Why Doesn’t Baseball Know the Score? : An economically troubled sport should look to the NFL’s new agreement

The world of professional sports, especially the side concerned with astronomical paychecks, has more to learn this weekend from the National Football League than the scores of playoff games.

After a long period of bickering, owners and players have reached a labor agreement that provides for free agency and, most important, introduces a team salary cap designed to keep down costs while ensuring profitability.

The National Basketball Assn., with able leadership and collective vision, has had a salary cap since 1983. There’s a lesson there for professional baseball, which has generated much unfavorable publicity because of its troubled economics. Currently, America’s national pastime is stumbling and grumbling toward a threatened spring-training lockout.

Football may have its headstrong owners, like the Raiders’ Al Davis, but baseball’s owners as a group have been especially stubborn in the pursuit of their particular interests.

They can’t agree on much of anything--whether it’s who should be commissioner, how to discipline Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott or the benefit of sharing revenues.

Baseball players have grown accustomed to the unbridled goodies that free agency has brought. It’s disappointing that the head of the baseball players union already has cast a skeptical eye on the NFL agreement.

Baseball must eventually establish a salary cap system of its own as a way of ensuring long-term viability. The National Hockey League, whose new commissioner comes from the NBA, should too.

The off-season’s frazzled free-agency market in baseball has served up a disturbing mix of economic pitches.

Can fans, who live and work in a recession, be expected to have infinite patience for the weak-hitting, poor-fielding shortstop who, if not making the game’s top dollar, is still being paid a very big salary?

After all, the allegiance of fans is being tested as never before by their inability to know, from one year to the next, who will be in the lineup. (The Angels’ payroll trimming over the last couple of years--which cost the team stars like Bert Blyleven, Jim Abbott, Wally Joyner and Dave Winfield--is a stark case in point.)

And, finally, the free-agency system is producing a small percentage of superstar players taking most of the salary pot. Is this right?

Occasionally in sports the most interesting action occurs off the field. That may yet prove to be the case with the NFL’s move this week toward a salary cap system.