Commentary : Arbitration Would Get Sports Back on the Field

Once again, as Pete Rose’s lawyers fight to keep him in baseball, a sports case is burdening the courts.

Does this make sense in a nation that has already all but swamped the judges in its court system?

Hardly.

Is there a better way?

Yes, happily, there is. It is called mediation-arbitration.

It is a quasi-judicial arrangement that begins with an effort by professional mediators to achieve a voluntary accommodation. If that fails, the case goes to binding arbitration.

It is my view that mediators and arbitrators are the people who should be settling sports arguments, not judges or commissioners.

It would seem easy enough to work out. All club owners, managers, coaches and players would simply agree--as a condition of participation--to two conditions:

The commissioner, or anyone serving as one, is empowered to interpret and enforce the organization’s constitution, rules and regulations.

--In case of a dispute, the appeals tribunal for a final decision is mediation-arbitration, not a court of law.

Salary differences and, conceivably, a few other kinds of disagreement could be exempt from such a system, if desired.

Before each hearing, both sides would have to be bonded. To the loser, the bills: for the winner’s expenses, for the mediators, and for the arbitrators, if needed.

That would inhibit frivolous appeals.

You can be sure that Pete Rose wouldn’t be allowed to spend all this time in court if, in a quiet moment years ago, he had consented to the concept of arbitration.

And you can be sure that with such a concept, there wouldn’t have been a long, expensive, draining fight between Raider owner Al Davis and the other club owners of the National Football League. Any arbitrator could have settled that one in six months, if not six minutes. As for the NFL’s long struggle with the NFL Players Assn., some of the battles in that war might even have been fought out in arbitration--leading, perhaps, to the new collective bargaining agreement that both parties say they want and need.

Theoretically, judges and juries are probably better. But in a litigious nation, one with a lawyer to every 100 residents in some states, the courts are running out of room for arguments between sports figures--the people who, after all, work in the toy department of America.

The leagues should be so advised, promptly, by a resolution of Congress.

The problem with giving any sports commissioner the power that baseball’s leader, Bart Giamatti, now claims--and that his predecessors have all claimed for 70 years--is that commissioners are chosen by the club owners.

Managers, coaches and ballplayers--there are 24 players to each ownership--are always denied any voice in the selection process.

The ratio is even further out of balance in the NFL, which averages 53 players to each ownership.

Still, regardless of how closely you’ve been listening since Pete Rozelle retired in March, you haven’t heard one NFL owner recommend that any player should be consulted during the search for Rozelle’s successor.

The methods of the owners are, in a sense, un-American. For this is a country that was founded on a premise that the governed should have a hand in choosing their governors.

It is a matter of record that all team sports deny this principle. And perhaps rightly. Perhaps the club owners, who in theory put up the money to run the franchises, should select their own commissioner.

But the result is that he is their commissioner. Thus, his powers to rule players, managers, coaches and others should be carefully circumscribed.

In no issue--surely in no issue as significant as the squabble over Pete Rose--should a commissioner be a court of last resort.

The rules of baseball and other team sports should always provide for an appeal to someone who isn’t paid by a minority as small as the owners.

One more thing:

The developments of the 1980s in American team sports suggest that it’s time for Congress to:

--Eliminate baseball’s favored antitrust status.

--Put all team sports on the same footing in terms of antitrust and all other national legislation.

It would be a plain injustice if baseball could excommunicate Pete Rose by order of a commissioner whose decisions, if he were in football, basketball or hockey, would be in violation of antitrust law.

More significant, baseball is no longer the national pastime, as it was in 1922, when it got its antitrust exemption. The NFL was two years old in 1922. The National Basketball Assn. wasn’t even a gleam in anyone’s eye.

Sixty-seven years later, if baseball is important to America, so are football, basketball and other sports.

Ironically, baseball’s exclusive antitrust exemption resulted from a total breakdown in its leadership--the mindless drifting that led to the 1919 Black Sox scandal. An alarmed Congress, many of whose members were baseball fans, concluded that the best way to save the game was to make its leader a dictator.

It is obvious now that this was an overreaction, and that, in the interests of fair play, it should be corrected.

Modern sports don’t need dictators. In a democratic, republican country, they can prosper under democratic, republican principles.

What sports leagues do need are fast, informed, well-grounded answers to their many tough problems. There are two reasons, at the moment, that this isn’t happening:

--Most commissioners lack the judicial training to supply informed answers to questions as complex as today’s.

--Few judges are capable of fast answers. To the contrary, one simple sports case--the NFL vs. Al Davis et al--lived in the courts for a decade. The Rose case could also live there for years if he doesn’t resign.

The solution? Arbitration.