Only once has White Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf entered the home of a draft pick with the intent of negotiating a contract, and that one time came in June 1982 inside the Williams household on Selva Drive in San Jose, Calif.
“Roland Hemond told me we drafted a guy in the third round who had first-round ability,” Reinsdorf recalled last week. “And we needed to sign him because he was going to play football at Stanford, so he asked me to go visit the family.”
Reinsdorf came to Mt. Pleasant High School star Ken Williams’ home that day to make a deal, and left making a promise. The longer Reinsdorf sat with Williams’ father Jerry, a local firefighter who had blazed a trail of independence for his only son to follow, the more he realized they shared more in common than their first names.
Jerry Williams grew up in Berkeley, Calif., with Black Panther leader Huey Newton, sued for the right to join a mostly white San Jose Fire Department and grew so close to San Jose State track teammates Tommie Smith and John Carlos–the duo sent home from the 1968 Olympics after their clenched-fist, black-power salute on the medal stand–that Carlos was Kenny’s godfather.
Enthralled by Jerry Williams, Reinsdorf “fell in love” with the Williams family story.
“He was impressive,” Reinsdorf said of the father.
The son, meanwhile, was nowhere to be found.
“I think Kenny was working on his car in the driveway,” Reinsdorf said.
Cars, rosters . . . Kenny Williams has always enjoyed tinkering. As he tinkered away that day, the man responsible for steering the course of his career in baseball mapped out a future in the living room.
“My pitch to them was, `Have Kenny go to Stanford and play football, and what we’d like him to do is play baseball in the summertime and if Stanford won’t give him a scholarship, we’ll pay for it,'” Reinsdorf said. “I told his dad that once he’s in our organization, not to worry, because I promised I would take care of him.”
The pledge might have sounded like empty rhetoric from a deal-making owner at the time, but 23 years later, Reinsdorf has proved the promise applied to Kenny Williams the person and not just the player.
Glimpses of greatness
It is not hard to find a friend or colleague of Williams who says, with a smile, that he has told them he could have enjoyed a fine NFL career. It is difficult to find anyone willing to say so for attribution, because it sounds like a boast to anyone who does not know Williams.
To the people who have worked with the 41-year-old White Sox general manager, the statement represents the quintessential Kenny: a bold prediction issued with confidence, based on fact.
Williams declined to address the NFL possibility himself, or anything else about his life, because he chose not to be interviewed for a story focusing on him.
“He definitely could have been an NFL defensive back or wide receiver, maybe even a running back, he was that good an athlete,” said Paul Wiggin, Williams’ football coach at Stanford who evaluates professional talent in the Minnesota Vikings’ front office.
Glimpses of such greatness came in Williams’ freshman season when he returned a kickoff 69 yards against Southern California. Against Cal later that season, Williams was heading onto the field to cover the final kickoff when Wiggin pulled him back at the last second.
Williams will always wonder if, had he been on the field, Cal would have been able to pull off the famous five-lateral return for a TD that weaved through the Stanford band and decided the game in Cal’s favor, costing Stanford a bowl bid in John Elway’s final college game.
Williams would not play in another college football game either, giving up Stanford for the Sox’s minor leagues in a decision he has called the worst one he has ever made.
“Guys were saddened to see Kenny give up football for baseball because he was such a good person, good teammate and likable,” Wiggin said. “But he also was one of those bright-light kids who knew what he was doing. If I read where he was stepping in to take over at Honeywell [Corp.], I wouldn’t be surprised. You could tell he had that special ability to absorb information and get along with people.”
From the ground up
That knack would come in handy after Williams’ six seasons in the major leagues with the Sox, Tigers, Blue Jays and Expos produced a Mendoza-like .218 lifetime batting average. His playing career ended after the 1991 season and his front-office career began months later after another meeting with Reinsdorf that addressed the future. This time Williams was the one making promises.
“He was convinced he could find talent in the inner cities that nobody else was finding and said, `Everybody’s afraid to go in there, and I’m not afraid,'” Reinsdorf said. “Two years later, he decided there wasn’t as much talent there as he thought, but I liked the way he went at it and wanted to teach him the business side of things.”
The grooming had begun. After a year of being involved with marketing plans and negotiating the team’s television and radio deals, Williams took over as head of the Sox’s minor-league operations at 31.
“That was the best indoctrination he could have gotten, as farm director, because it developed in him patience to see players develop and he got to know that it can take time to base a decision on someone,” said Roland Hemond, the team’s former general manager who is now a special adviser to Williams.
Within two years, in 1997, Reinsdorf promoted Williams again to vice president of player development, one seat closer to the hottest one in the building. At the time that belonged to Ron Schueler, the Sox general manager who resigned after 10 years in 2000 but not before advising Reinsdorf on the choice of his successor.
