RACKED With Trouble

It was only a few days ago that Bud Selig’s 93-year-old mother-in-law fell and broke her hip. This came only a few weeks after his wife underwent hip replacement surgery.

There is no evidence the condition is contagious, but now the commissioner is up to his own hips in controversy again as his industry limps toward another damaging--and some would say fatal--work stoppage that many will blame on him when they are not blaming a union whose members average almost $2.4 million in salary, which would undoubtedly be a picket-line record.

Of course, there is enough blame to go around, and Selig is the easiest of targets.

And now it is being reported, including in Friday’s editions of The Times, that he remains under the lobbying power and influence of a small group of militant owners demanding he stay rigid on the pivotal bargaining issue of a payroll tax, insisting the threshold at which the tax is triggered and the tax itself be kept at levels that would intimidate and affect more high-spending clubs than only the New York Yankees, which would be the minimal result of the union’s initial proposal.

First of all, Selig agreed in a weekend conversation from his Milwaukee home that he is definitely the bottom line on management’s labor position. No deal will be taken to the owners for ratification without his approval and no commissioner, he concurred, has ever had broader powers over labor or other industry matters--authority voted him by the owners in a series of initiatives since his tenure began.

Second, he volunteered, management’s position on the tax and the other labor issues should not have come as a surprise to the union or anyone else because it was all spelled out in the publicly released report by his blue ribbon economic committee two years ago.

And third, he reiterated, baseball’s economic problems simply can’t be ignored.

He is committed, he said, to structural changes that will help relieve the revenue and competitive disparities, but--as an often-painstaking consensus builder who has done an unprecedented job of keeping his constituents in line to this point--he is not under the influence and not tied to any special interest clique, any big-or small-market coalition.

“For people to think I’m unduly influenced, that I have any more commitment to or conversations with any one owner or any group of owners, is simply wrong,” Selig said. “The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of clubs, 27 or 28 of the 30, now fall into the same class, now face the same problems. This isn’t 1994, when every decision depended on a big-and small-market caucus. Now, the problems that affect the industry as a whole affect almost every individual club.”

Certainly, the explosion in some markets of local cable and media revenue has exacerbated the gulf between the haves and have-nots, and the fact that 17 teams are more than 10 games behind their division leaders in mid-August suggests a broader problem than the union’s often simplistic--although in some cases accurate--view of individual mismanagement.

However, baseball’s economics remain a murky proposition. Former New York Met co-owner Nelson Doubleday, in fact, recently accused Selig of creating “phantom losses” by doctoring the books and then had the gall, according to a source, of telling Selig that he hoped he didn’t take it personally. And people close to the bargaining process insist that if there is going to be a compromise on the tax issue and a settlement before Aug. 30, Selig will have to weigh the potential damage of a strike against the sentiments of that militant core he denies holding power and with whom he denies having conducted exclusionary conference calls.

Yet, Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, determined to protect his resources against increased tax and revenue sharing incursions, recently told the New York Times that Selig is indeed being influenced by a primarily small-market group of allies, and sources insist that the group is indeed a significant factor, some even believing the union can be broken.

The group is said to include John Moores of San Diego, Drayton McLane of Houston, David Glass of Kansas City and Carl Pohlad of Minnesota, with Stan Kasten of Atlanta (generally considered now baseball’s No. 1 hawk) and Jerry Reinsdorf of the Chicago White Sox the band leaders.

Reached at home Friday night, Reinsdorf insisted he is not involved and refused further comment. The Calabasas-based former agent Dennis Gilbert, now a White Sox advisor, said he recently spent eight days with Reinsdorf in Chicago and had no indication he was pulling any strings.

“I think Jerry was so vilified [for his alleged behind-the-scenes role] in 1994 that he has made a conscientious effort to stay out of it this time,” Gilbert said. “He has no desire for any kind of work stoppage. He wants a settlement.”

Perhaps, but it has been speculated that the owners didn’t mind the union setting a strike date, believing it would prompt a public backlash against the players.

If that was the case, it could prove to be a dangerous gambit for both owners and players. A strike date may accelerate bargaining in other industries, but it has never worked in baseball, where all eight previous negotiations have ended in a work stoppage and it failed to protect the players against a unilateral implementation of new work rules by the owners in 1994. It took a federal judge to protect them.

The lesson in all of that should be that it’s time to throw out history and mistrust, to quit bemoaning Selig’s inexplicable interruption of negotiations last summer, to call off the search for Paul Beeston, to stop wailing about the wasted opportunity while Selig and the owners were pursuing contraction.

These negotiations are far further along than those of 1994, when the industry began a 232-day work stoppage on Aug. 12. The sides are in the same ballpark on steroid testing, a worldwide draft and increased revenue sharing. There has been far more compromise and civility--aside from what sources say was a verbal meltdown by union leader Don Fehr during Wednesday’s tax discussion--than in ’94.

The union now needs to stop protecting the Yankees--which has become a burden for even the union since Steinbrenner’s fully loaded payroll is $171 million--and give the owners a meaningful payroll restraint. The owners, in turn, have to realize the union has made concessions in several other areas already and meet the players halfway on a tax. Take a partial cap this time, try for the derby the next.

It should be this clear:

If, in the shadow of Sept. 11 and amid the nation’s reeling economy, with major league attendance down 6%, Selig and Fehr can’t avoid a strike and reach a settlement from where the negotiations currently sit, both should consider stepping down.

Of course, some insist that Selig would first have to call that mysterious covey of hawks.