What Power Does a Boss Really Have? : Baseball: Beginning with Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s commissioners have dealt with labor problems in their own ways.

The Major League Agreement empowers the commissioner of baseball to take whatever actions he deems proper in the “best interests” of the game, and the seven men who have preceded Fay Vincent as commissioner have interpreted that phrase in different ways in dealing with labor disputes.

Commissioners have mediated disputes and stayed out of them. They have opened training camps closed by owners.

Bowie Kuhn, whose term was marked by player strikes in 1969, ’80 and ‘81, and the 1976 owners’ lockout, sided with the players in their fight for improved pension rights in 1969, but he vocally backed the owners’ push for free-agent compensation in 1981.

Kuhn was convinced that “compensation would help us maintain competitive balance in baseball,” he wrote in his book, “Hardball: The Education of a Baseball Commissioner.” Therefore, he added, “If their position was right for baseball, I thought it was my duty to support them and to take whatever criticism might come.”

Attempts to unionize players began during the days of the National Commission, the three-man panel that ruled baseball from its genesis until 1921. Those efforts failed, but commissioners acted to help maintain labor peace.

Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, appointed the game’s first commissioner in 1921 in the wake of the notorious Black Sox scandal. Called a “players’ commissioner,” he made several players free agents when he felt owners had treated them unfairly.

Under Albert B. (Happy) Chandler, players got a minimum wage of $5,000 in 1946 and a pension system partially funded by a percentage of receipts from radio broadcasts and, later, telecasts of the World Series. The Players Association was born in 1947.

Still, management held the upper hand. Chandler recalled in a 1981 interview how he had dealt with potential union insurrection.

“I remember once when I was commissioner, Pittsburgh players, who had been unionized, were threatening not to go out on the field,” he told the Associated Press.

“They debated until 30 minutes before game time. We told the players we (were) going to have a game. I was going to put on a uniform myself, if necessary, as were my assistants, John Demoisey, Hans Wagner and Frankie Frisch, plus a few players such as Rip Sewell. The players gave in. There was no trouble.”

Chandler’s successor, Ford Frick, resigned in 1965. A year later, Marvin Miller, an economist for the United Steelworkers of America, was named executive director of the Major League Players Assn. He immediately tried to improve player salaries and benefits and loosen the reserve clause that bound players to their clubs for their entire careers.

Frick’s successor, Gen. William (Spike) Eckert, was perceived by owners as not being strong enough to stand up to Miller. Eckert resigned under pressure in December, 1968, as players were gearing up for their first strike.

Into the breach stepped Kuhn, an attorney with the law firm that represented the National League. As the commissioner pro tem, Kuhn ended an impasse by persuading Miller to go back to the bargaining table and convincing owners to yield on several key points in the pension dispute. A settlement was reached by the end of February and the season was not disrupted.

Kuhn, who was elected to a seven-year term in August, 1969, faced another strike threat in 1972. This time, he stayed out of the talks and let the owners’ Player Relations Committee deal with Miller and the players. Removing himself from the negotiations contributed toward creating Kuhn’s public image of arrogance, which Miller emphasized repeatedly in his efforts to gain sympathy for the players’ cause.

“Kuhn did the most unproductive of all things,” Miller said last week. “On the one hand, he wanted to present the face of the commissioner being above the battle: ‘I am the lord high commissioner, the Gilbert and Sullivan commissioner.’ (An allusion to the pompous Major General Stanley in the operetta “The Pirates of Penzance.”) That somehow he was neutral, though he was paid, hired and later fired by the owners. And that he only had the interests of baseball with a capital B in mind, and he was really above the fray.

“None of that was true and he knew it. When the chips were down and disputes began to erupt and people wrote things like, ‘The strike would be over if only Bowie Kuhn were alive,’ he’d say the commissioner doesn’t have authority in labor relations. He tried to be all things and succeeded in being nothing.”

Kuhn could not be reached for comment.

The 1976 lockout was initiated by owners to force the restructuring of the reserve system after arbitrator Peter Seitz’s landmark ruling granted free agency to pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally.

