Owners Need Saving--From Themselves

In West Los Angeles, the Federal Building lawn has served as a piazza of sorts for groups espousing particular philosophies.

Demonstrations there have dealt with Iran, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Panama, El Salvador, Nicaragua, South Africa and the Soviet Union.

The subject of abortion has been taken up on the Federal Building lawn. Causes in behalf of redwoods, seals, elephants, owls and waterfowl have been advanced there.

Vivisection in connection with medical research has been debated, along with oil-drilling, flag-burning, gay rights, prayers in school and consumption of coal.

But never in the two decades or so the building has stood has a group appeared there, brandishing banners asking for higher wages for baseball players.

If this is a popular cause, you would never know it, circulating among villagers who have yet to demand that Will Clark be paid $4 million a year.

No one has made a speech requesting even $3 million, if, indeed, 30 cents.

Since moisture doesn’t form in the eyes of the public over player wages, why are major league owners embarked today upon this mad course, giving away massive sums almost capriciously--and then asking for sympathy?

They tell you, too, they can’t start spring training until they have a contract with the players that would hold in check salaries the owners have proffered, quite without a Luger at their skull.

Do you know why such salaries have been proffered? Owners who are addled give away money for fear owners more addled will steal their players.

Rules in sports governing talent have been instituted by owners not to protect them from the talent, but from each other.

It was the reason the famed “Rozelle Rule” was introduced to football. The Rozelle Rule called for equal compensation to a team losing a player to another team.

The court eventually threw out the rule in favor of the more modified system of compensation you see in the NFL today, but the owners hatched it as a safeguard against their own brotherhood.

So the good American asks, “Are you implying, sir, that baseball salaries be regulated? That violates the law of the land.”

“I am not implying anything,” you answer. “I am only telling the owners to be fiscally responsible, or shut up. We don’t want to hear the troubles of owners unloading the kind of money they have.”

Now, of course, the owners are trying to bring wages under control, but aren’t succeeding with the players who feel they can continue to prey upon the weakness, or the ego, of those employing them.

We take up this issue with one of baseball’s most formidable operators, Peter O’Malley of the Dodgers, asking whether the owners can pull off their new salary plan with a threatened lockout.

“By agreement among the owners,” he answers, “I am not able to discuss it.”

This is good and bad. It is bad because we would like to tap his erudition, but it is good because it shows the owners can agree on something.

A year ago, though, we discussed the madness of wages with O’Malley just after he had disburdened himself of $7.9 million for Orel Hershiser.

Confessing the owners had burst their moorings on pay, O’Malley tried to explain why the Dodgers, a rational firm, were following suit.

“If we don’t sign Hershiser,” he said, “we’ll lose him at the end of the year to an owner who is told by his manager that the club is only one pitcher away from winning it all. To win it all, some owners will do anything. God spare us from those owners only one pitcher away.”

O’Malley added that the actions of all the owners are interlocking.

“You get egotists and fast-buck guys into the game,” he said, “and all of us pay for it.”

The money flowing into the sewer last year alone was incomprehensible--colossal wages for non-producers such as Jim Rice, Dave Winfield, Keith Hernandez, Gary Carter, Jack Morris, Kirk Gibson.

The record shows that 33 players last season tapped management for All-Star bonus clauses, worth up to $50,000 if they could be voted into the game.

Is anything more frivolous than the selection of All-Star players? For this, the owners were shelling out.

And they expect hearts to bleed in their behalf?

Still, owners needn’t feel threatened until a sign appears on the Federal Building lawn, reading, “Millions for the split-finger fastball, but not one cent for whales.”