Today, Play Stalled Replaces Play Ball : Labor: Major League Players Assn. doesn’t have much in common with other unions, and salaries are the most obvious difference.

Last year, the average American labor union negotiated a contract that gave its members a 4% annual raise.

This winter, nine baseball players signed multiyear contracts paying annual salaries of $3 million or better. One of them, Will Clark, now makes roughly 170 times the median salary of a full-time American worker.

That’s merely the most obvious difference between the Major League Baseball Players Assn. and the rest of organized labor.

Baseball’s often-amended labor framework--which the owners are now trying to change again with their threat of a spring training lockout--is a world apart from traditionalAmerican industrial relations.

Money is not the only reason that an $8-an-hour member of the United Food and Commercial Workers or the Service Employes International Union may feel less than complete solidarity with a fellow unionist such as pitcher Pascual Perez, who recently signed a $5.7-million, three-year contract with the New York Yankees after a 9-13 season with the Montreal Expos.

The very issues that consume most unions are different. Health benefits, not wages, is the most volatile subject in American labor. The number of strikes over management cutbacks in health benefits has tripled in the last three years, while unions have grudgingly grown used to pay increases that fall a bit below the pace of inflation.

“As a good union man, I should say we feel a lot of kinship, but personally I don’t,” says George Blunt, a teamster from Whittier who hasn’t worked in five months after going on strike at a Los Angeles food warehouse. “For a guy making $2 million a year, a little medical bill isn’t the problem it is to the average working man.”

Traditionally, the prime responsibility of a union is to negotiate a master pay scale. In baseball, as well as the entire sports-entertainment segment of labor, the union negotiates only the minimum wage--$68,000 a year in major league baseball. Above that floor, the player is worth whatever he and his agent can get from the club’s owner.

The logic behind this difference is that, unlike the typical worker, the athlete is not just an employee.

“He’s the product that’s being sold,” said Dick Moss, a baseball players’ agent who was formerly general counsel to the players’ union as well as associate general counsel to the United Steelworkers of America in the 1960s.

The determination of these salaries is another example of the difference.

Salaries for most unionized workers are “uniform by job categories because, for the most part, the job skills the workers in these jobs have are on par with one another,” said Lionel Sobel, a Loyola Law School professor who wrote a book about sports law. “The variations are hard for an employer to determine.”

As anyone who’s ever participated in a rotisserie league can testify, employee variables in baseball are rampant, if not mind-boggling. They make job categories impossible, but they also make performance analysis much easier than trying to rate the work of, say, two dozen nurses.

The increased use of computers in the workplace now allows employers to more easily quantify worker performance, from the number of calls an operator handles each hour to the number of minutes a warehouseman needs to fill a certain stock stock order. But unions, fearing that this data will be used punitively, have generally resisted basing wages on such individual measurements.

And what of the notion of seniority, so prized in the union shop, where gradations in pay are based on the belief that the longer you’ve been around, the more valuable you are? At Boeing, for example, machinists move up through 121 labor grades and steps, ranging from $8.88 an hour to $18.42.

Baseball stands such an idea on its head. Ask any 37-year-old utility infielder who took a pay cut after hitting .193. Or ask Steve Garvey, who at 38 wasn’t offered a contract by the San Diego Padres after he had hit .211 in 1987.

The workaday world certainly has its share of that kind of coldness. Unions complain increasingly that employers are pressuring workers in their 40s and 50s into retirement to save medical and other fringe-benefit costs, and turning increasingly to younger or part-time workers. But sports--particularly baseball, with its wealth of statistics--makes such judgments even less forgivingly.

Daniel Mitchell, director of UCLA’s Institute of Industrial Relations, said that even the fundamental question of market value changes when ballplayers and workers are compared.

“In routine collective bargaining, individuals are trying to get more than they would be worth (individually) in a free market,” using the union’s traditional implicit threat of a strike as leverage, Mitchell said. “In sports, players are trying to get what they’re worth in the free market.”

Historically, baseball players have been regarded as a breed apart from other workers because their bosses--the team owners--were exempt from antitrust laws. This occurred because of what sports-law expert Sobel calls an accident of history.

The Supreme Court ruled in the 1920s that baseball was exempt because it did not meet the definition of interstate commerce--a definition that in subsequent decades has been substantially widened to include not merely manufactured goods but services as well. businesses.

But the control owners enjoyed over players--restricting them to a certain team, robbing them of all bargaining rights--began to evaporate in the 1970s with court rulings that created salary arbitration and free agency.

Those changes have made the antitrust exemption largely irrelevant, according to Sobel and Jack Getman, another sports-law authority who teaches at the University of Texas law school. The current battle between the players and the owners, as well as the future ones, will be played out under the same federal labor laws that govern the rest of America’s unions.