ANALYSIS : A 36-Hour Spans Reveals Owners’ Fears

Economic trouble and political strife within Major League Baseball are not new, but three jarring developments in a span of 36 hours last week provided a rare glimpse at the depth and complexity of those problems.

--On Wednesday morning, what had been an orderly procession toward the awarding of two long-awaited National League expansion franchises suddenly was shelved a week before it was to have been completed.

--Thursday morning’s Washington Post revealed that Baltimore Orioles owner Eli Jacobs is considering selling one of the game’s most prized franchises just 2 1/2 years after acquiring it.

--While making the unprecedented move of giving American League teams a portion of entry fees that will be generated by NL expansion, Commissioner Fay Vincent released a 7 1/2-page ruling late Thursday afternoon in which he blistered his employers -- the 26 owners -- for having been unable to resolve the matter themselves.

“I don’t know whether all of this is a coincidence, or whether people are focusing very, very seriously on the economics of the situation and where the game is going,” said Marvin Goldklang, a minority owner of the New York Yankees and principal owner of four minor-league teams. “But it’s human nature for people to come to grips more seriously with issues the closer they are to a point where they have to make a decision on those issues.”

In this case, that point was the owners’ meetings scheduled for this Wednesday and Thursday in Los Angeles. It was at those meetings that the sites for the two 1993 NL expansion teams were to be announced, and it is at those meetings that some very interesting and heated discussions still could occur.

There are some who believe the owners are content with expansion, because it will widen baseball’s appeal, quell political pressure from parts of the country without teams and provide a healthy cash infusion from entry-fee money.

But sources last week said that some owners believe it makes no financial sense to expand -- particularly during this period of national economic uncertainty in which existing teams are struggling and prospective owners are having a tough time getting up a $95 million entry fee and $20 million to $25 million in start-up costs only to sustain further losses.

Adding two teams also forces shared revenues to be split two more ways while eliminating two markets into which existing teams could relocate. In addition, there are concerns about dilution of player talent.

“None of us has made any secret of this,” NL Expansion Committee Chairman Douglas Danforth of Pittsburgh Pirates said last week. “But having said that, three commissioners (Peter Ueberroth, A. Bartlett Giamatti and Vincent) have believed that we wanted to provide exposure to Major League Baseball to other cities. We respect that. They’ve all had good reasons for doing it, so we will indeed expand.”

A backdrop to these developments is the political infighting among the owners that has been simmering for years. Part of the enmity stems from Ueberroth’s efforts in the early 1980s to make Major League Baseball more of a unified entity and less like two separate leagues.

When the time came to divvy up the $190 million in expansion entry fees, this restructuring effort, as well as the huge amount of money involved, prompted AL owners to demand a share even though the expanding league previously had kept all entry fees and supplied all the players. Vincent awarded the AL teams $42 million, but required them to supply half of the players for the expansion draft.

“All of this has led to an incredible amount of factionalization” among the owners, a source said. Vincent “has got himself a huge political problem going into next week’s meetings.”

Exacerbating matters is the process of awarding the teams. Because it feared leaks, the Expansion Committee tried to keep its deliberations secret.

That approach seemed sensible, but it irritated some owners. All 26 have a say in the process because the new teams must first be approved by the major league Ownership Committee, and then by votes of nine of the 12 NL owners and eight of the 14 AL owners.

The importance of the Ownership Committee’s role in the process is not to be underestimated because it includes some of baseball’s most respected and influential owners. It also has been criticized in the past for not being as thorough as it perhaps should have been, a source said.

After watching the Expansion Committee deliberate for months, sources said the Ownership Committee did not appreciate being left with about a week to make its review of the prospective new owners -- a process that normally takes 30-90 days. And with so much emphasis being placed on the ability of the new teams to be financially viable, the Ownership Committee balked.

“It could be as simplistic as them saying that getting it done by the June meetings was a little overoptimistic-no harm, no foul,” a former baseball official said. “It could be as complex as them looking at the ownership structures of all six groups and saying, ‘Oh, geez. In Year Four, after going 60-102 a couple of times, they are not going to be able to get it done.’ ”

It would seem to be a legitimate concern, just as it would seem legitimate that most of the prospective expansion owners have had to range far and wide to create the financial packages they now have. Miami’s Wayne Huizenga, the chairman of Blockbuster Video, is the only one-man show.

The Orioles’ Jacobs, who has two non-baseball corporate holdings that are in financial difficulty, said his reasons for selling the team are not economic.

But the former baseball official, noting the number of other teams for sale, said: “Maybe they are beginning to wonder if what they read is true and whether it is time to get out while the getting is good financially.”

In a recent interview Orioles President Larry Lucchino was discussing the manner in which Jacobs guides the club. Lucchino he recalled an old line by former Chicago Cubs owner Phil Wrigley: “He said, ‘Baseball is too much of a business to be a sport and too much of a sport to be a business,’ ” Lucchino said. “It’s a good line.”