You could say that Felix Millan had something to do with the baseball history happening now in Boston. About 13 years ago, the former New York Mets player needed a baby sitter.
It was back in Flushing, N.Y., in the mid-1970s, and Millan was looking for someone reliable to watch his children while he swung his bat beneath the bright lights of Shea Stadium. Just down the street from Millan lived a pleasant kid of 13 who had cultivated a neighborhood reputation as something of a whiz baby sitter. She seemed dependable. Millan liked her. He hired her. Naturally, the Flushing baby sitter became curious about her famous boss and the game he played. She started flipping the TV dial to catch his games
”just to see how he would do.” Pretty soon, she started flicking on the TV to watch the Mets just for the game itself. She began to comprehend strategy, to understand who was good and who wasn`t, who was on a winning streak and who wasn`t.
And now, the Flushing kid is in Boston, making baseball history. Elaine Weddington is the new assistant general manager of the Red Sox. She is the first woman to have made it to such a position in major league baseball and one of only a few blacks to have climbed so far.
All over baseball, people seem filled with incredulous delight, though Weddington, at the tender age of 26, has only begun to be tested.
”It`s obvious that barriers are coming down,” says Bob Watson, assistant general manager of the Houston Astros and currently the other black assistant general manager in baseball.
Even Red Sox people seem a bit startled at Weddington`s rise in the ranks. She was chosen from among more than 100 applicants, including some very heavy and well-known legal talents.
”I`m really excited about it and I must say a little bit surprised because even though we knew she had great potential, we didn`t know how quickly she would graduate into the position that she`s in,” says John Donovan, executive vice president and counsel to the Red Sox.
The only one who doesn`t seem surprised by the appointment is Weddington. Over and over again, along with the letters and calls of congratulations, she has received the questions. What`s it like being black and representing the Red Sox? What`s it like working at Fenway Park, where the players on the bases outnumber blacks in the stands? How did it happen and why would you want to do it?
Her standard response, always delivered with aplomb, has been this: ”I wanted to come with a good attitude and see what happens. And I can only speak from my own experiences. I have been treated very well. I have been treated with a lot of respect. I can only speak for experiences that I have had. And they have, honestly, been very positive.”
The daughter of a labor relations specialist and an office manager with the National Labor Relations Board, Weddington grew up near Shea Stadium. Baseball beckoned from the first.
The Weddington family, Elaine, her two brothers and her mother and father, would attend 30 to 40 games a season. Between Weddington`s baby-sitting job for Felix Millan and Shea Stadium just a screeching subway hop away, it seemed inevitable that baseball would lay its claim.
”Once I started getting into the game, I started watching more baseball than all of them put together,” says Weddington.
But it was during a Mets game, appropriately enough, that Weddington came to the realization that maybe she had a future in baseball. She was a senior in high school and she heard an announcement during a Mets telecast about an eight-week workshop designed to introduce students to the possibility of having a career in sports. Suddenly it dawned on her.
”That was the first time that I really knew that there were these types of jobs out there,”
She joined the workshop; nabbed the prestigious Jackie Robinson sports scholarship to St. John`s University in Queens, where she majored in athletic administration; and interned in her senior year in college with the Mets public relations office. Much of the rest of her time she spent working as a hostess in Shea Stadium`s Diamond Club restaurant.
From there, Weddington went on to St. John`s Law School. She continued to hit the books and work the tables at Shea Stadium. After law school, she entered an executive development program with the baseball commissioner`s office in New York where Bill Murray, director of baseball operations, remembers Weddington as ”a bright girl. She did a terrific job for us. . . . I thought she stood out.”
The commissioner`s office loaned Weddington to the Red Sox, where she worked for two months before being hired for good as associate counsel in 1988.
”Elaine came in the middle of the baseball season,” says Donovan. ”She didn`t know us and the place was helter-skelter and we threw her out there with the desk and the telephones, and she kept going. Everybody, in no time at all, was comfortable. The chemistry was there. She had the brains, the ability and the personality. She could communicate.”
And so, in January, the Red Sox announced Weddington`s appointment.
When sports agent Kimarie Stratos, representative of Red Sox player Rob Murphy, heard the news, she says she couldn`t help but chuckle. Stratos was in the final stages of negotiating Murphy`s contract and it looked, at the time, like they might be heading to arbitration.
”I saw this as a potential first because it would be the first time a female lawyer led a player into arbitration,” says Stratos. ”And
coincidentally, there could have been Elaine on the other side of the table.” As assistant general manager, Weddington will once again take on Red Sox paperwork and bureaucratic red tape. She`ll be working closely with general manager Lou Gorman in negotiating contracts, working on options, waivers and rule changes.
Despite the good fit Red Sox people say Weddington is, there is little question that Weddington, a Back Bay resident, cuts an unexpected figure there. Her easy, modest demeanor does not diminish her standout status in a world of older white males. There is always the ”token question.”
Weddington, though, seems comfortable enough, and tokenism doesn`t seem an issue.
”I`m the only one right now, but there are other females and other minorities that are qualified to work in this position,” she says. ”I feel I have broken the ice a bit.”
No doubt, according to Gorman, there will be problems coming Weddington`s way. Gorman says that it is the nature of baseball that some sports agents will have problems breaking through their prejudices to deal with her.
There may also be the inevitable problem of shoring up the reputation of the Red Sox among those blacks who have avoided Fenway Park in past years. Weddington says she has already thought about such issues.
”When I go out and sit in the stands, I don`t see many faces of color, and I`d like to know what we could do to draw more minorities,” she says carefully. ”There`s a perception out there that it`s not a friendly place to go to-Fenway Park. And we have to devote some energy to it. I haven`t come up in my mind with what the proper way to proceed is, to produce a feeling of friendliness for people not to feel strange coming into the park.
”I hope that I can help raise an awareness and sensitivity to the problem, just by open dialogue with people who are here. Hopefully we can do something.”
There are theories circulating as to how and why Weddington was appointed now. After all, there have been many bright, talented women who might have filled such a job who were never given the chance. Ditto for blacks.
So why now?
Theory A is a cynical one. According to some sports agents around the country, Lou Gorman has lost some contracts in the past because of managerial neglect, and knew he needed an assistant. Only problem was, he feared that a new person might force him out of his spot someday and he didn`t want to take the risk. ”What`s the best way to do that but hire someone who is a black woman in Boston?” asks one sports agent. No matter how good she is, the agent says gloomily, it won`t happen here.
Theory B is this: The Red Sox hired a woman assistant general manager because women have had to be extra tough to make it in the back-slapping world of sports. They figured Weddington had the steely will they were looking for. Weddington, however, chooses neither. She feels she got the job because she`s good and she worked for it.
”This is what I was shooting for all this time,” she says. And it didn`t hurt, either, that Felix Millan once needed a baby sitter.
