Baseball's "Labour Trouble": Overdraft at the Memory Bank

A rather splendid New York Yankee pitcher, Ed Lopat, grew up to become a rather splendid Minnesota Twins scout. It would have been rather more splendid if only his employer at the time hadn't been the bottom-feeding Kansas City Athletics. Scouting a wiry Cuban outfielder, Lopat was singularly unimpressed. "This kid," he reported to the Athletics, "will never hit in the big leagues."

Until that kid's knees betrayed him about a decade later, a Rookie of the Year award, three American League batting championships, one American League pennant, and a couple of American League West championships made the Twins awful grateful that Steady Eddie and the Awful A's didn't know Tony Oliva when they saw him.

And my point is? Most baseball fans are likelier to remember how the A's blew Tony Oliva than they are to remember such small details as just who and what provokes baseball's incumbent "labour trouble," concerning which the Major League Players Association has at last drawn its (30 August) line in the sand. (Baseball's "labour trouble" is really management trouble, of course. But why let the truth interfere with a comfortable prejudice?) And baseball fans being overdrawn at the memory bank are precisely what baseball's mandarins and the blowhard sports media count upon.

Real world: A CEO tells his board, his stockholders, and his division or franchise chieftains that, under his committed and visionary leadership, the corporation pulled in $3.5 billion in revenues last year, the seventh straight year in which the revenues went up, up, up, and yet we still managed to lose $519 million. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a CEO who would be lucky if all he got was a drop to the unemployment line from a high-altitude airplane with a hole in his golden parachute.

Club Bud World: Bud Selig delivered that very news - about the $3.5 billion 2001 revenues and the $519 million lost, despite a seventh consecutive season with a revenue spike - right along with his tawdry attempt to exterminate his market competitor while fatting its chieftain by the slaying. The only punishment meted out to Selig was a three-year contract extension and a pay raise to a reported $4 million a year.

In the seven seasons from 1995 through 2001, Major League Baseball's revenues went up 156 percent, an extra $2.1 billion per year on average. Says whom? Says MLB's very own "Report of the Independent Members of the Commissioner's Blue Ribbon Panel on Baseball Economics" itself, plus MLB's own updated supplement to that report.

News flash: Less than half of that 156 percent, seven-year revenue spike went toward player salaries. So where, oh where, asks the Society for American Baseball Research - which was not invited to send a representative to the "independent" Blue Ribbon Panel, despite being the people baseball trusts most with Hall of Fame research - did that slightly more than half of the seven-year revenue spike go?

"We know where it's not going," writes Doug Pappas, chairman of SABR's Business of Baseball Committee. "Teams aren't operating more farm clubs. They haven't doubled the salaries of their scouts, ticket agents, or secretaries. Stadium rents haven't doubled. With inflation running roughly 17 percent from 1995 to 2001, clubs aren't paying twice as much for supplies and equipment."

Pappas's eight-part deconstruction of Budonomics should be required reading for anyone wishing to claim baseball's so-called crisis is the fault of those greedhead players or those marauding, imperialistic New York Yankees. Maybe those eight parts will also help deconstruct the rampaging rhetoric. Who knows? You might end up reminding yourself, as Pappas writes, that revenue sharing - as has already been practised, and as yet posited to the Players Association - contains two serious problems:

"First, it doesn't require recipients to try to compete," he writes. "Owners can simply pocket the money, treating it as a no obligation subsidy...The second problem results from a definitional ambiguity. 'Small-market team' can mean either 'low-revenue team' or 'team that plays in a small metropolitan area.' Since a team's revenues are largely dependent on its marketing and its on-field performance, the second definition is more meaningful...but MLB's revenue sharing formula uses the first definition exclusively."

Never mind the "measure of civility and compromise that was absent in 1994," as Los Angeles Times baseball columnist Ross Newhan describes this year's, especially this week's, rounds between the owners and the players. And Newhan is incontestably correct that there has been a noticeable enough lack of fustian between them, even as what began as a "promising" series of bargaining steps (especially the somewhat simply dispatched smaller issues, like steroid testing, international draft, minimum major league salary, and the like) ended with a breakoff in talks and the 30 August line in the sand.

The fresh impasse comes predominantly over a new bid to impose a salary cap. No, it isn't called a salary cap. It is called a "payroll tax" or a "luxury tax," depending upon who is telling or writing. The owners, say Newhan's Times colleague Jason Reid, deems the "tax" imperative "to gain a minimal form of salary restraint on the high-revenue clubs that drive the market and, in the view of many owners, prevent competitive balance."

