Know Your Enemy Cincinnati: Marge Schott and The Fine Line

Remembering a polarizing owner

Note: this year’s “Know Your Enemy” will take a few different paths. We’re not always going to examine the pitching matchups unless notable. Rather, we’ll look at the scoundrels, oddities, histories, and other elements that make our enemies interesting.

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Cincinnati is a surprise to the first-time visitor. If you arrive by car, from the north of the Rust Belt to its southern tip, where the country is in one of its Mason/Dixon liminal zones, you’ll be surprised at its beauty. The downtown, full of 20th Century Germanic/Deco architectural charm, perches along the Ohio River, and the residential areas spread out into the hills, carved by eons of the river’s meanderings.

You might be charmed by the Victorian-style mansions, echoing back to when the Queen City was one of the Midwest’s jewels. You might be delighted at the retro steamboats by the beaut of a ballpark, reminding us of the town’s important riverine location, a final major city before the Ohio pours into the Mississippi and then the world. But underneath that — supporting it — the ugly reality of what makes a rich city rich.

Cincinnati got its wealth through meat-packing, through candles, through soap, through leather. While the latter three seem benign, those were intense, labor-intensive, dirty grimy work. The wealth was accrued and the land and water was dirtied and the people who worked those hard industries were sickened and died and their children slowly abandoned as the markets shifted.

By the 70s it was a hard town, filled with hard-working people scraping by. They rallied around those incredible Morgan/Rose/Bench/too many to name Reds teams, but the town was a byword for a bygone era. It was gritty and tough; it was, like Chicago, a town whose politics were defined by the white working class, a tense coalition of owner-class Germans and “newcomer” Middle/Eastern Europeans, while also changing racially. It was the mirror image of its close neighbor Louisville, which Hunter S. Thompson famously described as a “southern town with northern problems.” But Cincinnati was an economically northern town with a foot in the south.

It’s the kind of town in which Marge Schott felt at home.

Sports Illustrated

Marge Schott was the majority owner of the Reds until baseball rightfully forced her out for reasons of being extremely racist and personally awful. Those of you who remember her almost certainly remember that first. As awful as you remember, there are things about her that you’ve forgotten, that could be worse. Those of you reading about her for the first time might be salivating for the reprehensible details. But first, let’s look at her not teleologically, knowing how ger story ends. Let’s look at her as a Reds fan might have seen her in the late 80s.

Marge was a hard woman, with lines in her face and a permanent nicotine stain on her finger. She had a raspy voice. She was what some could call a broad, a real ball-buster, a strong lady who didn’t take shit. She was born in Cincy, into a German family which became wealthy through lumber. A Catholic school kid, a local who married well and was widowed young and took her husband’s auto dealers to new heights when he died in ’68, right when the town was spiraling into decline and fiery racial tension.

She got richer. She bought a stake in the Reds, her beloved team, in 1981, buying outright control in ’84. This made her the first woman to buy an MLB team (though, as site boss Brett Ballantini reminds us, our own Grace Comiskey owned the White Sox decades earlier). That’s pretty cool. Yeah, she was born pretty well-off and married rich, but she wasn’t some inheritance brat. Hell, she was the person at the end of the bar burning heaters and sucking down cheap beer and rasping about the Reds.

In some ways, she was indeed the voice of the fans. She wanted tickets cheap. She wanted hot dogs cheap — never more than a dollar. She didn’t sit in some fancy luxury box, she had regular box seats, and hung out with the people. She might have had money, but she was a true populist. She was a fan.

Of course … we know what fandom sometimes entails. Think of a dive in Cincinnati in 1989, factories closing, everything a little grim and dingy. Think about people who are sitting at the end of this dinged-up bar, doing sloshy mental math about how many more beers they can afford, wondering if they are going to work next week, watching with one eye the game on the blurry TV. How come that bum who just struck out again is making so much money?

Well, whether by natural inclination or street-smart PR or both, Marge tried to channel that fan. She kept ticket prices low, of course, but also didn’t spend money on the team. This has some very weird effects. The amazing Reds that swept the 1990 World Series, interrupting the Oakland dynasty, brought life to the city, but Marge was curdled about it. She wanted it to be at least five games. She was angry the sweep cost her money. She made the players pay for their own celebrations.

Here, there is still, if you squint and try to get into a certain broken-down mindset, a certain fan-oriented ownership at play. After all, isn’t that what we are paying them for? To win? They get paid so much more than the guy at the docks. Why do they get free champagne for doing their fucking jobs?

But we know how this curdles for fans. With Marge, it curd led for the owner. She took anything that cost her any money personally, while making the team and all its operations an extension of her nicotined personality. An example of the line between people-friendly quirk and plutocratic indifference was Schottzie, her beloved St. Bernard. The dog was always there. The dog was in the locker room. It shit on the astroturf field. It annoyed players. Was that a weird quirk? Or someone who thought she literally owned the players?

It became quickly clear it was the latter. Look, I’m going to sanitize this quote, but you’re going to hear it in your head, and for that I apologize. You’re going to hear the awful word she used. You will hear it; you’re an American. But there is no way to talk about Schott without it. A former marketing director for the Reds alleged that Schott referred to star players Dave Parker and Eric Davis as her “million dollar n-words.”

Schott later said the remark was made in jest.

And hell, it probably was. Imagine her cracking it at the bar. Imagine the fellas laughing. Those players belong to Marge, they are hers, and they are, well …

That’s sort of the point. Most owners suck because they are so far removed from the fan experience they might as well be inhuman. Schott wasn’t like that. She was a chain-smoking broad who thought these coddled players made too much money — obviously not Paul O’Neill, but you know. The other ones.

That’s the fine line between positive populism and something much darker. Schott wanted to act like the guy at the bar, for whom life has been cruel, who lashes out with inarticulate exactitude at those who are doing better. He hates them more than the factory owner who pulled up stakes to increase his stock. And why not? He sees them on TV.

But what excuse does Schott have? She worked hard, yes, but never struggled. And it is clear that she was warped both by wealth and the weird idea that she was working class. She saw nothing wrong with her “jest.” She loved lording over her players, because they were also doing well, but not as well as her. And she actually really couldn’t stop saying nice things about Hitler. She was weird in the way that only the rich can be.

Marge’s face was lined like the Cincinnati valley. It was carved with the history of her city. She was the rare owner who actually felt like part of the city, and that’s what she wanted. But to her the city was a slab, it was cruel and broken, it was mullet-haired and drunk and cig-yellowed and angry and indifferent to the future. She didn’t want that part to change or get better. She didn’t really care about fans’ lives. She wanted her ideal of the city to love her.

Insecure and arrogant. Stuck in an idea of the past that is both romanticized and brutalized. Desperate for approval, but only the kind that comes from people thanking you for stomping on others. Kudos for cruelty.

Marge Schott was a pioneer in many ways, none of which speak well of anyone.

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