Baseball’s owners can reopen negotiations on the basic labor agreement this winter, a year early, and another fight over fundamental rights will begin. If, as is probable, it is not settled by the time spring training is supposed to begin, the owners may do what they did in 1990-lock out the players. In 1990 opening day was merely delayed. But the owners’ aims were less aggressively ambitious than they now are, at least among those who participated in the downsizing of the Commissioner’s office.
Some of these owners may be less ardent for confrontation after they have conversations with their bankers. Some owners are, in effect, batting with an 0-2 count, financially. The Major League Baseball Players Association, the union, has a huge-upwards of $100 million-emergency fund from licensing revenues (baseball cards and lots of other stuff). Furthermore, in their battles with the union, the owners’ won-lost record is worse than that of the 1899 Cleveland Spiders (20-134, .130). Yet today’s owners still hope to break the will of the union that has almost never lost and has seen the compensation of its members increase 1,823 percent since 1976.
The easiest question to answer about the owners’ bidding up of players’ salaries is: When will it end? The answer is: When the money runs out. For many teams-perhaps most (but a few may be fibbing)-it pretty much has. And the next national television contract may be half the size of the current one that gives each team $14 million a year. As an industry, baseball is profitable, but very unevenly, and at some point unevenness becomes ruinous to individual teams, and hence to the industry. If 28 widget makers are competing, each hopes to drive some others out of business. But baseball depends on competitive balance.
Baseball’s basic dilemma is this: The price of players is set by a national market, but teams’ revenues reflect local disparities, the biggest being local broadcasting revenues. Revenue disparities mattered less when broadcasting mattered less, and when players were chattel. Players were among the last American employees to win the elemental right to negotiate terms of employment. Until the mid-1970s a player was owned by a team until it, at its unfettered discretion, traded, sold or released him. In 1974 players began to accumulate serious rights–to become free agents and to salary arbitration. (In arbitration a player demands a sum X, his team offers Y and the arbitrator must pick one sum or the other.)
Owners predicted that player mobility would mean the perpetual domination of both leagues by a few rich bigmarket teams. But free agency has coincided with unprecedented competitive balance. There are six teams in the three largest markets–New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. Only two (the 1986 Mets and the 1988 Dodgers) were among the 20 teams that appeared in the World Series in the last decade. Impecunious but intelligent management (the Twins won two world championships in five years) can beat rich dolts. (The Yankees get about 14 times more local broadcasting revenues than the Twins.) But at some point money can overwhelm mind in baseball.
Baseball’s fundamental need is a new constitution. It needs government, which human beings find necessary because individuals and their factions are partial to themselves. Good governments produce compromise and look after the general good-the collective interests of the community. Mussolini’s Italy was described as despotism tempered by anarchy. Baseball today is anarchy leavened by furious factional strife. Of the 28 owners, nine (10 if the sale of the Giants is consummated) have been in baseball fewer than five years. Baseball’s institutional memory is weak. The union has rarely recognized any responsibility to baseball beyond maximizing players’ earnings, and owners have rebuffed the union’s tentative suggestions for a more collaborative role. And remember-the players certainly do-that the owners’ most resourceful response to the players’ new rights was illegal. It was collusion against free agents, and it got the owners a $280 million fine.
The owners, with very valuable assets at risk, resent it when a Commissioner they hire uses his power to act independently “in the best interests of baseball.” They say: We pay him, he should obey our collective will. But they rarely have such a will because their interests are as diverse as their local situations. (Go ahead, try to get the Yankees and Twins to agree on pooling local broadcast revenues.) A suggestion: The union, because it has a huge stake in a healthy industry, should consider amending today’s compensation system that puts many teams in peril. In exchange, and for the same reason, the owners should consider more revenue sharing under a common salary cap, and with a salary floor, for all teams. Otherwise there may be Armageddon next April.
Between the foul lines the national pastime is emblematic of the nation in many nice ways. But off the field it mirrors many of the causes of our current discontents-angry factions loudly invoking the language of “rights,” and not even one small voice articulating the community’s collective and long-term interests. In the past, Commissioners have done that, but only delicately and rarely, husbanding their “best interests” power, like the best wine in the cellar, for extraordinary occasions. However, Fay Vincent may have been the last real Commissioner. Sure, someone will be called that. But as Lincoln liked to say, if we call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Five? No, calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg.
Subsequent Commissioners may have the prominence of a ship’s figurehead but little to say about the serious business on the ship’s bridge. Today some mutineers among the owners, having put Captain Bligh (as they think Fay Vincent was) overboard, want to steer the ship into the iceberg dead ahead. Fans had better brace themselves.
