Champions: Northern Star

Paul Beeston has been the driving force for baseball in Toronto for more than 40 years, serving two stints as president of the Blue Jays.jim courtney

There is no figure more tied to the Toronto Blue Jays than its president emeritus, Paul Beeston. He was the club’s first employee hired after the franchise came into existence in 1976 and has remained deeply connected to the Blue Jays over the ensuing 42 years.

But it all very nearly never happened.

A 30-year-old Beeston was at a career crossroads when Canadian brewing giant Labatt agreed in early 1976 to buy the San Francisco Giants from Horace Stoneham and move the club to Toronto. Beeston was about to make partner at Coopers & Lybrand, the accounting firm with which he had spent most of the prior decade, and was successfully lured by then-Labatt President Don McDougall to instead help set up the team in its new home.

“And then the thing cratered,” Beeston said, referring to minority Giants owner Bob Lurie’s 11th-hour move to keep the club in the Bay Area and become majority owner, scuttling the move north. “I’ll be honest with you. I thought it was all over.”

With his career prospects uncertain, Beeston’s prospective life in baseball was soon resurrected when Labatt a few months later persuaded the American League to make Toronto an expansion city along with Seattle. 

“Some angel up there has looked after me. There is no question. I’ve been so lucky,” said Beeston, now 72. “I watched this thing go from a possibility to no possibility and then to a reality. And now to see it grow to what it’s now become, what a thrill and what good fortune.”

But Beeston was anything but a mere passenger in the development of baseball in Canada’s largest city, and is frequently branded as the heart and soul of the franchise. Combining a keen intellect and financial aptitude from his accounting days with a buoyant, outgoing personality, Beeston was quickly able to marshal the Blue Jays into a competitive force on and off the field.

On his watch, the club won two World Series, reached the playoffs six times, opened what is now the Rogers Centre, solidified itself as a linchpin of Canadian culture, and became the first and still just one of four franchises to surpass 4 million in annual attendance. 

“His contributions are so huge,” said McDougall, now working in real estate development in Ontario. “He has basically been a major source of the organization’s culture and has been the influence of so many things the Blue Jays have done. And he has a rather unique skill set. He has been able to deal at once with shareholders and the business, the public relations element, and the on-field component, and easily cross between the numbers and the relationships.”

Spliced within two long runs as Blue Jays president and chief executive was a five-year stint between 1997 and 2002 working at Major League Baseball headquarters for then-Commissioner Bud Selig as president and chief operating officer. There, Beeston helped oversee the creation of MLB Advanced Media, the unification of the American and National Leagues into a single business entity, the beginnings of large-scale revenue sharing, and an array of other industry reforms.

“You never had to write any scripts for Paul,” Selig said. “He always knew what to do. That was an amazing time for us. A lot of things were changing, and he was right in the center of it.”

Small-Town Upbringing

Long before those series of events, Beeston enjoyed an almost Mayberry-like upbringing growing up in the 1950s in small-town Welland, Ontario, about 15 miles from the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Beeston’s father, Frank, was a high school teacher with a strong commitment to family.

“He really was a role model for me, and his whole deal was family,” Beeston said. “We always ate dinner together at 6 o’clock every night. Didn’t matter if you were only there for five minutes and then off again. But you still had to be there at 6 o’clock.”

Beeston, shown with Blue Jays merchandise in 1977, joined the franchise after working as an accountant and trying to help Labatt relocate the San Francisco Giants to Toronto.getty images

But even more powerful than those shared meals was Frank’s influence in instilling a positive and prejudice-free outlook upon his son, and a strong belief in what could be possible. That was particularly impactful growing up after World War II in a town with a broad collection of ethnicities.

“We were never allowed to use the word ‘hate’ in our house. You don’t hate people or hate things,” Beeston said. “You may not like certain things, it might be distasteful, but that wasn’t a word we used. So now, I don’t see how you achieve anything thinking negative. You may question things and have certain days where you don’t really understand why. But at the end of the day, if you’re thinking positive, you have a better chance of getting to a resolution.”

Beeston admits he didn’t have much of a defined career plan upon graduating from high school. But after studying economics and political science at the University of Western Ontario, it was a planned post-graduate trip to Europe that led him, essentially by happenstance, toward accounting.

“I interviewed with the accounting firms in London, Ontario, because I was going to go to Europe and I needed some money,” he said. “So I interviewed with whoever was paying the most, and I just fell in love with accounting. I loved the work, the audits, the people I ended up meeting. So I ended up seeing it through, getting my CA, which is now a CPA designation. And without that, I wouldn’t be here because they weren’t looking for a sales person when the Blue Jays were starting. They wanted a finance person.”

After meeting Beeston in London, Ontario, through a mutual friend, McDougall quickly forged a strong relationship with the young accountant. That bond arrived in part through regular trips to Detroit to see the Tigers, just as Beeston had done in his youth with his father. But McDougall acknowledges there was still a leap of faith required in entrusting the fledgling Blue Jays operation to Beeston.

