Baseball Set Precedent for Disciplining an Owner

Any punishment handed down to Donald Sterling, the Los Angeles Clippers ' owner, will inevitably be compared with Major League Baseball's actions in the 1990s against Marge Schott.

Schott, the widow of a prominent Cincinnati car dealer and the owner of the Reds, was a popular and eccentric society matron. She adored her St. Bernards, Schottzie and Schottzie 02, who accompanied her to Riverfront Stadium.

But she made offensive comments about blacks and Jews and insisted afterward that she did not mean to hurt anyone. She owned a swastika armband, a gift, she said, from an employee who had taken it off a dead German during World War II; spoke compassionately of Adolf Hitler; and sometimes used a slur to refer to blacks. In 1992, baseball's executive council investigated her for using racial slurs toward employees and making anti-Semitic remarks.

Bill White, who was the National League president, recalled in an interview that there was some brief internal discussion about forcing her to sell her share of the Reds.

'But I don't think you can put a price on bigotry,' he said. 'My suggestion was not to allow her in the ballpark for a year and give her diversity training.'

Robert S. Bennett, a Washington lawyer on Schott's defense team, would not let her be 'trampled or be made a scapegoat by the powerful baseball machine,' he said Monday.

Bennett told other owners 'that he had prepared a bunch of pleadings questioning their authority to impose harsh penalties,' he said. 'And I indicated that I wanted to depose all of the owners regarding whether they made similar statements in the past' or had used slurs.

Baseball ended up suspending Schott in early 1993 for a year from the day-to-day operation of the Reds. The league also fined her $25,000.

Robert Kheel, who was counsel to the National League, said Monday that baseball weighed Schott's comments against a belief that they were not said maliciously and that Schott, who was born in 1928, was a 'creature of her times.'

'The gist of it was not to throw her out of the game,' Kheel said.

The suspension, Bennett said, 'was very favorable.'

In 1996, Schott reiterated her view that Hitler was initially good for Germany but went too far, and she made disparaging remarks about women and Asian-Americans. She subsequently agreed to surrender her position as the Reds' managing general partner for two years.

Bud Selig, then baseball's acting commissioner, said negotiations with Schott did not include any discussion about forcing her to sell her 6.5 shares of the Reds' 15-share ownership. Still, baseball had been looking into claims by General Motors that she had falsified records at her Chevrolet-Geo dealership to meet sales quotas. In 1999, her suspension over, she sold her shares for $67 million.

'Knowing Marge, I think she just got tired of the headlines,' White, the National League president, said of Schott, who died in 2004.

More recently, Selig, now baseball's official commissioner, took temporary day-to-day control of the Los Angeles Dodgers from the owner Frank McCourt, leaving McCourt concerned that the move was a step toward Selig's dictating a sale. McCourt took the team into bankruptcy and eventually sold it in 2012 for $2.15 billion.

In 1953, Fred M. Saigh, sentenced to 15 months in prison for tax evasion, was reportedly pressured by Commissioner Ford C. Frick to sell his St. Louis Cardinals. The team was bought by Anheuser-Busch.

Sterling, the Clippers' owner, has faced calls to sell his team since TMZ released audio of racist remarks late Friday and identified Sterling as the speaker. But the N.B.A. constitution limits Commissioner Adam Silver's powers in disciplining Sterling.

The constitution, listing various causes, allows for an ownership to be terminated by a three-quarters vote of owners, according to two people who had read the relevant section, and the constitution appears to say that 'willfully' violating any of the document's provisions could lead to termination. Silver can fine Sterling a maximum of $1 million and suspend him indefinitely.

Sterling has been a fixture in the N.B.A., having bought the San Diego Clippers in 1981 (the same year Schott became a minority partner of the Reds) and moved the franchise to Los Angeles in 1984 (the year Schott acquired the controlling interest in the Reds). As a practical matter, a long suspension for Sterling, a regular attendee at Clippers games, might give him sufficient reason to sell.

Kheel, the National League counsel, said Silver had to be concerned about whether others would come forward with new accusations about Sterling.

'One lawsuit started it with Marge, and then people started piling on,' said Kheel, a lecturer at Columbia Law School. 'That's part of Silver's problem. He might know all the facts about this incident, but he has to be concerned about others.'

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