PERSPECTIVE ON BASEBALL : With Trust, the Solution Is Easy : The owners and players eye one another across a vast divide; if neither takes the first step, a strike is certain.

Can a baseball strike be averted, even at the last moment?

Easily.

Will it be?

Almost certainly not.

Why not?

Do you know this story? Eleanor Roosevelt heard her husband, Franklin, President of the United States, complaining that his opponent was driving up the price of buying votes. “Why don’t you both just agree not to buy any?” she asked. “But Eleanor,” he replied, smiling and explaining as if to a child, “We don’t trust one another.”

That’s why. The players and club owners don’t trust one another.

If they did, even a little bit, the basis for settlement would be simple and obvious. Since they don’t, they seem determined to reject what any rational person can recognize as overwhelming self-interest in cooperation for mutual prosperity. The players are not, in any traditional sense, “employees” of the club owners, but the very product the owners are trying to sell. Without exceptionally skilled major leaguers, irreplaceable by any other commodity, the owners have no product. And without owners creating the context for presenting the product, the players’ skill is worthless. Let them perform in unmarked sweatshirts on a corner vacant lot and see how much money they make.

Yet they remain at each other’s throats in labor confrontations after 25 years. Why?

The players distrust the owners for at least five reasons:

* Within months of signing a 1985 labor agreement, management violated it by engaging in collusion against free agents, as determined by impartial arbitrators.

* Baseball’s vast publicity machinery has been used by management to bad-mouth players constantly.

* Predictions of impending financial disaster, year after year for a quarter-century, have proved totally false.

* Financial data, when offered, have been doctored or misleading in the past and are ambiguous now.

* In devising the plan now being offered, the owners pointedly avoided seeking any input from players.

Therefore, players don’t believe that the owners have any intention of bargaining anything in good faith. They see only maneuvering to force upon them, under cover of baseball’s unique antitrust exemption, rollbacks of what they’ve gained in previous negotiations.

The owners distrust the players because:

* They feel that union officials, agents and other greedy manipulators with their own agendas hoodwink naive and innocent athletes into trying to bleed management for every available penny.

* They believe that only they, as owners, have the right and qualifications to decide what’s good for baseball.

* They’ve seen all previous compromises lead to players asking for and getting more.

* They know, from their own painful and avowed experience, that they’ve been unable to trust each other, so how can they trust someone else?

Therefore, the owners also don’t believe the players are willing to “negotiate” anything, and see bargaining as an all-out win-lose proposition with egos on the line for union negotiators as uncompromisingly as for themselves.

The plan on the table transparently shifts hundreds of millions of dollars from players to the richest clubs. This amount would recompense the richer clubs for money they would be passing on to the so-called poorer clubs as additional “revenue-sharing” dollars. The owners say more revenue-sharing is necessary for the health of baseball. But they won’t do it unless the players pay for all of it. It’s not surprising that clubs voted for it 28-0, and that players find it abhorrent.

So the clubs believe that, whether or not the players actually strike, they can impose their plan unilaterally for next year, under labor law that permits this when there’s an “impasse” in bargaining. And players know that a strike, or the threat of one, is meaningless between seasons; only now, while the big bucks from post-season revenue can be threatened, can they deter the owners. Meanwhile, by insisting publicly that “we’re willing to take a strike,” the owners confirm to players how high they think the stakes are--how much they have to gain, and the players to lose. And yet, with an honest desire to solve a problem instead of win a fight, anyone can see a solution.

The players can say: “Our only concern is that you not impose your plan unilaterally. You say you want us to join you in a partnership. You took 18 months among yourselves to produce this proposal. We don’t like it, but give us a year to work out suggestions to deal with the problems you say you have. Then we can put our ideas together with yours and develop something acceptable to both. But drop the threat of imposing it yourselves.”

The owners can say: “We are convinced we face a crisis and that the present system cannot continue. If you agree in principle to make substantial changes that address our concerns, whether in the form of a salary cap or some other way you can think of, we’ll live with the status quo for one more year to see what you come up with.”

If that fails, the war can be resumed without either side having given up key weapons. If it succeeds, a true era of partnership might actually begin to evolve. But that would require trusting the good faith of both sides, and that’s exactly what’s missing.

If the goal is victory, however, not resolution, the ghostly voice of King Pyrrhus, who defeated the Romans in 279 BC with such great losses that he gave his name to our well-known phrase “Pyrrhic victory,” will echo again: “One more such victory and we are undone.”