Langston Finds Seller’s Market, but He Might Be Only the Start : Contracts: Some believe that players who are not stars could cash in on trend epitomized by pitcher’s five-year deal with Angels.

Perhaps the lesson in Mark Langston’s $16-million, five-year contract is that mothers should teach their boys to grow up to be left-handed pitchers.

Over the course of his contract, Langston will make more than the entire 24-man Angel roster was paid last season.

But the salary explosion shaking baseball also promises to make millionaires out of journeymen, even run-of-the-mill right-handers.

Until recent weeks, free agents were unlikely to get anything longer than a three-year contract. Moreover, Langston’s $16-million deal is by far the largest guaranteed sum in the history of the game.

Enriched by a $400-million cable TV contract and a $1-billion CBS television contract for the next four years, baseball owners are awash in cash, and apparently willing to part with sizable chunks.

For perspective, consider the industrywide baseball payroll was $369 million in 1989.

“It’s quite clear that the clubs have an enormous amount of money or they wouldn’t be spending it like this,” said agent Dick Moss, negotiator for about a dozen free agents.

“You have to understand that whatever baseball players make in salaries, it just means the owners make less profit,” Moss said. “It has no (adverse) implications to the rest of the public.

“There’s no reason to raise ticket prices.”

Not all owners are jumping on the free-spending bandwagon, however.

“What we have is a market out of control,” Montreal Expo owner Charles Bronfman said before Langston--who left the Expos at the end of the season to become a free agent--agreed to terms with the Angels.

“As a club, we’re still in a state of shock,” Expo spokesman Claude Brochu said Friday. “It’s really quite incredible. And I guess a little scary.

“I don’t know what the impact is going to be.”

There remain at least 74 opportunities to find out the full impact. That’s the number of free agents still unsigned from this year’s record pool of 90.

“What you are having is a four-year catch up,” agent Tom Reich said. “The owners’ revenue has about doubled in the last four years and you’re having a catch up. The players who have been in their prime during that period were short-changed.”

Some believe the Langston deal foreshadows a flurry of agreements.

“A lot of people have been waiting for Mark Langston,” agent Alan Meersand said. “When they find out they aren’t going to get him, they are going to go to plan ‘B.’ ”

Moss, who represents Angel pitcher Bert Blyleven, said Langston’s agreement is not the most significant of the winter.

Langston’s terms, and Rickey Henderson’s four-year, $12-million contract with Oakland, were “the ones you could predict several months ago,” Moss said.

It has been the middle-rung players such as Nick Esasky and Kevin Bass --”who have changed the (salary) structure considerably,” he said. Esasky signed with Atlanta and Bass with San Francisco, each for three-year agreements for more than $5 million.

Meersand, whose client, pitcher Walt Terrell, signed a three-year, $3.6-million contract this week with Pittsburgh, agrees.

Terrell, who had a sub-par season with San Diego and the Yankees, and former St. Louis catcher Tony Pena, who recently signed with Boston for $6.4 million over three years, are the truly significant contracts, Meersand said.

“Tony Pena was released from St. Louis. Released!” he said.

San Diego Padre Manager Jack McKeon said last summer that Terrell “would be lucky to get $400,000 and a one-year deal,” Meersand said. “I think a lot of people are surprised when a Walt Terrell gets a three-year package, but in this day and age it’s a bargain.”

Reich, who represents another free agent, Angel catcher Lance Parrish, doesn’t expect the Langston deal to limit the Angels in the negotiations.

“One knee-jerk reaction might be to say they spent all their money, but believe me, the California Angels don’t have a liquidity problem,” Reich said. “They have plenty of money.