BASEBALL / ROSS NEWHAN : TV Dispute Points to ‘Chaos, Disaster’

Acting Commissioner Bud Selig has tried to put a positive spin on it, but the withdrawal of ABC and NBC from baseball’s television contract after the World Series has deepened the concerns of many in a troubled industry.

Compounding a 25% attendance falloff in the aftermath of a labor dispute that remains unresolved, two perceptions emerge from this latest development:

--Baseball’s network rights and revenues could be on fragile ground, reduced to possible bidding between Fox and CBS, providing angry networks ABC and NBC are truly out of the picture until the turn of the century, as they have said.

--While Selig and his TV committee might have been the victim, in part, of an ABC-NBC power play, the image of baseball as an indecisive, leaderless industry has only been underscored by collapse of the partnership with the two networks.

Seeing the empty seats, it is impossible to forget that 2 1/2 years after voting to reopen labor negotiations a year early, the owners do not have a labor contract and have refused to negotiate in an official context since March 30 because, as the chairman of a National League East team said, “We don’t know what we want to negotiate. There’s no consensus, and Bud won’t act without a consensus. The TV situation is simply the same old story. It’s chaos, a disaster.”

Said Dodger President Peter O’Malley:

“More and more clubs are coming to the conclusion that we need a full-time, outside, independent commissioner to lead the industry. The attempt to reach decisions through committees isn’t working.

“We not only don’t have a commissioner, we don’t have a director of marketing, we don’t have a TV director and we don’t have a director of player relations. We don’t have three deputy commissioners, so to speak.”

Not all of it, of course, can be laid at Selig’s feet.

Most clubs still think that they should wait until there is a labor agreement to hire a commissioner.

Though cautious, perhaps to a fault, Selig is also paralyzed by the clubs’ indecision as to whether they should return to the table in pursuit of a salary cap, a luxury tax or a roll-over agreement that would retain the current system for another year or two.

The small markets say they would be satisfied with increased revenue sharing, period. The big clubs still link increased revenue sharing to a tax or cap, some way to pay for the increase. And the union still suspects that the owners will try to create another impasse, justifying implementation of a new system.

There have been informal meetings of lawyers and some hints that full-scale talks could resume before the All-Star game on July 11, but there has been no significant progress.

Selig’s role remains complicated by the need for a 21-vote approval of any agreement and his own conflicting status as the owner of the small-market Milwaukee Brewers.

All of the complaints are familiar to Selig, who refused to reply to O’Malley’s or any other comments except to say that at a recent owners’ meeting in Minneapolis, all 28 clubs agreed on the need “to rethink our TV position and to keep our options open. There was total unanimity on that.”

True, perhaps, but a National League executive said, “We have so many problems that we have to start putting some of the fires out. Unfortunately, no one seems in any hurry to do it.”

In dissolving the Baseball Network, Dennis Swanson, president of ABC sports, and Dick Ebersol, his counterpart at NBC, accused Selig and baseball of “a trail of broken promises” and said they can’t imagine being involved in baseball again before the turn of the century.

Selig and others in baseball suggested that the networks, concerned about the sale of advertising and prime-time scheduling in 1996, tried to strong-arm baseball into making a renewal decision before the required contract date of Nov. 1, a process that began last September.

The partnership would have renewed automatically if revenue for the first two seasons had reached $330 million, but the strike wiped out any chance of that in the contract’s first year, giving all three partners the opportunity to withdraw at the end of the 1995 postseason.

According to one source, however, the networks asked baseball to throw out 1994 and consider ’95 the first of a new two-year agreement that would roll over into two more two-year deals through 2000.

“It was an ultimatum, ‘Continue for six more years or we’re out,’ ” a baseball official said. “It was part of their campaign. I mean, the perception that the networks didn’t want any more baseball is invalid. They wanted six more years. They also wanted an answer, which we gave them. The problem was, they didn’t like the answer.”

The networks had been posing the question of renewal for 10 months and finally set a June 22 deadline in defiance of termination deadlines in the contract.

The answer from Selig was that he wouldn’t have an answer because:

--The TV committee was still looking at options and two members of the committee in particular, San Francisco Giant vice president Larry Baer and Florida Marlin owner Wayne Huizenga, strongly resisted capitulating to the renewal demands, believing that baseball, despite its problems, could do better by going on the market again.

--Baseball wanted the two networks to re-evaluate their desire for strictly prime-time starting times in postseason play and the regional telecasts of the league playoffs.

ABC and NBC opposed any changes in those areas, and Ebersol and Swanson ultimately responded to their pseudo deadline by calling a newspaper and announcing their withdrawal, claiming that Selig had made an oral agreement that the Baseball Network would be unaffected by the strike and that it would be extended through 1996. Selig denied making that promise.

Where does all of this leave baseball?

The six-year, $255-million contract with ESPN is unaffected, and a TV committee headed by Bill Giles, chairman of the Philadelphia Phillies, meets today to begin formulating a long-range policy.

In the meantime:

--Many baseball officials believe that the ABC-NBC stance is a negotiating ploy and that they will ultimately join the bidding for a new contract.

--With Fox, a lucrative new player in the sports market, having paid $1.58 billion for NFL rights, the TV committee and many big-market clubs had been pushing for dissolution of TBN, believing Fox will pump up bidding and the industry can do better with a contract guaranteeing set revenue rather than a percentage of potential sales.

Although the innovative partnership with ABC and NBC--the networks paid nothing for rights and basically gave 87% of advertising revenue to baseball--allowed the clubs to package advertising and sponsorship rights as they had never done before, the two-year goal would have provided individual clubs only about $5.5 million, not even a dent in the more than $500 million lost through the strike, Huizenga is said to have argued.

--Advertising sales for this year’s All-Star game are at a record high, Selig said, leading the clubs to believe that baseball’s market position is not as bleak as attendance would indicate and that there could be spirited bidding for a new contract.

Fox has been noncommittal regarding baseball, but is believed to have responded favorably to back-channel contacts from club officials.

Said David Kenin, president of CBS sports, “If we can conceive an arrangement that makes sense, naturally we’d be very interested in acquiring some kind of baseball package.”

CBS is obviously cautious.

After losing an estimated $500 million on the four-year contract that expired after the 1993 season and guaranteed the clubs about $265 million a year, or more than $10 million a club, it offered to retain the sport at about $120 million a year before baseball, with little leverage in a bad economy, chose the potential of the ABC-NBC partnership.

The end of the partnership saddened one of the architects, Chicago White Sox co-owner Eddie Einhorn, who acknowledged that the economy has improved but said, “This was a situation crying out for compromise and I don’t think that happened. Partners should be able to sit down and talk, and I don’t think they ever did.”

This much is certain: Baseball won’t be returning to the heady days of the former contract with CBS and may be at the negotiating whim of only one or two networks.

Without a labor agreement, it could even be shut out.

The Baseball Network was hardly off the drawing board when the strike hit, ultimately wiping out the World Series and the opportunity for both ABC and NBC to televise the Series at least once during the failed partnership. No decision has been reached on whether ABC or NBC will show this year’s event. There is no guarantee, of course, that it will be played.