Team owner surprises workers with checks

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, Iowa, writes Michael Levenson of The New York Times

The team’s sale to a global sports and entertainment company had closed that day, and Gartner, 83, said he wanted to give the employees their new business cards.

But there were no business cards in the envelopes that Gartner (pictured) handed out. Instead, inside 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 Gartner, who was the team’s majority owner for 22 years, until the sale closed 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.”

Cohen described the checks as “a lifechanging gesture” for some longtime staff members.

“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,” he said.

Gartner said 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,” said Gartner, whose gesture was first reported by Yahoo! Sports. “They’re just fantastic people.”

Gartner, who had owned the team with his son and three other partners, added: “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 Gartner, a businessman, lawyer and third-generation Iowa newspaperman.

A former editor of The Des Moines Register and a former president of NBC News, 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.