Say this much for baseball's mandarins: They are smarter than they were in 1994, even if not so much smarter as to craft something that could escape hard translation as a salary cap. But they have at least learned the lesson of rhetorical subtlety. The players may not be dumb enough fish to swallow the lines, but an awful lot of fans sure are. Soften the lingo, drain the memory bank. Then sit back and let the talk radio stooges pour gasoline onto the fire and accuse the gasoline makers of arson.

And the owners have a few suicide bombers in their midst, "a militant group of small market owners," whom Newhan says have Selig's ear closer than any other owners. "That group...has been known to conduct its own conference calls devoid of other owners," Newhan reports. And one of those should by his very name bring the defences up on line, real right fast: Jerry Reinsdorf.

The Chicago White Sox owner once buttonholed then-Commissioner Fay Vincent for spending too much time at the ballparks. Reinsdorf was unamused to learn Vincent had enjoyed having a little dugout chat with Nolan Ryan on the day the future Hall of Famer nailed his 300th career win. "Nolan Ryan is a player," Reinsdorf admonished the Commish. "You're the commissioner of baseball. You can't be in awe of a player, I don't care who he is." Oh, the horror - a baseball commissioner watching baseball games like an honest-to-God baseball fan...and rooting, no less, for a baseball player to achieve a respected milestone. Death, where is thy sting?

It was in Reinsdorf's primary possession in 1994, as a matter of fact.Little did the outraged know that the owner who bawled out a commissioner for sitting in awe of the Ryan Express, then pushed for and got the 1994 strike and World Series kill, was himself sitting in awe of Ding Dong Belle.

But you needn't take my word; Reinsdorf has already been Ratted out. "Here's the biggest antilabour hawk of all time, the guy who spent years lecturing...the other owners on financial restraint," wrote Whitey Herzog, in You're Missin' A Great Game. "He wanted to force a strike and he wanted to cancel a World Series, if only just to break the players' backs. He got his way in '94 and put the game on a respirator. Yet the second the thing was settled, who was there backing the Brinks truck up to Albert Belle's house?"

Reinsdorf was such a hawk that he practised financial restraint by telling Belle the truck wasn't leaving until he helped himself to $55 million over five years. Financial restraint ends when the White Sox's intradivisional need to keep Albert Belle out of division rival Cleveland's lineup and get him into theirs before the Indians can re-sign the, ahem, mercurial free agent.

"As a matter of fact, Ebenezer Scrooge got so damned excited he forgot to count," the White Rat continued. "The top salary at the time...was $8 million. Reinsdorf skipped right past nine and ten and went straight to $11 million a year. That was the biggest fast-forward in the history of the salary spiral." At the time, anyway. Did the players put the guns to the Texas Rangers' owner's head and force him to solve the American League's worst team ERA by spending the equivalent of a quality pitching staff on...a shortstop?

But now the strike date is set. (That it can actually be bypassed, if the negotiations get close enough to a final deal that there becomes momentum enough to cancel it out, escapes many.) The owners, as usual, have screwed the pooch and want the players to pick up the brunt of the tab, if not the whole of it. The players, as usual, resist the idea that they should clean up the mess they didn't make in the first place. And Reinsdorf is said yet to be among the "small market" militants closest to Bud Selig's ear?

"In 1990," Bill Madden of the New York Daily News wrote in early July, "baseball owners took in $1.3 billion in revenues and spent $495 million of it on players' salaries, leaving $805 million to spend on everything else. Last year, those figures had nearly tripled...Yet, we are told a fifth of the teams are on the verge of bankruptcy...where did it all go? Obviously not on players' salaries...which is the only way to directly affect competitive balance. So who's kidding who here when it comes to more revenue sharing addressing baseball's competitive balance?"

Two days earlier, there came the much-respected journalist and baseball historian, Leonard Koppett, writing in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to remind anyone who cared to listen that baseball's good old days (read: before the free agency era, when the players were "more loyal" thanks to the owners' abuse of a certain contract clause to bind them like indentured servants) were, in terms of "competitive balance"...well, not so great.

"(From 1919 to 1922, the Yankees) bought Babe Ruth and nine other players, plus the manager, from the Red Sox, who had won four World Series from 1912-18 and finished second twice," Koppett wrote. "The Yankees won six pennants in eight years while the Red Sox fell into the second division for fifteen consecutive years, eight of them in last place...All of that without free agency...

