Commentary : Foot-Dragging Owners Have Their Bluff Called on Baseball Expansion

For a dozen years and more, it has been a stall, a runaround and a con job on a level of cunning that would evoke the admiration of Machiavelli, that famous master of deceit and supreme authority on bad faith.

This is about the long-running and contemptible game the major league baseball owners and Peter Ueberroth, their present commissioner, have been playing with their favorite gulls--those innocent cities endlessly duped into the belief that there was an expansion franchise in the future for some of them.

The reality is that the two major leagues never have had much intention of expanding; that on this subject they always have been insincere, and still are, in their vague promises to award a new franchise here and another there; that they are panicked at the idea of bringing in more partners to share their television loot; that keeping applicant cities on the string serves to deflect any wrath at an outright no.

It is easy to picture the 26 owners and Ueberroth, in the privacy of their board rooms, guffawing at the success of their Big Tease--at the continuing gullibility of supplicant cities unaware they are chasing moonbeams to the amusement of the lords of baseball.

Always, when the subject of expansion has come up, it is as if the owners have been struck mute. Always they are content to scurry behind the skirts and empty utterances of their glib spokesman, Ueberroth, whose talent for saying nothing in general terms is unmatched.

A Ueberroth sampler, after he has emerged from meetings with the owners in which expansion was supposed to be on the agenda:

“Put expansion in the column of progress.” (No details.) . . . and “Baseball will expand sooner than later.” (When, for instance?) . . . and “I did not hear any discussion about not going forward.” (Two more negatives adding up to nothing positive.) . . . and “I never heard a single owner say he was against it.” (Did any owner say he was for it? Tell us.) . . . and “The train has left the station.” Oh goody.

Truthfully, two deviations from the party line did occur, once in 1985 and then two months ago. Bill Giles, the Philadelphia Phillies’ owner, said, “I do not favor expansion.” And Milwaukee’s Bud Selig is on record as saying, “I’m not on the expansion committee, but I see little interest in it right now.” Thus, the only available poll of club owner sentiment on expansion seems to stand 0-2.

Yet, and perhaps glory be, there is a glimmer of hope for the disenfranchised, and maybe even more than that. Let it be known there’s a movement afoot, a powerful and determined one that will not only get the club owners’ attention but should beat some fear into their heads and spoil their little game, make ‘em loosen up and spread some more franchises around.

It is the group calling itself the Senate Task Force on the Expansion of Major League Baseball, composed of 17 United States senators now playing hard ball. When 17 delegates from an assembly sometimes called the world’s most powerful body want to make a suggestion, it behooves organized baseball to pay attention. Implicit is the threat of “or else.”

The or else is that baseball will be stripped of its precious antitrust exemption granted in 1920 in a Supreme Court decision since called by one learned judge an “aberration” and by another as “not one of Mr. Justice Holmes’ happier days.”

Last year, when some of the senators met with Commissioner Ueberroth and asked him to set a timetable for expansion, they thanked him for his courtesy in meeting with them, despite getting no definite answer. Now, no more nice guys.

“We don’t like being stiffed,” said Sen. Tim Wirth, D-Colo., chairman of the group.

“We don’t consider their response in good faith,” said Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., adding, “We’re prepared to give major league baseball one more swing at the ball before they strike out.”

Typically outrageous was the response to these warnings, made this time by Ed Durso, executive vice president of Major League Baseball: “Baseball has been thoroughly responsive to all the task force inquiries and we’ve acted in good faith all the way . . . baseball is giving expansion its clear attention. A program for expansion is being developed by a joint committee of the American and National leagues and we will continue to report on its progress.”

More of the old pablum.

Granted that the 17-senator task force has special motives inasmuch as the members are from regions that seek franchises. But they have a weapon the club owners must respect and fear. They have a gun at baseball’s head.

Three times in different cases since 1920, the Supreme Court has ruled that baseball is exempt from antitrust control by some peculiar reasoning that it does not constitute interstate commerce.

It has been a myth for years that Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled that baseball was not a business. What he ruled is that organized baseball, then necessitating travel to and from seven states and the District of Columbia, was not engaging in interstate commerce.

Every time the Holmes court decision was challenged, subsequent Supreme Courts upheld baseball’s exemption on the added basis that Congress could, if it desired, enact a law upsetting the Holmes decision. Baseball benefited from Congress’ inaction.

If action comes now, lost to baseball would be its rights to its free agent draft, which now tells hundreds of graduating scholastic stars which teams they must sign with, thus avoiding expensive bidding wars. Absent immunity, that practice would be instantly labeled antitrust.

And no more would the two leagues be able to enforce their rule on territorial rights of the sort that now enables an American League owner to decide that Washington, D.C., is too close a neighboring city and thus can’t have a team in his league; that it must go hat in hand to the National League, which has been notoriously opposed to expansion. That’s antitrust!