Owners could cash in

Sporting News, The, August 22, 1994 by Dave Kindred

So I go to church and the gentleman handing out prayer books says, "Just call up all the minor leaguers. Let them play. They'd play for nothing. Forget these other guys. Reagan did it with the air traffic controllers and it worked, didn't it? Do it with baseball."

So I go to my car and the gentleman in the parking lot says, "What people don't like about it is that it's what's happening in every other part of our society. Nothing's as good as it used to be. Everything's corrupted by money. And now it's baseball."

Which brings me to a long paragraph and three questions:

If your business could make $500 million by expanding tomorrow at no cost to you ... if, the next day, television wanted to give you another $30 million for doing nothing ... if you could make $20 million by changing one sentence in a contract ... if you could make a bundle by simply rearranging the stuff on your shelves ... if your $3-billion business already set sales records annually ... if all this were true, then:

* Would you tell everyone you're going broke?

* And would you blame your employees for it?

* And would you threaten your employees with the loss of their jobs if they didn't give back rights they had earned earlier?

Anyone with a thimbleful of common sense would say no, no and no.

Yet major league baseball owners are saying yes, yes, yes.

In this glorious baseball summer of 1994, the owners are claiming poverty while surrounded by all that money and, worse, they are making enemies of the employees who made the money possible.

We live in baseball's best times. They were made possible by uniquely talented players given negotiating power by their first union boss, marvin Miller, whose two decades of work beginning in 1966 should earn him a place in the Hall of Fame.

More fans today go to more games in more cities than ever. More teams win championships with more stars. Franchises sell for record prices and maybe two dozen buyers are eager to pay whatever it takes to join the major leagues.

Few people believe the owners are going broke. Those rare owners who respect our intelligence have spoken up to say the game is in no trouble. But let's say they are losing money. Why not, instead of fighting players, bend over and pick up the money lying on the ground?

They could pick up $500 million in expansion fees by adding four teams at $125 million each. They then could divvy up that money to help the poor lil' small-market teams crying so loudly.

The owners could make $30 million, the low estimate by economist Andrew Zimbalist, author of "Baseball and Billions," by selling pay-per-view TV. "If you're a Yankee fan in St. Louis," Zimbalist says, "you could buy Yankee games from their network. Millions of such people are scattered across the U.S."

Another $20 million might come from a change in revenue sharing. American League teams share gate receipts 80-20; the National League's home team gets 97 percent. Make it 80-20 in the N.L., Zimbalist says, and the small-market revenue problems of San Diego, Pittsburgh and Montreal would be resolved.

The value of all franchises would go up with the start of interleague play, a simple shuffling of inventory that puts a Frank Thomas here and a Barry Bonds there. And these appreciations would happen in a business with franchises already worth more than $100 million each. (Bought for $11 million in 1979, the Baltimore Orioles sold 12 years later for $173 million.)

The only reasonable response to the owners' bleatings is to say these owners are no different from those of a hundred years ago. They must come with a genetic disposition to the outrageous lie. At birth, a base-ball owner must emerge squalling, "I'm broke and it's the players' fault."

How else to understand the existence today of a salary-cap idea that was abandoned as unworkable 105 years ago? In 1889, N.L. owners set the maximum salary for a Class A player at $2,500. A Class E player made $1,500. Boston Owner Arthur Soden required E's to sweep out the bleachers after games.

The players' quick response to the cap was to create a competing league, the Players League. So the N.L. dropped the cap and ran the Players League out of business in a season.

And here we are, 105 years later, the players still fighting for what they deserve in a free-market society: the right to work anywhere for whatever anyone wants to pay them. Plumbers and sportswriters and even the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers have that right -- but not baseball players, whose bosses now want to create new restrictions rather than new freedoms.

The owners' negotiator even says his bosses will not give up their legal right, if a bargaining impasse is declared, to "implement" their own rules. They would impose a salary cap and eliminate salary arbitration.

The players' union leader, Don Fehr, has said, OK, let's get rid of arbitration; we'll drop it if you'll give us free agency sooner than six years. The owners' response has been an insistence on nothing less than the salary cap, a fixed shackle on freedom.