COMMENTARY : Reinsdorf Becomes the New Walter O’Malley

All season long, during the splendid season now stopped, the Murderers Row for baseball was Ken Griffey Jr. and Frank Thomas and Matt Williams, Barry Bonds and Jeff Bagwell and Albert Belle, and the great Tony Gwynn. These players lifted their sport and filled its ballparks. Now they have been replaced by a different kind of Murderers Row. This one shuts the sport down and turns ballparks empty and silent in August. It really is time for the big management players to be out in the open, like the ballplayers, for everyone to see.

Murderers Row for management is Jerry Reinsdorf of the Chicago White Sox and Bud Selig of the Milwaukee Brewers and Richard Ravitch, their mouthpiece. And Carl Pohlad of the Minnesota Twins is in there, and whichever empty, union-busting suit is now in charge of The Tribune Company, and Claude Brochu of the Montreal Expos, who has the best team in baseball but says he is unable to compete anymore.

And throw in Doug Danforth of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Danforth is selling the Pirates but thinks he can have a say in shaping baseball’s future. Only in baseball do the guys running a going-out-of-business sale decide how the business should be run. Peter Gammons pointed out in the Boston Globe the other day that four members of baseball’s executive council--Pohlad, Danforth, Jackie Autry of the Angels and Tom Werner of the San Diego Padres--are selling their teams, or at least entertaining offers.

“Wouldn’t the governing body be better served by people who like the game?” Gammons wrote.

But these are some of management’s most powerful hawks all of a sudden, the toughest tough guys, even as they hide behind some kind of mob code of silence and let only Selig and Ravitch do their talking. Management’s Murderers Row. It is like some old-fashioned gang of political bosses, and so perhaps it is fitting that it is run out of Chicago by Reinsdorf, who has convinced enough small-market bosses that he is their champion. Reinsdorf’s agenda has nothing to do with what is good for baseball or what is good for the small-market bosses. Reinsdorf’s agenda is making more money for Reinsdorf.

This is the Reinsdorf who once said he refused to pay his own baseball players “what the dumbest guy in the business pays his players.”

And this is the Reinsdorf who once said: “Baseball is a business for owners, not players or umpires or fans.”

If the owners can bust the union, he makes more money. If they can get a salary cap, he can get more money, even if it means doing some revenue-sharing. Reinsdorf, remember, didn’t want to pay Michael Jordan. Why should he pay millions to some of these no-name baseball players?

Reinsdorf is brilliant, tough, and has the supreme hustler’s gift: He always lets the other guy think he came up with the idea. He is the new Walter O’Malley; he just doesn’t want to make a big show of it. Of course, he is perfectly happy to stay behind the scenes and let Selig be out front. People like Selig, who clearly believes baseball is on the verge of some baseball version of October 1929, even if that is the great lie of the baseball summer. Reinsdorf is the real commissioner at this time.

Donald Fehr is right about one thing: The real negotiating right now should involve a roomful of owners. Because if you still believe this war is between all the owners and all the baseball players, you are a sap. This is all about management’s Murderers Row, which has been able to get enough votes and enough help from Ravitch to organize this Holy War against the players and shut down baseball. They knew the players would never go for a salary cap. The longer the cap stays on the table, the more it looks as if the owners will sacrifice this season, do that kind of grievous damage to their own sport as a way of breaking the union.

This really is an amazing scam. Brochu, with the best record in baseball, his team playing in a city whose population is 3.1 million, cries the small-market blues. But if Brochu can’t make a go of it in Montreal with this kind of team, why does Montreal have to be in the baseball business? What law says Seattle has to have a team? What law is there on the books that says baseball must come up with a system that takes care of Bud Selig in Milwaukee?

Know this: Selig doesn’t get this salary cap on the table without some big-market muscle behind him. That is where Reinsdorf comes in.

Reinsdorf runs the owners, enough of them anyway, the way O’Malley once did. He is that kind of boss, even as he hides behind Selig. Reinsdorf is the one who took out Fay Vincent. He is the real author of this strike. The cleanup hitter for Murderers Row. In the process of murdering a baseball season.