"Free agency's full effect wasn't felt until 1982. Up to then, teams based in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles finished first 87 times, while Cleveland, Detroit, and Washington did so 14. Since 1982, of the 30 teams...26 have placed first at least once, including Arizona, San Diego, Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland, Oakland, Seattle, Texas, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Houston, and St. Louis. Which era seems more competitively balanced to you?"

Ponder if you must the wherefores behind various owners looking to punish the Yankees because George Steinbrenner does what they should be doing: reinvesting revenues and profits back into his team, sustaining his arduously rebuilt farm system, finding and securing new additional revenue streams, as even "smaller market" teams used to do in various ways (you really think the St. Louis Cardinals became a multi-state regional attraction just by sitting there collecting redistributed wealth?).

Ponder, too, why it is so that we should demand baseball players accept, basically, what we would never ourselves tolerate - abrogation of our right to work wherever we please, so long as it is mutually agreeable between ourselves and our prospective bosses; or, demands by our bosses that we clean up the mess left by their screwing the pooch repeatedly enough. For that matter, ask yourself the last time you got into a hearty discussion after the game over how Jerry Reinsdorf blew that 98 mph heater past Jeffrey Loria, or how Carl Polhad threw Peter Angelos out at the plate.

And, then, ask yourself how fast today we would hang any baseball player who dared to justify earning more than President Bush (himself a former baseball owner) by saying, as Babe Ruth said of his earning more than President Hoover: "Because I had a better year." What was then (and still, actually) just the good ol' Bambino for you would be, now, grounds for a necktie party.

Setting a strike date does not automatically mean another baseball shutdown. But at least it is time for fans to pay close attention at last to who and what might really make it so.

And while you do, you might care to return to Eddie Lopat. When he wasn't screwing the Tony Oliva pooch, he was making himself one of a score of reasons why there became a Major League Players Association in the first place.

Graduated from scout to general manager, he promised a player a certain salary raise, while the two chatted one on one at some gathering or other. Come time to talk contract formally, the player reminded Lopat quietly of that conversational promise and asked, respectfully enough, that it be made good for this year's paycheck. Lopat had only two words for him: "Prove it." Ahhhh, baseball's "good old" days.

Here is an article from todays Dallas Morning News, expressing Hick's opinions. Don't laugh at the irony of the article.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sports/topstories/stories/081702dnspohickslede.247d8.html

By KEN DALEY / The Dallas Morning News

Rangers owner Tom Hicks said Friday that if baseball players carry out their threat to walk off the job Aug. 30, the strike will be a long one. In fact, he will insist on it.

"I think a majority of owners, including me, would probably like to have even stronger cost-containment than we're talking about right now," Hicks said from a yacht off the coast of San Diego. "If they do choose to go on strike, I'm confident ownership will not allow a repeat of 1994. We need to fix baseball and not just have another Band-Aid solution."

Hicks said he fully expected the union to set its strike date Friday, calling the postponement of the decision earlier in the week "a maneuver for the benefit of public relations and not substance." And while Hicks said he is optimistic a settlement can be reached before the strike date, he will urge fellow owners to make a work stoppage count if it occurs.

"For the good of baseball, we need to have cost-containment and competitive balance," Hicks said. "People know a strike wouldn't be good for the game, but what is worse is to put our fans through this every seven years. I think a lot of owners would have a preference for a hard salary cap like football has. That would probably be better for baseball, but that's not what we're negotiating this time."

What owners are seeking, in addition to increased revenue-sharing, is a payroll tax of 50 percent for teams exceeding $102 million in payroll. The Rangers opened the season with a $105 million payroll, which ranked third in the majors, but Hicks promised he would comply with the proposed tax threshold.

"Every team in baseball that has any kind of business sense would try to manage its payroll to stay under that tax threshold," Hicks said. "There might be one or two that wouldn't, but that's a decision those teams have to make. Certainly, I can assure you, the Texas Rangers wouldn't be among them. If this system is implemented, the Texas Rangers will be under the threshold."

With the Rangers mired in last place and on pace to lose 93 games, attendance at The Ballpark in Arlington already was down 343,287 from last year through 60 dates. That 16 percent drop could worsen if the strike threat angers fans, and Hicks said he would understand.

"I think [fans] should be concerned; I don't blame them," he said. "This is a tactic. If we get an agreement between now and the 30th, that's terrific. If not, it will set off a chain of events that won't be good for anybody.

"If it happens, I just hope we as owners make sure we fix baseball for good. And I'm confident we would. I think it would be very different from 1994."

