving force in the organization, but the former employee, who asked not to be named, thinks his ex-boss at times is a little too full of himself. He quipped that Baer's epitaph should read: "Nothing important ever happened without me."
When it comes to the last 16 years of Giants history, however, that's undoubtedly true. And it is likely to continue that way for the foreseeable future. Every major decision the club has made - from Barry Bonds to the price of garlic fries - has his fingerprints all over it.
While Neukom will handle the broad organization decisions, the lanky, garrulous guy with the frizzy hair will increase his authority over baseball issues, such as player payroll and the front office.
As always, Baer will be both the Giants' hatchet man and their No. 1 cheerleader. Part of his job is to yell at KNBR boss Tony Salvadore or local TV executives if the team isn't feeling the love.
"If you cut him open, the blood would be black and orange," said Jeff Krolik, executive vice president of Fox Sports Regional Networks.
General manager Brian Sabean describes his relationship with Baer as "brutally open. I think that's one of the reasons I've survived in the long term. He'll vent to me and vice versa."
Baer promised he wouldn't "for a minute pretend to be a judge of baseball talent." He said his role would be to determine the level of resources at the major- and minor-league levels. "Are we organized right? Are the spring-training complexes set up right? Do we have enough going on in Latin America? In Japan?"
He said the player payroll for next year, excluding deferred money to former players, will approach $90 million. "The question is: How do we take this up a significant notch, knowing that dollars doesn't equal success? The Yankees have a $200 million payroll and they didn't make the playoffs, while the Rays, with $45 million, did."
Buoyed by a bevy of prospects, Baer paints a rosy picture of the future despite the reality of a fourth straight losing season. On the other hand, give Baer a few minutes to think about it, and he could make a leaky dinghy sound like an America's Cup favorite.
Wired for sports business
Baer is a perfect fit for his job, given his enormous energy and his credentials as a longtime fan of his hometown team, a former broadcast executive and a political junkie. A deft networker, he harnessed a team of financial heavy hitters to buy the Giants in 1992. Magowan was enlisted as managing partner of the organization. He agreed, on the condition that Baer, then working for CBS, become No. 2.
Baer's father, Monroe, now 85, was an antitrust attorney who often took the youngster on the bus to Candlestick Park, where they sat in section 19 by the Giants' bullpen. "It was heaven," Baer said.
His sister, Leslie Carrington, said he was a regular caller to Giants boss Chub Feeney's radio show. "Once he even said, 'Here's my sister,' and put me on," she said.
At Lowell High, he headed the student newspaper, The Lowell, which inveighed against the school's admissions policies, criticized a booster club's financing of a trip for teachers and students to Hawaii, and endorsed school board candidates.
Bennett Freeman, now an executive for the Calvert investment group, succeeded him as editor-in-chief. "The principal was not unhappy when we graduated," he said. "We were energetic, nice Jewish boys who knew how to be s- disturbers.
"If there's anybody I've known who was destined to do what they do, it's Larry Baer. His passions - going back to when he was a kid - were baseball, the Giants, San Francisco, politics and the media."
While at Cal, Baer and pal Andy Coblentz cooked up a scheme to ride every Muni line in San Francisco in one day. "Being the consummate marketing guy, Larry got hold of KRON, and it became a complete media experience," Coblentz said.
By the time he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cal, Baer had done radio play-by-play on A's games, sold advertising and produced game broadcasts for KNEW, and served as marketing director of the San Francisco Pioneers, a fledgling women's pro basketball team.
Brazen deal-maker
As sports director at the campus station, he called up irascible A's owner Charles Finley in 1978 and offered to do the team's radio broadcasts. Finley was considering selling the team to Marvin Davis in Denver.
"Mr. Baer, b- walks; money talks," Finley told him. "How much are you going to pay me?"
Nothing, Baer said.
It's a deal, Finley replied.
Finley didn't have a radio deal at the time and - what the heck - the team was going to be moving to Denver in a few weeks anyway.
"He said to send a dollar in the mail," Baer said. "Somebody said it was the first one-figure contract in the history of broadcasting."
The A's didn't go to Denver, but after 23 games on the campus station, Finley landed a deal on KNEW, and Baer was invited to produce the broadcasts by Bud Foster and Curt Flood.
The lure of the business world supplanted not only his broadcasting aspirations but his intentions of following his dad into law.
He became the Giants' marketing director for three years, attended Harvard Business School and spent the next decade with Westinghouse Broadcasting and CBS, the latter as special assistant to chairman Lawrence Tisch. One of Baer's tasks was to explain to Dan Rather why CBS would no longer cover the political conventions wall-to-wall.
The broadcast experience prepared him for life as a baseball executive and no doubt taught him the importance of star power. He personally negotiated the deal for free agent Barry Bonds even before the Giants' new ownership group had Major League Baseball's seal of approval.
One former club employee said the decision years later to retain Bonds in the face of steroid allegations "came from Larry. I'll bet you that it wore on Peter (Magowan) that he was getting blamed."
The ex-employee said, "There's a lot of people even within the organization who feel his style wears you out a little bit. People who worked with him wonder how genuine he is."
Another former Giants hand said Baer's zeal for the team frequently crosses into self-promotion, saying he has on occasion alerted the TV crew so that the cameras can capture him "spontaneously" giving a Giants cap to a celebrity sitting next to him.
But his supporters inside and outside the organization stress his bulldog loyalty to the team.
"I think his first thought when he gets up in the morning is about the Giants, and his last thought before he goes to bed is about the Giants," said Ted Griggs, general manager of Comcast SportsNet Bay Area, which the Giants partially own. "He's as competitive as they come and he's relentless, and that's a great trait to have."
About Baer
-- Fourth-generation San Franciscan
-- Lowell High graduate
-- Cal graduate
-- Giants executive vice president since 1992
-- Responsible for organization's day-to-day functioning
-- Key figure in getting AT&T Park built
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