BASEBALL / ROSS NEWHAN : Players’ Group Is Not Expected to Welcome Salary-Cap Plan

The Major League Players Assn. will ask two basic questions of baseball’s seemingly determined and united owners when the owners lay out their salary-cap proposal.

--Why is it needed?

--Do we share in decisions as to how revenue is generated, or are we partners in name only?

Now that the owners have agreed to a revenue-sharing formula to fund a salary-cap system of compensation, collective bargaining negotiations are expected to begin soon.

There is little reason to believe the players will be pleased with the answers to their questions.

There also is little reason to believe that an eighth consecutive negotiations-related work stoppage--either in September of the 1994 season or in the spring of ‘95--can be averted.

It’s this simple:

The union does not believe a $1.7-billion industry is in financial peril or requires a new compensation system.

Nor does it believe the owners will ever allow players to sit in on major decisions.

As Don Fehr, the union’s executive director, noted after the owners had finally agreed to revenue sharing: “We were deliberately kept in the dark again and excluded from the process. When does the partnership begin?”

In the full sense, probably never. Even Richard Ravitch, the owners’ chief negotiator, acknowledged as much the other day when he referred to the salary-cap agreements in the NBA and NFL and said:

“Not by precedent or otherwise has it been demonstrated that a salary cap has to be accompanied by player control (of economic decisions).”

Fehr’s response is that NFL players had to swallow a salary cap in return for free agency and that NBA players agreed to it at a time when the league was near death, and that they will attempt to remove it in the next negotiations.

He calls the cap concept troublesome and knows it will be accompanied by an equally troublesome attempt to severely modify arbitration and free agency.

“If the owners want to redistribute their revenue, let them do it,” he said. “We’ve never cared how they did it, as long as it didn’t adversely affect the free market, but now they want the players’ cooperation in restricting the market.

“You can color it any way you want, but that’s what a salary cap does.

“The other troublesome aspect is that the owners refuse to involve the players in their decisions, but they are now willing to redistribute revenue to the very owners who have shown no ability to manage it or generate it.”

Under the revenue-sharing formula that will be implemented only if the owners get their salary cap, the list of clubs that would pay and receive would change annually, depending on their economic profiles.

If implemented today, a baseball official said, Montreal and Milwaukee, at the lowest end of the revenue ladder, would receive about $9.5 million, and the Dodgers, among big-revenue clubs, would contribute about $6 million.

The Angels, who have the seventh-lowest revenue, according to industry accounting, would get about $3 million, but would have to increase their payroll more than that to satisfy the minimum funding requirements of the salary cap.

“This has nothing to do with helping the Angels make a profit,” owner Jackie Autry said in Florida the other day. “It will only help bring our payroll up to the required level.

“It’s up to us to work out other areas of income. I mean, (coupled) with the right lease (at Anaheim Stadium), it will help correct some of our problems, but we need to get back up from having the seventh-lowest revenue to the top so that we can give rather than receive.”

Fehr, however, is not alone in his belief that if some clubs have economic problems, mismanagement is the reason. Two owners of high-revenue clubs, Peter O’Malley of the Dodgers and George Steinbrenner of the New York Yankees, voiced similar concerns before agreeing to the formula.

Nevertheless, Ravitch argues that there is a legitimate disparity among the clubs’ revenue sources--”some clubs’ payrolls exceed the gross revenues of other clubs”--and unless a measure of balance is achieved through revenue redistribution, the competitive balance will be jeopardized, along with economic viability.

“The (national) TV revenue provided many clubs with false security, but the bloom is off that rose,” Ravitch said.

“It won’t be easy, but (a new system is) so critically important that I’m confident we can reach resolution with the union.

“Can the union be happy with a system in which 10% of the players receive 50% of the compensation and more and more veterans are being forced out in favor of rookies making the minimum salary?”

The union’s response: So be it.

The market, it says, has always and will continue to respond to economic conditions and adjust itself, barring collusion.

There’s no conspiracy now. The owners are out in the open on this, and Ravitch has a seemingly free hand.

There’s no commissioner to intercede, as Fay Vincent did in the 1990 lockout, and the threat of capitulation by the often divided owners seems to have been reduced by a change requiring three-fourths approval of a new labor agreement or work stoppage rather than simple majority.

So the owners gear for acrimony while talking about an end to their acrimonious relationship with the union. Will this be a negotiation to cap all others? Bet on it.