272 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
Larson was mulling retirement at 32 and daydreaming about owning
a piece of the team. When Gorton called, he decided he could spare $25
million or so and immediately began e-mailing other potential investors.
Gorton’s next call was to Wayne Perry, a friend and admirer who had
ascended to the No. 2 spot at McCaw Cellular. Their paths crossed often
in Washington, D.C., where Perry argued the cell-phone industry’s case
with the FCC and Gorton ran interference on the Commerce Committee.
“Wayne is the kind of guy who likes straight talk,” Gorton says, “so I just
told him, ‘You’ve made a lot of money. It is time to give back.’ It helped
that he had been a Little League coach—and that John McCaw trusted
him implicitly.” Gorton, Arakawa and Lincoln then told Ellis he was be-
ing drafted. His investment would be his management skill and Seattle
bona fides. He’d be the group’s glue. “I have never approached anything
in my life with less knowledge of how to do it,” Ellis recalls. Nonsense,
Gorton says. “He was the perfect choice.”^
For his baseball chops and PR skills, Ellis and Gorton immediately ac-
cepted Chuck Armstrong’s offer to help. He’d been the team president
before Smulyan acquired the M’s. With the addition of Boeing CEO Frank
Shrontz, the Baseball Club of Seattle was announced to the public on
January 23, 1992.^7
To help offset the team owners’ undisguised hostility to Japanese own-
ership of a piece of the American pastime Hiroshi Yamauchi agreed to
reduce his share in the franchise. The political realities were delicately
couched by his son-in-law, but Yamauchi already knew the score. Japa-
nese investors were seen as predatory, a new wave of yellow peril. A half
century after Pearl Harbor, they’d bought Rockefeller Center, even Gor-
ton’s of Gloucester. Now they wanted a piece of the American pastime.
Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent made it instantly clear that Major
League Baseball’s “strong policy” was to reject investors from outside
North America. Gorton found the anti-Japanese sentiment in Major
League Baseball shameful. Howard Lincoln, having worked so closely
with Arakawa, was profoundly “pissed off” at the disrespect visited on his
boss and the chairman.^8
The Washington State Senate unanimously approved a resolution urg-
ing Vincent to “recognize and applaud the international appeal of base-
ball.” Governor Booth Gardner and Seattle Mayor Norm Rice met with
the commissioner. “The only foreign ownership I’m concerned about is
Tampa Bay,” Gardner told him. New York Times columnist Dave Ander-
son wrote, “For those who think of baseball’s 26 owners as the only mem-
bers of a snobbish country club but could never prove it, proof is now