Beeston and fellow Blue Jays executive Ron Millichamp hawk tickets to the expansion franchise in 1976.getty images

“How did I know he would be a great baseball executive? I didn’t,” McDougall said. “This was basically a startup. But we were optimistic we could be successful, and Paul’s outlook was certainly part of it.”

That optimism would be tested immediately from the Blue Jays’ inaugural game, played April 7, 1977, before a sold-out Exhibition Stadium crowd. Despite the 9-5 Blue Jays win over the Chicago White Sox with then-MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and American League President Lee MacPhail in attendance, one crisis after another marked the day.

It snowed, as if confirming to skeptical Americans the folly of putting more baseball in the Great White North. A Zamboni was required to clean the artificial turf field. Plenty of fans missed the start of the game due to congestion at the gates. And with beer sales not starting at the facility until 1982, the shivering masses began chanting, “We want beer!”

But even with the Blue Jays operating in a legendary hockey town and losing 100 games each of their first three seasons, Beeston said the notion of selling baseball in Toronto wasn’t overwhelming.

“It wasn’t as difficult as you would think,” he said. “This wasn’t taking baseball to a country that had never played it before. We knew baseball. There obviously was a team in Montreal. We had lots of people like Ferguson Jenkins come from here. We weren’t the neophytes people thought we were. We had the worst stadium in sports, but it was ours, and we drew 1.7 million that first year,” good for fourth in the American League.

Rise To Glory

Those early, undermanned Blue Jays teams quickly gave way to a sustained run of excellence under Beeston and General Manager Pat Gillick. First built largely with homegrown talent and later supplemented with key free agents, the Blue Jays posted 11 consecutive winning teams between 1983 and 1993, peaking with World Series champion teams in 1992 and ’93 that included six eventual Hall of Famers.

“The whole country came together. It sounds a bit strange, since the Expos were still here then. But we were Canada’s team at that point,” Beeston said. “It was absolutely special. And here, the players embraced the city, and the city embraced the players.”

But even more than just winning those two championships, Beeston was leading a franchise that for about a half-decade was the center of the baseball universe. On top of the two titles and playing host to the 1991 MLB All-Star Game, the Blue Jays in 1989 opened the SkyDome, later renamed the Rogers Centre.

Beeston with his ever-present cigar in 1997, not long before his first Blue Jays stint ended and he joined MLB’s league office.getty images

Built on a former railway switching yard, the $570 million (Canadian) facility was the first stadium to feature a motorized, fully retractable roof. And with the SkyDome predating the opening of Oriole Park at Camden Yards by three years and the retro-design craze that facility spawned, the SkyDome’s futuristic look was just as removed from the bland, doughnut-shaped multipurpose stadiums dotted through the United States.

Beeston was a key figure in the complex development that involved provincial and city governments, the Blue Jays, three breweries, and more than two dozen other corporations all contributing to the construction cost. And from the moment it opened, the SkyDome was an immediate and historic smash. It ultimately pushed the activity of downtown Toronto farther west and helped create a larger entertainment district that later would also include the Air Canada Centre and a collection of theaters, music halls and other tourist attractions.

The Blue Jays drew 3.9 million in attendance in 1990, the team’s first full year there, and then topped 4 million each of the next three seasons, a sum only matched in later years by the Colorado Rockies and New York Yankees and Mets.

“We never thought it was going to end back then,” Beeston said. “And remember, we weren’t some type of ‘small-market’ team. Back in those days, we were frequently No. 1 or No. 2 in the league in payroll, generating a ton of revenue.”

And during those lofty days of success, it was again Beeston who was the jovial face of the franchise.

“It’s hard to think of somebody more comfortable in his own shoes than Paul,” said Larry Lucchino, Boston Red Sox president emeritus, who has known Beeston for more than 30 years. “You’re talking about an incredibly authentic, open, genuine and fun-loving guy with such an overriding passion for baseball.” 

Lucchino also helped oversee the 2013 hiring of Beeston’s son, David, as Red Sox senior vice president and strategic counsel. The younger Beeston had a successful law career before joining the Red Sox on his own merit. But Lucchino still acknowledges the influence of “good breeding” from his longtime friend on the hire.

The Blue Jays’ good times of the early ’90s did eventually end. The 1994 MLB labor dispute significantly eroded fan interest in Toronto, as it did in many markets. And one by one, the veteran heroes from the championship clubs saw their careers come to an end in Toronto or elsewhere.

Beeston sought to revive the club’s fortunes in late 1996 by landing star free agent pitcher Roger Clemens, beating out a fervent push for Clemens’ services from the New York Yankees and then-owner George Steinbrenner. Clemens would go on to win pitching’s Triple Crown and the Cy Young Award each of the next two years. But an initially secret side deal that allowed Clemens to seek a trade if desired and veto any ones he didn’t like put Beeston in hot water. He was fined, and Selig banned such deals leaguewide.

