Game Over 
Sports
Major Minor
How far afield is Jimmie Lee Solomon from the southeast Texas town where he was raised? Today he’s the executive director of baseball’s farm system—and he may be swinging for even bigger fences.
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Born in Sugar Land, Solomon was raised in Thompsons, a rural community 35 miles southwest of Houston. One of six children, he grew up “land poor.” Which means, he says, “that we had food and land but no money.” His father, Jimmie Lee Senior, a strict disciplinarian and a workaholic, thought a man’s worth lay only in what he could do with his hands. His mother, Josephine, who worked at a Houston Kmart, and his college-educated grandfather, Jeremiah, constantly encouraged him to do well in school. “I remember once overhearing my father and grandfather fighting over me, and my grandfather finally telling him, ‘Just leave that boy be. That boy’s got brains, and if you let him alone, he’ll make you proud someday.’ I never forgot that.”
During most of his childhood, Solomon would wake up as early as four in the morning, using the headlights of his father’s truck to work by. He put out the hay, ran fence, and picked cotton. Though he idolized Willie Mays and was a big fan of the Houston Colt .45’s first baseman Walt Bond, he played little baseball but says he was always the fastest kid in Thompsons. By the seventh grade he was a star running back as well as the first black to start for the Lamar Junior High School football team. “I was small and didn’t have good hands, but I could really fly,” he says. “My running is the first thing I remember making me feel special.” No slouch in the classroom, Solomon was an A-minus student in advanced classes.
At Dartmouth College from 1974 to 1978, Solomon earned a degree in history (“with a heavy emphasis on government and economics”), set a school record for the sixty-meter dash, and played wide receiver on a football team that “threw the ball only ten times a game.” He wasn’t drafted out of college but managed to get a tryout with the Houston Oilers in 1978. He caught passes, did drills with the team, ran the forty, but for the first time in his life he wasn’t the fastest player on the field. He ended up being one of the first players cut. Afterward, then—head coach Bum Phillips not only told Solomon he was especially weak on fundamentals but also provided the further sting by saying, “I understand you were accepted to law school. Well, if you were my son, I would tell you to go do that.”
“I was devastated,” Solomon recalls. “Everything I was hearing was just bouncing off my head. But on the drive back home I came to the realization that my talent had likely topped out and that I had to be a man now and come to grips that football had come to an end for me. But I’ll tell you something, I really hated that first year I didn’t play football.”
Solomon attended Harvard’s School of Law, graduating with honors in 1981. He immediately took a job in the Washington, D.C., office of the prestigious corporate law firm of Baker and Hostetler, becoming its first black attorney. “By that point, I started getting comfortable with that ‘first and only black’ thing,” he says. “In fact, it had become a challenge for me to succeed as that. I sort of wore it as a badge of honor. Although I think that after a while people forget that I’m black, which is what I strive for.” During his ten years at the firm, Solomon, among other things, advised the NFL Management Council, handled the NFL arbitration hearings, and represented several professional—albeit fringe—basketball players. “I thought I wanted to be a sports agent,” he says. “I eventually realized that I didn’t want my career to rely on the whims of an adolescent.” In 1990 Solomon reached his goal of making partner, then quickly looked for the door. “I was getting burned out,” he says.
Coincidentally, around this time Major League Baseball was looking for someone to fill the newly created position of director of minor league operations, someone to act as a problem solver for disputes between the two levels as well as smooth over the acrimonious feelings created during the 1990 labor negotiations. William Schweitzer, a managing partner at Baker and Hostetler and the general counsel to the American League, recommended Solomon—even though Solomon’s previous baseball experience amounted to nothing more than a pair of memos he wrote on behalf of his firm to the American League.
During the initial interviewing process, the late Carl Bargar, the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates and the chairman of the owners committee, wasted little time before asking Solomon the touchiest of questions: “What are you going to do when you go into areas where blacks aren’t welcomed?” Solomon replied, without flinching, “Look, there’s no stronger group of tobacco-chewin’ good ol’ boys than the ones I grew up with. And I dealt with them very, very well. And I think they ended up respecting me, and I also think I may have even helped enlightening them a bit.”
About a week after the interview Solomon was hired by Commissioner Fay Vincent. And that first year he went out of his way to visit as many minor league ballparks as he could. “Since I was such an unknown, I wanted minor league people to clearly see, hear, and touch me,” he says. Observes Stephen Greenberg: “Frankly, with two thirds of the minor league guys coming from either the South or the Southwest, Jimmie Lee’s Texas background gave him the ability to communicate in a fashion that someone from New York or Chicago probably couldn’t. He talked their talk.”
“When I tell people I’m just a little ol’ country boy from Texas, they’re convinced I’m putting them on,” Solomon says, laughing, his face pinched into his usual infectious smile. “It’s like ‘Puh-leeze, Jimmie Lee, don’t hand us that stuff.’ But then I tell ’em, ‘Hey, listen, I grew up in a place with one beer joint and no post office. And that’s just a fact.’”
These days Solomon, who lives in Washington, D.C., doesn’t go home to Thompsons very often, especially since his father died at 64 of a heart attack last February and his mother is living in a nursing home in Richmond. But he still makes it back about once every other month. “In many ways,” he says, “I feel like I’ve outgrown Thompsons, but I go back to reminisce. And I guess I’m still a Texan at heart. It’s still the only place where I can kick back, put my jeans and boots on, and really be me.”
Two weeks after we met in New York, Solomon took a rare break in his schedule to watch a game between the Astros and the Mets at Shea Stadium. Dressed in black—from his tailored suit and his cotton mock turtleneck to his Bally shoes—he sat about two dozen rows back from the Mets dugout at field level, tightly squeezed into the commissioner’s box of reserved seats right behind a metal railing. Eventually, between his frequent whoops and hollers at the game’s action, his discomfort got the better of him, sparking a favorite rant: all minor league ballparks, at all costs, should be fan friendly. “If you were more comfortable, you might have a better time. And if you had a better time, you might buy season tickets to the games,” he said. He paused, took a swig of springwater from a plastic bottle, then said softly as he turned to one of his three guests, “I don’t suffer mediocrity or foolishness well. It’s something I’m working on.”
In the sixth inning, with the game locked in a scoreless tie, Solomon suddenly picked up to leave as he attempted to avert yet another fan inconvenience—traffic. Tonight especially, he explained, he couldn’t be late; the next day he was scheduled to fly to Houston for a major powwow about the agreement. Solomon’s gut instinct was that the whole thing was winding down, finally, to a resolution.
And, in fact, less than a month later the agreement was quietly and amicably done—a ten-year contract with an option to reopen negotiations after six. The majors got the minors to pay for umpire development (a $4.75 million annual expense) and some equipment costs; the minors got to keep their existing teams and leagues. The press conference to announce the agreement hardly made a ripple, lost in all the commotion about the major leagues’ experiment with interleague play. When the deal was done and Jimmie Lee Solomon went home, you have to imagine that he took a long, deep breath and came to another absolute stop. Briefly.
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