Owner Not the Only Militant Padre

The Labor File....

* So, San Diego Padre owner John Moores, a leader of the militant corps, said he is prepared to sit a season rather than ratify a bad labor deal.

How prepared?

Well, Moores is ranked 14th in Fortune Magazine’s list of the “Greedy Bunch,” having recently cashed in $646 million worth of stock in his troubled software company.

* Never afraid of a little controversy, Padre union representative Phil Nevin told the San Diego Union-Tribune that owners are simply “billionaires who need to have their messes cleaned up. It’s hard for me because our owner is one of the hard-liners. I love John to death [but] they knew what they got into when they came here. I hate to say it, but if you can’t handle it, get out.”

Moores had a private little chat with Nevin and came away suggesting that all players are simply puppets under union leader Don Fehr, comparing it to Communists in the old Soviet Union. Moores said that if the strike issue was put to a secret ballot “you’d find that most players don’t have the stomach” for it and added (with some validity?) “they do what Fehr tells them to do. They’d be running the bases backward from now on if Donald Fehr asked them to.”

* Of course, a year off might help Moores’ Padres reorganize that Master Plan that was supposed to have them competitive by 2004, when they move into their new ballpark. The Master Plan has seemed to disintegrate, if the 2002 standings and the fact that they have used a major league-record 33 pitchers this season are any indication. To be fair, injuries have contributed to that record, prompting the Padres to do more force-feeding than any nursery.

“I’m like a proud papa,” pitching coach Greg Booker said. “Bring ‘em on. The more the merrier. In North Carolina we say two’s company, and 33 is ... oh, well, you finish it.”

That’s what Manager Bruce Bochy would like to do, be able to get past the strike date and finish the season to see just how many pitchers he can try to build some unity around.

“Forty’s easy,” Bochy said. “Give me a challenge.”

* Texas Ranger owner Tom Hicks was floating on his yacht off San Diego (you don’t suppose he had dropped in for a little lunch and strategizing with Moores) when he chose that rich man’s setting to preach his recent bit of hypocrisy, saying “a majority of owners, including me, would probably like to have even stronger cost-containment” than management negotiators have proposed.

Obviously, Hicks now realizes he needs help in controlling himself. This is the same guy who blew the salary scale apart with his $252-million signing of Alex Rodriguez, then compounded it with the $65-million signing of Chan Ho Park, the $22-million signing of Juan Gonzalez and the $16.5-million investment in journeymen pitchers Jay Powell and Todd Van Poppel.

The Rangers have a $105-million payroll ($131 million for luxury tax purposes) and are about to join the lamentable New York Mets as the first teams with payrolls of more than $100 million to finish last in their divisions, and Hicks is now saying it’s the system that doesn’t work.

Funny how the system works with good management. He could check out the division-leading Oakland A’s and Minnesota Twins as two examples of how to get a real bang for your bucks.

* It’s his own distinguished career that former commissioner Fay Vincent has tended to demean with his ongoing harangues and criticisms of Bud Selig, such as those in Friday’s editions of The Times. Vincent was forced from office in 1992 by a coalition of hard-line owners led by Selig, and it’s as if he can’t let it go.

“He comes across as a bitter old man,” said Rich Levin, baseball’s senior vice president of public relations. “I was very close to Fay, but I’m disgusted. He was outsmarted by Bud 10 years ago, and it’s still bothering him.

“He ought to remember how angry he would get when [former commissioners] Bowie Kuhn or Peter Ueberroth would question or criticize what he was doing. I mean, can you give me one thing he accomplished as commissioner?”

* Selig’s beloved (and still family-owned) Milwaukee Brewers, who Moores said are like the Padres’ twin sister (which must mean both are suffering from similar parental abuse), are another sad team that might just as soon see the season end Friday.

If it doesn’t, the Brewers are headed for 100 losses for the first time in a once-proud franchise history, an attendance drop of more than 800,000 in only the club’s second year in Miller Park and the firing of Manager Jerry Royster (likely no matter when the season ends).

It’s all just a little more rain on Selig’s already soaked parade, and that doesn’t take into account the leaks in the Miller roof. So much water poured through in a sudden storm Wednesday night that the appropriately named pitcher Ben Sheets said, “We almost had a rainout in the dome.”

* Free speech is wonderful, but isn’t it time that Fehr puts the same gag rule on his players that Selig has put on the owners (although someone is going to have to show me those canceled checks to prove he really fined Moores and Hicks $1 million for saying what some believe he encouraged them to say)?

I mean, the players might have some justification in thinking the owners have backed them into a corner again, that they have to stop the process on their own terms before the owners impose a lockout and new work rules in the off-season, but the migraine kicks in every time one of them says, “None of us wants to strike, but ... “