The Making of a President

"I was born in New York City," he said. "I'm particularly sensitive to what's written on the Statue of Liberty. That was ingrained in me. My parents were Holocaust survivors. My parents beat that [message] into me every day as they were showing me the Holocaust pictures. . . . I took some time to share that with John."

The Rocker fiasco dominated the next six months of Kasten's professional life, as he fought to defuse a volatile situation that required the most delicate of touches. The Braves had no intention of getting rid of Rocker, a dominant pitcher due to make only $290,000 in 2000, but needed to placate an angry coalition of activists that was calling for Rocker's head.

The key parts of Kasten's strategy were to immediately distance the franchise from Rocker's comments, to agree to every meeting requested by every angry interest group, and to leave Rocker's punishment in the hands of baseball's head office. Kasten believed Rocker was not racist, just immature. "He got carried away," Kasten said, "with his own wrestling character."

Ultimately, Rocker was suspended for 14 days, but the Braves' handling of the situation drew praise.

Kasten "is a man with integrity -- that's what I took away from this incident," said former Atlanta City Council member Derrick Bozeman, a leader of the anti-Rocker forces at the time. "I didn't always agree with him. But he did what he said he was going to do. He could have hid out and said, 'Let's just let this blow over,' but he didn't. . . . I told him to save those teary-eyed stories [about his parents] for someone else. But I did get the real sense that it went deeper than just business for him."

Like Atlanta, Washington is a majority-black city that holds a central role in the nation's civil rights history. In recent weeks, the role of minority investors within the competing groups of bidders for the Nationals became a major issue, with critics in the D.C. government accusing the Lerner group of tokenism.

Kasten views himself as someone attuned to the plight of the disenfranchised. Asked about the District's demographics and baseball's efforts to retain African American players and fans, Kasten touted the Braves' efforts at minority outreach during the 1990s. When other teams were content to snatch up a couple of African American scouts and hold them up as examples of diversity, he said, the Braves started a minority scouting internship in 1994, pulling students from Atlanta's traditionally black colleges.

"No one was out in the community more than the Braves," Kasten said. "We worked very hard at that. . . . Wherever I go next, that's going to be an important part of what we do."

Inner Development

When Kasten agreed to take over the Braves in 1986, he spent the first few months studying the franchise's operation. The Braves' business model, he told Turner, was a losing formula. That model was fueled by a desire to create compelling programming for Turner's superstation, TBS, for which it relied heavily upon pricey free agent talent, with mostly lousy results.

The better approach, Kasten told him, was to invest in player development -- by buying additional minor league teams, signing more draft picks and improving minor league facilities.

"To his credit," Kasten said, "Ted told me: 'I don't need a speech. Just fix it, whatever it takes.' "

In 1991, a year after finishing last for the third straight year, the Braves captured the National League West title and came within a whiff of winning the World Series before losing in seven games to the Minnesota Twins. The Braves have won their division title in every year it was awarded (the strike wiped out the end of the 1994 season), a streak unmatched in professional sports.