Owners Told to Zip It

As baseball’s spring camps open under the sun of Arizona and Florida, the long-range forecast is for a return of the storm clouds that have darkened every labor negotiation, shadowing eight work stoppages.

The bargaining agreement binding players and owners expires at the end of the 2001 season.

By the spring of 2002, with owners determined to slow salary growth and narrow revenue and competitive disparities through changes in the economic system, the high strike could be replaced by a players strike, line outs by a lockout.

“If my life depended on it, I couldn’t tell you how this will play out, if there’s going to be a shutdown or not,” the chairman of a big league club said.

He demanded anonymity because Commissioner Bud Selig informed owners at a January meeting that he will be the only management spokesman on labor issues and any owner violating that edict will be fined $1 million. Selig, of course, is trying to avoid the inflammatory rhetoric accompanying the long labor dispute of 1994-95. He is trying to keep the focus on the 2001 season, avoid the usual perception of the owners as divided and enhance the improved relationship with the players union.

“Bud isn’t trying to be a censor,” the team chairman said. “He wants opinions, but he wants them in-house. The union doesn’t have to tell the players what to do because they all sing from the same hymnal.

“Frankly, the history is that of the owners being all over the map, and that can be a hindrance to negotiations. All of us have shot ourselves in the foot at times by talking to the press.”

Selig, it has been learned, had to enforce his edict recently after Boston Red Sox Chairman John Harrington told the Boston Globe that as much as changes are needed “you’re not going to see a [work stoppage] happen again” and that owners might even agree to extend the current agreement through the 2002 season while talks continue.

Industry sources said Harrington, hoping to convince potential buyers of the Red Sox that play will not be interrupted, infuriated close friend Selig with his comments and was fined “several hundred thousand,” escaping the $1 million because he convinced the commissioner that he’d made the comments before the January meeting but they were not printed until afterward.

Will Selig be able to keep the focus on the field in 2001?

Will the owners present a united front when negotiations start late in the season?

What is the true status of an industry in which disparity and economic paranoia have become the dominant themes, despite ongoing signs of financial health during another wild winter of player signings and the often-overlooked growth in attendance and revenue?

There are no easy answers, but consider:

* Since 1993, the last full season before the ’94 strike, industry revenue has almost doubled, rising from $1.7 billion to about $3.3 billion--this before the new $2.5-billion postseason TV contract with Fox and several impressive cable deals at local levels.

* Attendance was up another 3.4% last year, producing a record 72.7 million, a total that should be surpassed this season when the ballpark renaissance continues with openings in Milwaukee and Pittsburgh.

* Despite wails about competitive disparity, the 3-year-old Tampa Bay Devil Rays are the only team that has failed to reach the playoffs in the last 20 years. The only teams to have failed in the last 10 years are Detroit, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Montreal and the Angels. Even at that, the Angels were within a one-game playoff in 1995 and Montreal had baseball’s best record in 1994 when owners forced the union to strike. In addition, in the last few seasons, several teams in the mid- to low- market and revenue category have reached or almost reached the playoffs, including San Diego, Seattle, Oakland, Cincinnati, San Francisco and the Chicago White Sox.

Said Leonard Koppett, a Hall of Fame baseball writer and one of the industry’s most respected analysts, “Look, by any point of view, this is the best baseball has ever had it, a golden era, but the owners keep spoiling it by talking about all of their alleged problems. They are so obsessed with the fight with the union--and it’s not just a fight over money but a fight over who wins--that they are spoiling a great thing.

“I mean, attendance, revenue and salaries have never been higher, there are more teams than ever with a chance to reach the World Series and the performance of the players has been spectacular. There are more active players headed for the Hall of Fame than ever. The owners are creating a false impression. They need to stop talking and focus on the field.”

Selig agrees with much of Koppett’s view but insists that too many teams have too little hope and the problems are so pervasive that it will take a combination of solutions.

“There was a lot of blood spilled, but we’ve made a remarkable recovery [from the 1994-95 strike],” Selig said. “No question about it. If somebody had told me four or five years ago that we’d be drawing 72 million and grossing more than $3 billion I wouldn’t have believed it.

“But in spite of that growth, the disparity issue has been exacerbated, and that’s been the frustrating and perplexing part, and we have to deal with it. The system has to be changed.”

Negotiations are expected to begin in late summer. Last year’s report by the owners’ economic committee is expected to form the framework of their approach. They are expected to seek a more restrictive luxury tax on high payrolls, increased revenue sharing among the clubs, a rule prohibiting clubs from receiving central fund distributions unless they have a payroll of $40 million or more, several changes in the amateur draft designed to restrict signing bonuses and creation of a competitive draft in which teams with the poorest records over a three-year span can select players from the teams with the best records.

The union is only one obstacle. The owners will have their own big market-small market debates.

And if it comes to the issue of a work stoppage next spring, there are certain to be lively disagreements.

Said the team chairman: “If I’m [primary Giant owner] Peter Magowan, for instance, and up to my eyeballs in [stadium] debt, am I going to agree to a lockout without the assurance of [financial] assistance from somewhere? Absolutely not, of course. If you’re the Walt Disney Co., and you don’t have any major loans and you’re only looking at losing money on a cash-flow basis, would you be more agreeable to a lockout? Certainly. You may lose even less in a lockout than if your doors were open. If I’m Fox and the most important thing to me is putting broadcasting on my regional networks, would I want a lockout? Of course not.

“So you have all this diversity within the ownership group--all these disparate and often conflicting interests--and that’s why Bud wants everybody to shut up while he tries to work it out on an internal basis.”

Don Fehr, the union’s executive director, reacts with amusement to the Selig gag rule.

“The whole business of regulating speech is bizarre, but they’ll do what they do, as always,” he said, preparing for his annual tour of the spring camps, where he will update players on the imminent negotiations and prospects for peace or war.

“You hope for the best and prepare for the worst,” he said. “I’m out of the prediction business, but I agree with Bud that there has been a remarkable renaissance. The increased attendance and revenue, the new stadiums, the number of fans watching on television and in person all speak to that and are a credit to the nature of the game. I think there’s a lot of positive signs and a lot of reasons to be optimistic and a general desire on the part of everyone involved not to mess that up.”

In addition, Fehr said, “If you look back at the kind of rhetoric we were hearing in ’92 and ’93 and in the first part of ‘94, and if you look at what’s going on now, the tone is vastly different. That’s not to say we’ll get everything done, but at this point in ’94 we’d already had a full year of tension and threats and you knew that at some point the world would come to a grinding halt. You just can’t say that now.

“I mean, negotiations are driven by issues and not personalities, but I’d like to believe that some of the progress we’ve made in getting along with people, toning down the rhetoric, realizing the importance of avoiding a crises atmosphere, is going to be helpful. We’ll see.”

For now, the sun is shining.