But not all owners might be able to withstand a shutdown as long as Hicks. Mike Ozanian, the senior editor who compiles the annual franchise valuations for Forbes magazine said, "The players have already been paid for almost all of this season. However, the owners stand to lose more than $1 billion from TV and ticket sales if a strike forces the cancellation of the postseason. Teams cannot afford such losses because many owners already have too much debt. And their personal businesses have been suffering as a result of the weak economy and beaten-down stock market."

The last paragraph says it all in my opinion.

Have you got a guesstimate as to how long this strike might last? Are we gonna miss another WS?

Assuming that there will be a strike at all (remember: setting the date does not for once and for all commit you to keeping the date if you think negotiations are improved enough, from the day you set the date to the day of the date, that you feel confident a deal is just a short while away without a strike), a strike could last any length of time. But I suspect that, if former Commissioner Fay Vincent can be believed, a strike this time would not last long enough to put the postseason into a cryonic chamber - because of yet another of the owners' self-possession blunders:

The day the players go out on strike, the banks will give baseball one week to make a deal. And Don (Fehr) knows it. He has all the cards. - Fay Vincent, to the Washington Post, earlier this season.

Now, of course, it is sensible to ask why the hell, if Bug Selig and those of his fellow owners so bleating are so convinced baseball is worse than dead flat broke (which is, I think, proven well enough to be a lie in the first place), those owners who did borrowed up the patootie and beyond in the first place? But it might first be sensible to remind ourselves that baseball owners have and exercise the kind of sensibility that would make them excellent political office candidates if they so desired...

If the owners want even a beginning to a permanent fix, they will have at least two things that they will have to do at long, long last:

One: They will have to cut the crap and accept more equitable box office splits between home and visiting teams. This is one area in which baseball can draw upon the NFL, if nowhere much else. But to my knowledge the NFL's box office split is 60-40, with the home team getting the 60. A reasonable split, that. Again to my knowledge - I could be very wrong about the actual percentages - the American League uses something like a 75-25 (or worse) box office split between home and visitor, and the National League uses 80-20 or thereabout. Among other "revenue sharings," the box office gate splits are among the most ridiculously lopsided or blindsided across professional sports, period, never mind baseball. And since Bug Selig's clever enough idea of dissolving the separate administrations of the National and American Leagues, there seems to me to be no damned excuse to perpetuate the overly inequitable box office splits that have too long existed.

Two: They will have to agree to a requirement - not a "faith understanding," a requirement - that any revenue shares distributed must be reinvested into the team. The revenue sharing implemented in the second half of the 1990s made no such requirements, and it is probably better than an educated guess that most owners whose teams did qualify to receive revenue shares put the money right into their own pockets. Essentially, this is the crux of why George Steinbrenner explodes like Mt. St. Helens whenever revenue sharing comes up in the discussion: he demands to know, and he is not unreasonable about it, why the hell he should be penalised for his having rebuilt and reconstituted a very successful franchise - with brains (or, at least, with his having learned at last it isn't too bright to keep meddling with the good brains he brings in to run the Yankees) more than money - by having monies siphoned from his organisation, monies his organisation in a nutshell earned the old fashioned way, and redistributed to franchises whose managements have neither the foresight, the insight, or the basic brains to put into their teams and reconstitute them?

In other words: Think of the Yankees as a wealth-generating, wealth-producing taxpayer. Now, if taxpayers (like us rightward folk on the FREEP for example) qua taxpayers think it criminal that the government (well, really, the State, since a properly construed government would not even think of such a thing) should take from them what they have earned and give it arbitrarily to those who have not and have no inclination to earn their keep and development, where is it a crime for the New York Yankees to think likewise?

Granted: Baseball is, essentially, a franchise business. It has its distinctions, like any franchise business. (One such distinction, which the "traditionalists" who lament the "good old days" of the reserve system and player indenture seem to forget, if ever they realised: Baseball the franchise business is selling its work force as the attraction to the public. You don't go to McDonald's because you think someone behind the counter is going to whomp up record french fries, but you do go to baseball games to see baseball players.) And, like any franchise business, there should be a particular minimum of revenues distributed for the basic sustenance and upkeep of each franchisee. Now: How far do you think a McDonald's franchise would be allowed to go by the parent corporation if said franchisee just pocketed those corporation revenue shares rather than putting a reasonable enough percentage of them into his franchise? I don't think this one would go very far, either.

