Ueberroth Addresses Amateur Coaches

Baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth told amateur coaches Friday they can help make baseball the first sport to eliminate drugs.

Ueberroth told 1,400 coaches at the United States Baseball Federation conference that ridding the sport and society of drug problems “starts at your level, with family.”

“Baseball is the fabric of society, that’s part of what makes baseball great,” he said.

In what he called an effort to make amateur and professional baseball “more of a family together,” Ueberroth named American League President Bobby Brown as the major league baseball coordinator for amateur baseball at a USBF luncheon.

Ueberroth sidestepped major issues at a post-luncheon news conference, but said “expansion is going to come to baseball, based on the quality of ownership and the quality of fans.”

“I think baseball franchises may move if there’s places that can’t support it,” he said.

Television is one of the biggest problems facing the sport, Ueberroth said, because “some teams can sell locally for $20 million and some for $500,000. There is a great inequity in finding players.”

In other major-league sports, the teams and network television share the profits, while major-league baseball teams are forced to sell for what they can get from local television operators.

The commissioner said he felt it was “blatantly unfair” for satellite “super-stations” to pick up games from teams that attract large audiences and televise them to other league cities.

But he admitted he had no power over the stations and added: “I’m not asking anybody to knock anything off.”