“It’s not my proudest moment, but I’m not sure he would have signed if we hadn’t done that,” Beeston said. “I shouldn’t have done it. It should have been in the contract. But did I do it? Yeah.”

Move To New York

As the Clemens contract was coming together at the end of 1996, a confluence of other events led to Beeston shifting out of his home country and to New York for five years. Club owner Labatt had been sold the previous year to Belgian brewing company Interbrew, and with the shift came a sense there would be a diminished corporate priority for the baseball team. Interbrew soon began quiet efforts to sell the club, and after some delays, ultimately completed a sale to Rogers Communications in 2000.

As Interbrew took control of Labatt, and by extension the Blue Jays, then-interim Commissioner Selig was also making changes of his own. Still wounded by the 1994 labor dispute and by growing competitive imbalance, Selig sought to make changes both in staffing and policy to re-energize the sport. And among those shifts was bringing Beeston to the league office in a newly created post of president and COO.

“It was important to me to have someone in the office there who knew how to run a franchise and understood the needs of the clubs,” Selig said.

Beeston admitted to some initial trepidation in taking the job. But part of him was also drawn to working in New York. And the five-year period was marked by a series of historic shifts within the game. In addition to the formation of MLBAM and unification of the AL and NL, the period also saw the hiring of current MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred as a full-time league employee, a divisional realignment, the introduction of interleague play, the arrival of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Rays as new franchises, and the establishment of Selig as permanent commissioner.

“I look back at that period with no regrets,” Beeston said. “I worked with a lot of great people, and we made a lot of important changes that continue to this day.”

Beeston also played a sizable role in helping Fox Sports get established as a national broadcast partner for MLB. The network first broadcast baseball in 1996, and then took on the World Series full time starting in 2000.

“Coming off the players’ strike, America’s pastime was downtime, and there was little excitement, little buzz, little of anything really,” said former Fox Sports Chairman David Hill. “Fox Sports had just become the proud owner of a set of storied rights, which were generating very little of anything. Then Commissioner Selig played a blinder. In comes Paul Beeston.

“Paul’s brilliance was that he had a total understanding of the fans, what they wanted, how to keep them excited, and how to keep them coming back. And that was because there wasn’t a bigger baseball fan in the world than Paul Beeston. His enthusiasm, passion and love of the game, the players, its history, everything about it, was palpable.”

Disagreements between Selig and Beeston over labor policy leading up to and during the fractious 2002 set of collective-bargaining negotiations led to the end of Beeston’s time in New York. But 16 years later, neither man speaks ill of the other.

“I’m practical enough to know when it’s time to move on,” Beeston said. “And I knew I couldn’t agree with a lot of [Selig’s] philosophies and what he was doing, but I liked him as a person. And it was time for me to move on. And that didn’t make me right. I respected what he was doing. I just didn’t want to be part of it.”

Return To Toronto

After leaving MLB in early 2002, Beeston was essentially out of baseball for more than six years. He kept an office at the SkyDome, renamed to the Rogers Centre in 2005. But that period was largely marked by a corporate board and philanthropic work, most notably a three-year run as chairman of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Canada’s largest mental health and addiction teaching hospital. Beeston called that chairmanship and the institution’s role in expanding awareness of mental health issues “probably the most rewarding thing I’ve done, including baseball.”

But the sport again called Beeston back. Rogers Communications asked Beeston to return in 2008 to be chief executive on an interim basis. What was designed to be a short-term assignment eventually turned into another seven-year run with the club, one that saw the Blue Jays return to the playoffs in 2015 and again elevate into one of MLB’s most-attended and most-watched teams.

“Again, I must be looked after by an angel,” Beeston said. “To have not one but two good runs like this? Incredible. Who can get luckier than that?”

Beeston’s legacy includes the Blue Jays’ two World Series championships in the early ’90s.jim courtney

There was messiness, though, toward the end of his second run with the Blue Jays. Beeston had a contract with Rogers Communications expiring in 2015, and the year before, the corporate parent began scouting replacements. It was a fact unknown to Beeston until he was tipped off by his close friend, White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf (see related story).

But like his prior labor rift with Selig, Beeston refuses to hold grudges against Rogers, and says there is still a productive relationship with the company.

“I never really had an exit strategy. And that wasn’t fair to the people working for me,” Beeston said. “I had people that I worked with that I owed a responsibility to and to make sure they were OK. And at the end of it, I was 70 years old. It was time to go and turn it over to new people.”

Beeston was succeeded in late 2015 as president and CEO by former Cleveland Indians President Mark Shapiro, and the two have enjoyed a successful collaboration. Beeston still maintains his Rogers Centre office and gained the president emeritus title in 2016, reveling in what he now calls “having all the answers and none of the accountability.”

“Paul is absolutely an institution here,” Shapiro said. “Paul’s experience and pride in this organization are really beyond contemplation. He’s been absolutely invaluable. And as I have gotten to know him better, he has remained very open to me as an adviser, and he is still all about what is best for the Blue Jays.”