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Published on: 8/16/2004
Last Visited: 8/16/2004
Lucinda K. Treat, chief legal officer for the Red Sox, says she relishes both the art of the deal and a job 'with a real sense of impact on the community.'Lucinda K. Treat, chief legal officer for the Red Sox, says she relishes both the art of the deal and a job "with a real sense of impact on the community."(Photo / Webb Chappell)
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When John Henry closed the deal to buy the Red Sox, his secret weapon was Lucinda K. Treat.
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But then in walks Lucinda K. Treat, wholesome as a glass of milk, her blue eyes honest and clear, her chocolatecolored hair long and threaded with gray, her freshly scrubbed face anchored with a cute ski-jump nose.She blushes like a schoolgirl when her tinkly laugh overtakes her, which it often does, and then she speaks: "When I die, I want my epitaph to read that I softened the world."
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And in that Jerry Maguire moment, Treat -- the chief legal officer for the Red Sox, who says she is the only woman to hold that title in Major League Baseball and, at 33, is the youngest of either gender to hold such a position -- throws the first of her many curveballs.
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Treat abandons her office behind the grandstands, along Executive Row, and leads a visitor on a walk around the park that has undergone yet another face lift that the owners hope will prove to skeptics that Fenway does not need to be replaced, merely improved.Gazing out over the field, she talks about how much she loves this "cathedral to baseball" and the fans who worship there and how honored she is to work with the management team.As Treat stands on an upper-level deck, a soft breeze floats off the expansive cityscape and flirts with her linen peasant skirt."This is what I love about Fenway and the Red Sox and my job," she says almost reverentially."Being a part of the fabric of the city."
But how did this self-described brainiac, this product of a Quaker school system who speaks Swahili and was never into organized sports (she played Ultimate Frisbee, for goodness' sakes), become such a key element in one of the most storied franchises in baseball at such a young age, anyway?"I was free one night in June," she says, laughing.
It's a little more complicated.After graduating from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1992 with a degree in African languages and literature -- and having spent a semester working on a South Dakota Indian reservation -- she thought she'd do something cerebral, like get a PhD and do field research in Africa.But her daughter was born in the fall of that year, and a son would follow several years later.She leaned toward the practical -- law school -- but she knew she wasn't the aggressive type."I'm just not like that," she says, which is how she instead discovered that she loved deal-making.After graduating from Georgetown's law school in late 1996, Treat took a job in mergers and acquisitions at the firm of Shearman &Sterling in New York.
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