BASEBALL : Players Can Learn From Owners’ Mistakes

About a year ago, with baseball’s owners already working on the concept of a spring lockout if the players rejected revenue sharing, their Player Relations Committee hired one of New York’s largest and most powerful public relations firms, Howard Rubenstein & Associates, as consultants.

On Day 12 of their lockout, not even Rubenstein and all of his associates could dig the owners out of the public relations morass they have created.

A settlement in collective bargaining negotiations is inevitable, but what purpose has the lockout served except to alienate fans, damage Arizona and Florida businesses and threaten the start of the regular season?

It has failed to intimidate the leadership or membership of the Major League Players Assn., but it has compounded a portrait of ownership disarray and deceit.

From attempting to sell a revenue-sharing proposal they knew couldn’t fly or be defended to their recent, 24-hour sellout of Commissioner Fay Vincent’s attempt at a moderated settlement; to their refusal to roll back the requirement for salary arbitration to two years after gaining a three-year rule in 1985 through lies concerning their financial situation (lies they then compounded with three years of collusion), the owners have done nothing to create trust that is imperative to what Vincent hopes will be improved relations with the union.

This is an owners’ work stoppage, make no mistake about it.

This is Month Three of negotiations because the owners wasted two months on revenue sharing, then, until the last few days, couldn’t seem to agree on what they wanted to propose or who would propose it.

Paradoxically, the players have the capability of deciding how long the lockout lingers, and of transposing the public perception of whom is to blame.

The union may have an ethical right to its contention that it is entitled to a rollback of arbitration eligibility and restoration of the 33% pension share of national TV revenue because it gave both up as concession to the owners’ false claims of financial distress in 1985.

But the union also is on fragile ground here--if it is concerned about the reaction of a public that sees only dollar signs.

The union pension and benefits plan--one of the nation’s best and a role model in sports--is rumored to be almost overfunded.

And, while the average salary for players with more than two but less than three years of service has not kept pace with industry revenues because of the arbitration change that the union conceded in ‘85, the average salary for players in that category through last season was still $219,136.

A father of three who carries a lunch pail to work and wonders if he can meet the mortgage may legitimately ask, “How much more is a two-year player supposed to make?” He may listen to Don Fehr, the union’s executive director, claim that the owners have “(Kissed) off all the guys who are going to be the game’s ambassadors for the next 10 years” and say, “whoa, that’s a little too strong, Don.”

The bottom line is that the union, having warded off revenue sharing and other regressive proposals, may want to think twice before attempting to extract too much blood from these bumbling owners.

Otherwise, one may be tempted to write, as Shakespeare did, “a plague o’ both your houses.”

The temperature dropped into the low 20s in New York Sunday, an appropriate environment for bargaining talks that have never really climbed above chilly.

There was only a quick, uneventful phone call between Fehr, who spent the day at his suburban Ryebrook home, and Charles O’Connor, the PRC’s general counsel, who met with his staff at the PRC offices in Manhattan.

The 30th bargaining session is scheduled this morning. It could be the last for a while.

If there is no agreement--”I don’t know if we need a miracle but it would help,” Fehr said--then negotiations are scheduled to recess indefinitely while Fehr meets with his executive board in Phoenix Tuesday and then travels to other cities to update players.

Fehr reiterated Sunday that he fears a long lockout is likely. Of the season’s scheduled start on April 2, Fehr said: “We’re not there yet, but we’re rapidly approaching the point where it will be next to impossible to open the season on time.”

O’Connor said a recess isn’t critical because management believes only three weeks of training would be necessary to maintain the April 2 opening, but “from a negotiating standpoint it’s difficult to make up for lost time.”

Most observers believe that the PRC will give Fehr one of two proposals to take to Phoenix:

* In lieu of a rollback to two years on arbitration eligibility, an improved pension and minimum salary offer along with an increase in roster size from 24 to 25 players.

* A compromise on the arbitration eligibility impasse that would set up a scale combining service and performance standards that, if met, would allow players with more than two years but less than three to qualify for arbitration.

An example is the Boston Red Sox outstanding center fielder, Ellis Burks, who will be entering his fourth major league season in 1990--he came up after the start of the 1987 season--but has yet to compile three years of service time.

On Sunday, however, O’Connor continued to take a hardline against compromise.

“Even if you isolate only eight or ten or twelve players from that class, it will have a predictable economic effect, a ripple effect, on the entire class, even if the rest of the class isn’t eligible for arbitration,” he said.

Why are the owners so intent on finding arbitration cutbacks anywhere they can?

Consider:

* The 161 players eligible for arbitration this year increased their salaries $69,109,690 over 1989, a gain of 101.1%.

* Those 161, including the 24 who had their salary determined by an arbitrator and the 137 who settled before their hearing, showed an increase in average salary from $422,135 to $852,074.

* Even the 10 players who lost their hearings didn’t really lose. They increased their salaries a total of $4.7 million, an aggregate 110%.