Three days
after Christmas, Michael Gartner, summoned the employees of the Iowa Cubs minor
league baseball team to a staff meeting at Principal Park, the team’s stadium
in Des Moines.
The team’s
sale to a global sports and entertainment company had closed that day, and Mr.
Gartner, 83, said he wanted to give the employees their new business cards.
But there
were no business cards in the envelopes that he handed out. Instead, inside there were checks worth $2,000 for every year each employee had worked for the team —
$600,000 in total for the 23 full-time workers.
Employees
who work in maintenance, accounting, marketing and other areas received checks
for $4,000 to $70,000, said Mr. Gartner, who was the team’s majority owner for
22 years, until the sale closed last Tuesday.
“My jaw
dropped,” said Alex Cohen, 33, who has been the team’s radio broadcaster since
2018 and has worked in professional baseball since 2009. “It’s an industry
where you work really hard, and sometimes you don’t get compensated like that. Seeing
all the people who had been there for two decades, three decades, tears
streaming down their faces, it was a very special, emotional day”.
Mr.
Gartner, who had owned the team with his son and three other partners, said on
Saturday that sharing proceeds from the sale “was the right thing to do. A lot
of those people have worked for us for over 20 years, and they’ve helped us
build a successful team. They’re just fantastic people. They need the money
more than we do. A lot of them still have mortgages and car payments and
college payments.”
Scott
Sailor, 63, who received $46,000 for his 23 years working for the team in media
relations, sales, marketing and other areas, said the checks were “not out of
character” for Mr. Gartner, a businessman, lawyer and third-generation Iowa
newspaperman.
A former
editor of The Des Moines Register and a former president of NBC News, Mr.
Gartner won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for editorial writing at The
Daily Tribune of Ames, Iowa. Two years later, he bought the Iowa Cubs, the
Triple-A affiliate of the Chicago Cubs, and became a fixture in the front
office and in his usual seat behind home plate.
In 2020,
when the minor league baseball season was canceled because of the coronavirus
pandemic, Mr. Gartner kept every full-time employee on the payroll, with
benefits.
“The surprise was not that he was generous because that’s the way he’s been,” said Randy Wehofer, the team’s vice president and assistant general manager, who joined the club in 2008. “We’ve had above-standard health insurance and we’ve always been the organization that people looked at and said, ‘Gee, I wish everybody did that’. That’s always been his way, as long as I’ve been part of the organization.”
Michael Gartner owned the Iowa Cubs for 22 years until last week, when he sold the team to Diamond Holdings.
— Front Office Sports (@FOS) January 3, 2022
On his final day, he surprised employees with checks — $2000 for every year they'd been with the team.
Gartner gave away a total of $600,000 to 23 full-time workers. pic.twitter.com/aEh4OkN1zL
From The New York Times (edited)