Which brings me to a third thing baseball the parent corporation must repair: its insane promotion. Do you really think that even the longest-serving baseball fans will continue patronising a game whose management is a bunch of franchisees who haven't got clues about promoting their franchises (and who would rather get their hands in the back pockets of those who do - instead of banging on the Yankees, for example, for coming up with new promotion and thus new revenue streams, what the hell is keeping them from thinking likewise within the parameters of their regional markets real and prospective?) or whose idea of promoting the game is to denigrate its condition (albeit a condition they themselves have instigated) and its major product (the players)? Players in the NBA aren't any less "greedy" than major league baseball players. Michael Jordan actually earned better than the major leagues' highest average salary in his prime, and he was also not exactly a consistently sterling citizen...yet the NBA promoted the living daylights out of him and various other players and even went so far as to say how wonderful it was that these players could make so much money because the league was doing so wonderfully! MLB bitches about who's making how much money within seconds after they variously insist upon this or that player taking the money.

And between that and their gimmick-mentality "changes" in the game (the three-division alignment, the wild-card, interleague play, et. al.) which are aimed more at turning baseball into spectacle of a sort rather than enhancing the singularity of baseball as a pastime (a pastime, you don't give a damn how long the game lasts, and anyway, have we forgotten how long football and basketball games last when you factor in not just the TV commercial requirements but all the damn timeouts, fouls, penalties, and the like? You think an average baseball game lasts two hours and change? You sure haven't spent a Sunday afternoon with an NFL team where a game which in theory takes a minimum of an hour to play can take as long as three hours to finish, and football isn't even a game that you could call a pastime...), you could almost make the case that baseball - if you consider the game in no terms beyond its mandarins and their trained media parrots - was overtaken by a suicide wish.

Baseball the game wasn't broken until the owners decided to (quick) fix it. Baseball the business, of course, is a mess. And I can guarantee that businessmen in other lines of work who had handled their businesses the way baseball owners handle baseball the business would have some of the shortest executive careers in history...

I don't understand why they don't just go with some kind of "incentive" system.

There already are incentive contracts in baseball, pretty much spread around the game. But they do have their problems, mostly having to do with people who either can't count or don't know the team's specific playing needs and style drawing up the incentives. To the point where it is entirely possible for a player to sign a contract that makes it more lucrative and secure for him not to achieve than it does for him to be an achiever. (This actually happened with one of Rick Cerone's contracts: he had an incentive laden contract that, by the time you read his incentive clauses and figures, it proved actually more worthwhile for Cerone to be a mediocre catcher than it did for him to repeat his earlier solid performances, in his earlier turns with the Yankees...)

Now, about that .225 hitter making a million: Well, if all you see is his batting average, you'd be right. But if that .225 hitter nevertheless has a .350 or better on-base average, is run productive (in terms of creating and building as well as driving in runs), and is run-preventive in the field, you'd perhaps think twice about making just a blanket "he hits .225, he ain't worth a million." Ozzie Smith all but had to learn to make himself a useful major league hitter, but there wasn't a baseball man alive worth his weight in anything who would have said the Cardinals were idiots to make him the first million-dollar-a-year shortstop in baseball. You look at the player's entire game. Mike Schmidt hit .268 lifetime, and if the only thing you look at was that batting average, you'd write him off in a New York minute...and someone else who saw his entire game would snatch him up and he'd probably get into your kitchen and rattle your pans every time you played against his new team, because this guy was going to help his teams win and play himself into the Hall of Fame for reasons having nothing to do with his batting average.

It works likewise with a pitcher. Maybe you wouldn't pay a 5.09 ERA $20 million...but if he was working in a mega-offence era and the league ERA was six, you'd think differently...to an extent. OK, maybe he's not worth $20 million. Certainly not $20 million a season, but if this is a guy who can pitch at one run below the league ERA, you might think about him as maybe making, say, $10 million over six years. Because a guy who pitches one run below the leage ERA maybe isn't a Hall of Fame candidate (see, God rest his soul, Darryl Kile, for one) but he's a valuable pitcher. Now: Suppose he's 5 and 9 but he's a lights-out relief pitcher who gives you, what, 30 saves a season? How did he get that 5.09 ERA - did he have one or two bad innings in which he did get lit for a few runs? You look at the whole game.

Give you an example: John Smoltz has a not-so-great-looking ERA for a relief pitcher to this point. Look at that strictly and you might think you're overpaying the man. But...the reason it got that way is because, in April, Smoltz got his brains beaten out for nine runs in one bad inning by the Mets, in a game the Mets ended up winning in extra innings. For about two weeks, Smoltz's ERA looked like nine plus. You have to look at the player's or the pitcher's entire game, and how his game fits onto your team, to measure his legitimate or prospective worth (and, remember, you're gambling as much on his prospective worth as you are his performance to date. And that is why they call it gambling).

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