PORTLAND, Maine — The autograph line in Warwick, Rhode Island, was too long, and the Boston Red Sox players were in jeopardy of missing their next stop that evening in Connecticut.
Charles Steinberg, who’d joined the team to help oversee outreach events like these just a year earlier in 2002, decided to split the children out into a separate line.
Through more than two previous decades working in major league baseball, Steinberg had learned that small gestures could pay big dividends in terms of building fan loyalty, but he would have no idea how true that parable would turn out to be on this day.
The executive vice president and senior adviser to the Red Sox president recalled the incident Thursday during a keynote speech at the Maine Sports Commission’s Business of Sports Symposium, held at the University of Southern Maine’s Hannaford Hall in Portland.
Steinberg was the man behind some of modern baseball’s most memorable scenes, orchestrating Fenway Park’s 100th anniversary celebration, as well as the festivities surrounding Cal Ripken Jr.’s record streak of consecutive games played for the Baltimore Orioles.
A master of sports theater, Steinberg pulled the strings to play the ominous tones of the AC/DC song “Hells Bells” whenever dominant former San Diego Padres closer Trevor Hoffman took the field, and was instrumental in making the playing of Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” an eighth-inning tradition in Boston.
But on that 2003 day in Rhode Island, he had just wanted to make the young fans a priority. Even splitting the children off into a second line, though, left a line longer than they had time for.
So he sent then-third baseman Bill Mueller to the back of the line to whittle his way toward the front, where catcher Jason Varitek and first baseman Kevin Millar greeted youngsters who’d arrived earlier. Eventually, all of the children in attendance got to meet at least one Red Sox player, and Steinberg thought he’d escaped.
But there was still one boy crying.
The team executive asked what was wrong, and found out the 11-year-old was an aspiring catcher and had dreamed of meeting the popular Varitek, but was among the children in the back of the line, where Mueller had been making the rounds.
“I told him, ‘You know what? That bus isn’t leaving without me,’” Steinberg recalled. “So I marched him over to the bus, where Jason Varitek signed his jersey and they took pictures.”
But that’s not where the story ends. Steinberg said two years later, his workday was interrupted by a colleague who called him into a conference room with three stern-looking men in business suits. The team had been courting their company, Gulf Oil, for a big money sponsorship, Steinberg’s colleague whispered, and for some reason, they asked to meet him before they’d agree to close the deal.
“I said, ‘Sure, but you know I’m not David Ortiz or Curt Schilling, right?’” Steinberg said.
One of the men asked Steinberg if he’d been the one to bring the Red Sox players to Warwick, Rhode Island, two years before. He admitted he was.
“He said, ‘You changed my son’s life,’” Steinberg said. “Self-esteem is a fragile thing for anybody, but especially an 11-year-old. He had gone to school the next day and was king of the world — he had autographs, he had photographs. [He told me,] ‘You validated his belief that good things can happen to little boys.’”
Steinberg told the Portland audience Gulf Oil would later return to help finance a documentary the Red Sox wanted to produce about the history of their home stadium, Fenway Park, and the boy would grow up to become an intern for the team during his college years.
The moral of Steinberg’s story was that the Red Sox worked hard to cultivate personal bonds with their fans during much of his early tenure with the team, and those efforts paid off. He said supporters of the Maine Sports Commission, who hope to amplify the state’s sports tourism economy with events like Westbrook’s Tough Mudder off-road running race, should focus on creating positive experiences for fans and participants.
“At the end of the day, it’s personal,” Steinberg said. “It’s about touching people’s lives.”
Steinberg left the Red Sox for short stints with the Los Angeles Dodgers and Major League Baseball commissioner’s office, then returned to the team in 2011. In his absence, he said, the team became too comfortable after years of winning and sold-out games. He said the team began seeking to “maximize profit” instead of taking extra steps to make games more affordable and accessible, or make personal connections with fans.
As long as the team was winning on the field, he said, fans were willing to overlook the change in the team’s attitude.
“[But] when you do have the collapse — the horrible collapse — you don’t have the reservoir of goodwill to draw upon,” he said.
“There was a passionate romance, and we broke up,” Steinberg recalled. “Now we’re good friends again. We watched 2013 [ when the Red Sox won the World Series] together holding hands, but it’s not like it was. And that’s heartbreaking, because it didn’t have to be that way.”
Members of a Maine Sports Commission panel talk, featuring Portland Sea Dogs executive Charlie Eschbach and three others, took Steinberg’s lessons to heart.
Brian Corcoran, president of Shamrock Sports & Entertainment, announced that his group has reached a deal to bring the Professional Bowlers Association back to Portland in 2016 after the bowling stars were so impressed with the city in their first visit last month.
Bill Baker, a Westbrook city official whose aforementioned Tough Mudder helped generate $5 million in economic activity, said photos posted on social media by mud-covered runners and their supporters were viewed more than 850,000 times.
“You couldn’t buy that exposure for $1 million, and that’s great exposure for the state,” Baker said.
Andy Shepard, president and CEO of the Aroostook County-based Maine Winter Sports Center, said the World Cup Biathlon and other international sporting events hosted by his group have garnered hundreds of millions of television viewers around the globe.
He said that, like Steinberg’s effort to cheer up the young Varitek fan, his organization’s legacy of generating economic activity and mentoring young athletes paid off. When the Maine Winter Sports Center learned its longtime benefactor, the Libra Foundation, would be cutting off funding in February 2014, Shepard said he wasn’t sure if the center would survive.
But he said over the next eight weeks, donors poured in more than $1.5 million to help keep the center alive. A year later, Presque Isle-native Mary Barton Akeley Smith donated $2 million outright and another $3 million in matching funds to help kick start the center’s $20 million capital campaign.
“We tried to make an impact over our 16 years in business,” Shepard said, pausing to collect himself. “What we saw in February was that it did matter. … These [sporting events] have become a central part of the economy in Aroostook County.”
