O’Malley: Baseball Needs Solutions : Meetings: Dodger owner says ownership turnover helps foster instability in the game.

Concerned about divisiveness among owners and other factions of his game, Dodger President Peter O’Malley said Tuesday it is imperative that they all pull from the same end of the rope.

Tom Lasorda, the Dodger manager, has often made that plea to his teams, but O’Malley’s message comes in a lower key and at fewer decibels.

His message, he believes, is no less urgent, however.

“I’ve never seen the game more fractionalized,” he said at the Santa Monica hotel wheremajor league owners begin quarterly meetings today.

“There are fires burning all over. The game is crying for solutions.”

O’Malley said he didn’t mean to suggest that he had those solutions, but that the focus here, in addition to the agenda items of expansion and revenue-sharing, had to be on the start of a search for common ground, “ways to bring us together.”

“I’m very concerned because I care about the game,” O’Malley said. “If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t have stayed as long as I have. My mother and father passed away in the summer of ‘79, this is the summer of ’91 and I’ve had opportunity to leave every year. As I’ve said before, every year someone calls to say they’re interested in buying the team, and we tell them it’s not for sale.”

In the 22 years since Walter O’Malley appointed his son Dodger president, every major league club has been sold at least once or has undergone a significant change in administrative or ownership structure.

The Montreal Expos recently were sold, the Houston Astros and Baltimore Orioles are for sale and the Seattle Mariners and Cleveland Indians are rumored to be next.

As baseball’s senior chief executive officer based on continuous service, O’Malley said the frequent turnovers are reflective of the industry’s problems and contribute to them by creating instability.

“It takes time to develop a relationship,” O’Malley said. “Friends can work together to solve a problem easier than strangers, and it seems like every time we come to one of these meetings we’re being introduced to someone new. It’s tough when an owner is in the game for only a year or two at a time. It’s not an ideal environment to solve problems.”

Nor does that frequent turnover serve as the foundation for successful organizations, O’Malley said. The owner should be on the job every day.

“The running of a major league franchise today requires more attention and effort than ever before,” he said. “The issues are too complex and too varied to look on it as a hobby. It’s not fair to the fans, the players and the franchise to work at it on a part-time basis. Look at the franchises that are doing the best, generally speaking, and they are the ones that have the full-time support of an owner, president, CEO, a definite stability at the top.”

Commissioner Fay Vincent expressed similar concerns when he announced that the American League would receive $42 million of the National League’s $190 million in expansion revenue.

Caught in the middle by the leagues’ failure to resolve the issue, a displeased Vincent said it was time for the leagues and some owners to forget their parochial self-interests and realize that they are all in the same business with the same problems. Vincent wrote all of that in his seven-page report and may speak about it behind the closed doors of the two-day meetings here.

O’Malley said that a difference of opinion is healthy, but “I think it’s a mistake to hang our dirty laundry in public. It’s like Lawrence Tisch (chairman of the board of CBS) being quoted to the effect that he felt it was a mistake to have signed the contract with baseball, and that if he had to do it again he wouldn’t. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, you might say that to your staff, but you don’t tell the world that you made a mistake because you still want everyone to watch. I wouldn’t be happy if I was a CBS shareholder.”

The division of the expansion money--”there’s a lot of anger in the American League, and I think you’re going to see sparks fly,” Texas Ranger owner George Bush said Tuesday of Vincent’s failure to split it evenly--is simply the latest in a series of flare-ups that have divided owners or spotlighted the sometimes adversarial relationships with the players’ association, the umpires’ association and the minor leagues.

Increasing attendance, a healthy product on the field and ownership demonstrating its ability to put a variety of problems behind it are among the pluses, O’Malley said.

But now there’s expansion, and beyond that the hottest fire of all, the continuing search for an agreeable change in the economic structure.

O’Malley, owner of one of the richest and most successful franchises, said he would bring an open mind to the discussions on revenue-sharing here, but he didn’t sound excited about it, saying that he didn’t see how a distribution of wealth from one city to another would solve the issue of escalating salaries.

“I do think we were on the right track in the last negotiations,” he said of a system that would tie salaries to a percentage of gross revenues.

In the meantime, O’Malley and his seven colleagues on the major league ownership committee are expected to approve the National League expansion committee’s recommendation of Denver and Miami today. The leagues may still vote on it Thursday or conduct a phone vote in a week to 10 days.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that the National League’s decision to announce its expansion recommendations after previously having said a vote would be delayed was designed to circumvent an 11th-hour bid by O’Malley on behalf of Washington and former commissioner Bowie Kuhn.

O’Malley’s interest in Washington and his long friendship with Kuhn have been well established, but National League sources said there was no substance to the paper’s conclusion, and O’Malley called it ridiculous.

He reflected on the game’s problems and said, “We’ll pull together because there’s no alternative. Like it or not, we’ll be forced to hold hands because the issues are too important. The game means too much to the country to let anything happen to it, and that’s the daylight I see.”