Trust Baseball Owners? No!

Marvin Miller gets right to it. As executive director, he gave purpose to the baseball players association 25 years ago. Now retired but paying attention, Miller never believed owners crying poor mouth. “If the owners truly believed small-market teams would fail, they’d act in their own self-interest to share revenue in a meaningful way,” he says. “Their refusal to do that is proof that no such catastrophe looms.”

In an era of corporate downsizing, Miller says baseball is a growth industry: more teams, more jobs, more players, more executives. Even as the major leagues expanded to 30 teams, cities in Canada, Mexico and the United States asked to buy in.

Yet baseball’s owners dab at their eyes with silken handkerchiefs and say, “Poor, poor us. We are doomed to penury.” Or something like that. The owners want us to believe players demand so much money as to bring baseball to ruination.

Wrong, on two counts.

Even with attendance down during this latest round of combat, new ballparks are evidence of our confidence that baseball is the best game and still the best bargain for a family’s major league entertainment dollar.

Second, even if the business were near financial doom, blame would rest not with hired-hand players but with people who decide big-money questions, the owners. For in baseball, as in life, the golden rule applies: He who has the gold, rules.

So the owners’ enemy is not Donald Fehr, the players association executive director, nor Albert Belle. It is themselves. Not only do they attack the players who create the game they’re trying to sell--does any other business so denigrate its own product?--the owners attack each other as well.

Consider the Chicago grump, Jerry Reinsdorf. He is the White Sox board chairman who, by the fomenting power of his persuasion, led spineless owners into four years of crisis so mean-spirited as to scar the game forever.

First, the Reinsdorf cabal ran off Commissioner Fay Vincent; they worried that Vincent would undermine labor negotiations by saying a kind word about the players’ position. With the $1 million-a-year puppet Bud Selig saying, “I am not a commissioner, but I play one in real life,” Reinsdorf’s cabal then set into motion events that may have cost $1 billion in lost revenues and heaven only knows how much goodwill.

At a time baseball had achieved its greatest revenues with its greatest attendance, here came Reinsdorf, Selig and their blind-led-by-the-blind buddies doing in 1994 what World War I didn’t do, what World War II didn’t do and what an earthquake couldn’t do. They called off the World Series.

And once Reinsdorf led his fellows into that valley of death, he betrayed them. Allegedly, the Reinsdorf-Selig plan had been to help small-market teams. Instead, those teams suffered the most. And when they had been rendered helpless, did Reinsdorf help them? Did he offer to share with them more than a pittance of his White Sox revenue?

Hah.

He did what he had preached against for four years. He spent money like a fool. He signed Belle to the biggest contract in baseball history, $55 million for five years.

Quite a picture it made, the grump Reinsdorf and the lout Belle side by side at a happy-happy press conference, poster boys for everything people dislike about the game today: selfishness, duplicity, arrogance, anger and greed.

That caused some owners to rise up in anger. Only two weeks earlier, Reinsdorf and Selig had persuaded owners to vote down an agreement with players. That vote itself was a betrayal of the owners’ negotiator, Randy Levine, who had been told he had the power to make a deal with Fehr.

So, after Reinsdorf signed Belle, owners whose blood bubbled near boiling demanded another vote. The New York Daily News reported that four owners made speeches denouncing Reinsdorf. Larry Lucchino, president of the San Diego Padres, said, “Jerry, we’ve listened to you for four years. You’ve been on every committee and you’ve been wrong every time you’ve told us we had to do something. It’s time for you to stop talking and get out of the way.”

This time, the vote went for the agreement, and implicitly against Reinsdorf, 26-4.

Cynics have suggested that Reinsdorf scuttled the negotiator’s agreement because the White Sox were in negotiation with Belle. The Levine-Fehr agreement called for a tax on payrolls of a certain figure. Had Reinsdorf signed Belle with the tax in effect, it might have cost him $6 million of tax money. But because he signed Belle before the agreement, he owed nothing.

Only a cynic would think such sour thoughts, but some men invite cynicism. Reinsdorf once made a deal to move the White Sox out of Chicago to St. Petersburg, Fla., unless he was given a new ballpark--and the Illinois legislature literally stopped the clock at midnight on the last day of its session, June 30, 1988, to allow further debate before approving money to replace Comiskey Park. As author John Helyar wrote, “The good people of St. Petersburg looked on in stunned disbelief. Jerry Reinsdorf got the gold mine, and they got the shaft.”

Such deals may be hypocritical, but since when do we expect hardball businessmen to act in any way other than their self-interest? It has always been so, and especially so in baseball before players gained power to protect themselves, as Enos Slaughter once pointed out after a 1940s contract negotiation with the great man, Branch Rickey.

The St. Louis Cardinals’ outfielder, now in the Hall of Fame, said, “Mr. Rickey had more knowledge of baseball than anyone else and he knew his ballplayers, but when you talked money to him, you could get none of it. He was always going to the vault to give you change for a nickel.”