Camps were shut down on Feb. 23, then were ordered open by Kuhn on March 17 because “the closed camps were no longer serving any purpose.” Negotiations continued without Kuhn’s intervention, and the season began as scheduled while the two sides reached an agreement that included provisions for free agency.

Kuhn was roundly criticized for doing little to end the 50-day strike of 1981, although, according to his accounts, he helped persuade the PRC to accept Miller’s idea that teams that had lost free agents should be allowed to take compensation from a pool of players from both leagues.

His power had been technically curbed in 1979 when the PRC became an entity that was--at least nominally--separate from commissioner and owners. But he contended in his book that he couldn’t end the 1981 strike because, although he could direct the PRC to continue negotiating, “I had no power to direct a federally protected labor union to do anything . . . Had it been otherwise, there would have been no strike. No sensible person would have permitted the Players Association to strike over the compensation issue.”

He added, “The issue transcended compensation. But how, in an emotional setting, do you explain to a public deeply attached to the game and its continuity, that the commissioner had best let the players live with the responsibility for what they had done; that things would be better in the future if they learned now that there was a price to be paid; that future strikes might take short courses or not happen at all? I tried and found no answer. As a result, I took a fearful lashing from the press for allegedly doing nothing.”

Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan intervened, but American League President Lee MacPhail was the catalyst in reaching the settlement early on July 31. Kuhn lost much of the owners’ support for his handling of the strike, and many teams were disgruntled with the split-season format that settled the division and league champions.

Owners voted to dismiss him in November, 1982, but asked him to stay until August, 1983, then eventually settled on Peter Ueberroth as the new commissioner. But because Ueberroth could not sever his ties to the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee until after the 1984 Summer Games, Kuhn remained in office until Oct. 1, 1984.

Ueberroth’s term began with an umpires’ strike. He initially declined to intercede on the basis that it was “the league presidents’ business.” He entered the fray as an arbitrator on Oct. 7, on the condition that umpires agree to work the World Series. He brought about a quick settlement, siding with the umpires in their fight for better pay.

When he took office, Ueberroth said he intended to stay out of labor negotiations.

“There may be items that the owners take to the bargaining table that I don’t believe are in the best interest of baseball,” he said. “There may be items that the players take to the table that I don’t think are in the best interest of baseball. There may be items that both take to the table and agree on that are not in the best interest of baseball.

” . . . So if the commissioner is to function as commissioner, he cannot take sides, as unhappy as owners might be about that position.”

He maintained that stance in 1984-85 negotiations, but, behind the scenes, he opposed the owners’ plan to institute a salary cap and was credited with limiting the strike to one day.

In the end, he might have hurt the owners more by allowing and encouraging them to exchange salary information, which led to almost no free-agent bidding and, eventually to arbitrators’ decisions that owners had colluded to depress the free-agent market. Ueberroth insisted he was simply trying to find ways to improve the game’s financial situation.

“Ueberroth was kind of different,” said Miller, who was a consultant to the players’ association during the strike of 1985. “He insisted he was independent, but he wasn’t; that he was above the battle. The owners paid him but he didn’t need the job.

“He proceeded to spend his first period in office telling me and Don Fehr (Miller’s ultimate successor as executive director of the union) and the players’ association that they were going to hear poverty claims (from owners) but they weren’t poor. They kept two sets of books. But that didn’t stop him in 1985 (during contract negotiations) from saying the owners were poverty stricken.”

Bart Giamatti, Ueberroth’s successor, was not involved in any contract negotiations during his brief term, which ended when he died of a heart attack last September. His hand-picked deputy, Vincent, inherited the current situation.

Vincent has said he would like to help, and Miller said Vincent’s involvement could be crucial to resolving the dispute.

“Mr. Vincent, I have met, and I think he’s a bright man,” said Miller. “He does not spout the Bowie Kuhn line. He understands and admits he’s an appointee of the owners. He’d like to be helpful in the negotiations, but he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to do it. But he doesn’t pretend to have the answers.

“It’s not encouraging in terms of having a sane, intelligent voice who could step in and have impact (and won’t intervene).

“He’s waiting to be invited to step in. He’s uncertain about what is the appropriate role for him.”

* NEGOTIATIONS: Commissioner Fay Vincent joined talks between representatives of the players and owners, but the stalemate continued. C4