Vincent Gives AL Part of NL Expansion Fees

Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent said Thursday that he will award the American League $42 million of the $190 million that the National League will receive from its two expansion teams and that the AL will supply half of the 72 players scheduled to be drafted from the 26 existing teams.

Vincent, forced to act as arbitrator when the leagues were unable to resolve the American League’s demand to share the expansion income, said in a seven-page ruling that any future expansion money will be divided equally between the leagues.

“There is much to be said, especially in baseball, for following precedent and for playing by the established rules,” Vincent said of expansion revenue’s never having been shared before.

“On the other hand, the American League makes the good argument that the allocation to the National League of the entire $190 million . . . would seriously weaken the American League.”

Each of the National League’s 12 teams will receive $12,333,333, compared to $15,833,333 if the league had kept the entire $190 million. Each American League team will receive $3 million.

Of the decision, Dodger owner Peter O’Malley said: “I respect it. We gave him a difficult problem to resolve, and I respect it.”

That was a lukewarm endorsement representative of the NL dissatisfaction with having to give up any of the $190 million. Many AL owners, insisting on anonymity, were equally dissatisfied, claiming the $3 million they will receive will not even cover the developmental cost of the three players each AL team has to give up in the expansion draft.

Vincent, caught in the middle, has said that the issue should have been resolved by the leagues and that he was unhappy to have been put in a no-win role. He said Thursday that he feared the decision might damage relations between the leagues and was disturbed that some owners continue to think only of their own interests, rather than the good of the game.

Vincent wrote that the squabbling and a tendency to see economic issues as moral ones were contributing to baseball’s “fall from grace” and had to stop.

This dispute developed because of the escalation in expansion fees to $95 million a team.

When the AL expanded to Toronto and Seattle in 1977, there was $13.25 million at stake--Toronto paid $7 million and Seattle $6.25 million. In 1969, Montreal and San Diego paid $10 million each to join the NL, and Kansas City and Seattle (the Pilots became the Milwaukee Brewers) paid $5.55 million each to join the AL.

“The difficulty with the American League argument is that it forces me as commissioner away from the comforting and reassuring principles of law and of precedent into the cloudy waters of equity,” Vincent wrote in his decision. “I am asked . . . to allocate money to protect the American League against serious harm which cannot readily be proven.”

Each existing team will provide three players to the expansion pool. Each NL team had been previously scheduled to contribute six. The change must by approved by the players’ association, but Vincent said he had talked with the union and didn’t expect a problem.