Speculation centered on Dan Evans, the popular former assistant general manager who had spent 19 years in the organization, and Williams, a 36-year-old wunderkind with charisma galore.
“I told Jerry you have two choices–Dan and Kenny,” Schueler said. “I thought Danny had a big edge administratively and on the baseball rules and worked well with everybody. Kenny’s strengths were on the baseball side. I said, `Jerry, you have a tough decision.'”
Reinsdorf made it sound much simpler.
“We didn’t just pluck Kenny out of thin air. We knew him and what a great job he’d done with the farm system,” Reinsdorf said. “He wasn’t a risk at all. He was the logical one.”
On Oct. 24, 2000, Williams became the third African-American general manager in baseball history following the late Bill Lucas and Bob Watson. He remains the only black GM in his sport.
Evans, who declined an interview request, departed for the Los Angeles Dodgers and now works for the Seattle Mariners. Schueler, a scout with the St. Louis Cardinals who wants to be a general manager again, left his role as a Sox consultant after about a year when his management style clashed with Williams’.
“A guy wants to do what a guy wants to do,” Schueler said. “I just said to Jerry, `We’ve got to make a separation here.'”
Schueler complimented Williams for returning the Sox for the playoffs but acknowledged, diplomatically, that “he can rub some people the wrong way around the league.”
`A straight shooter’
What rankles some peers about Williams’ self-confident, bordering on cocky approach brings respect from others. Not everybody believes what Athletics general manager Billy Beane said in the 2003 book by Michael Lewis, “Moneyball,” about Williams being an easy mark (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
“He’s a straight shooter and he’s realistic when you’re dealing with him about what he wants in return,” San Diego Padres general manager Kevin Towers said. “He cuts through the fat. Generally, the conversation lasts about five minutes because Kenny knows what he wants.”
In terms of decisiveness, Towers compares Williams with Atlanta Braves general manager John Schuerholz, an executive with Hall of Fame credentials.
Towers used the July 31 Sox-Padres trade for utility man Geoff Blum, consummated in less than an hour, as an example of Williams’ acumen. The conversation began with Williams wanting Sean Burroughs, but the Padres wanted too much in return. So with the clock ticking, he quickly focused on Blum for minor-league pitcher Ryan Meaux. The two were able to work it out largely because of mutual understanding.
“Deals are made based on past relationships and trust and a feel for one another,” Towers said. “And Kenny’s gotten really good at that.”
Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, whose trade of Jose Contreras for Esteban Loaiza in July 2004 made a huge difference for the Sox in ’05, agreed.
“He’s someone who knows what he wants, he moves fast and he swings for the fences,” Cashman said. “The guy was hired to do one thing: win a championship for the White Sox and take over Chicago. He’s not afraid to make a mistake, and that’s the sign of a good leader who is interested only in getting the job done.”
Being bold and aggressive does not always work. The failed David Wells deal in 2001 and the Todd Ritchie/Billy Koch pitching experiments provide swing-and-miss examples from the Williams regime.
But never was Williams’ lack of fear more obvious, or important, than last December, when he dealt outfielder Carlos Lee to the Milwaukee Brewers for outfielder Scott Podsednik and reliever Luis Vizcaino.
Even more than the Contreras trade or the deal earlier that summer for Freddy Garcia, the deal with the Brewers allowed Williams to revamp his roster into one he thought could unseat the Minnesota Twins. And without it, Sunday would not mark the end of one of the most surprising, successful regular seasons in Sox history.
“You have to give Kenny credit for sticking with his convictions on what he set out to do–a lot of teams would not do what he did and make such difficult changes,” said Brewers general manager Doug Melvin, the man on the other end of the Podsednik deal. “You have to have a lot of guts to do this job sometimes, and he certainly does.”
Deal raises questions
The trade was questioned on talk radio in town and panned in one headline as a “Cheap Trick.” That it turned out so well surely must satisfy a general manager as competitive as Williams, who enjoys sparring with the Chicago media. But those close to him caution against using the word vindication to describe his feelings about the signature deal of this Sox rise.
“I don’t think he thinks about vindication because his harshest critic is himself,” Reinsdorf said.
Added Rick Hahn, the team’s assistant general manager under Williams: “Maybe it would be vindication for that decision, but Kenny doesn’t go through his day or career trying to show the critics they were wrong. He feels a great deal of responsibility to people to win it all for the team and the city.”
That, after all, was the pledge Williams made when he took the job five years ago.
And it all started with a promise Jerry Reinsdorf made years earlier to Williams’ dad when he vowed the White Sox would take care of the young man who grew up to be a worthy caretaker of the organization.
“You know, Kenny never got his degree [at Stanford], but as it turns out he didn’t need it,” Reinsdorf said. “He’s now in the upper echelon of baseball executives, and he’s going to remain there for years to come. I’d say he’s done all right.”
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dhaugh@tribune.com
