Reputations Are Riding on Outcome

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig arrives in New York today to join labor talks that have turned so desperate, boxed in by Friday’s strike deadline, that the players union actually requested his presence.

But is Selig riding to the rescue, or riding in with a monkey wrench?

As a baseball season sits in the balance, with some teams already revising travel plans in anticipation of a walkout Friday, it has become clear that this latest impasse is about more than revenue sharing and payroll taxes and player give-backs.

This is about Selig, small-market owner and major league commissioner, digging in and striking a blow for the little guys, his long-standing kin, along with the big guys, who have grown desperate trying to break out of a 30-year slump at the negotiating table.

This is about Donald Fehr, the head of the Players Assn., who learned his chops at the side of Marvin Miller, the Babe Ruth of sports union leaders, and knows his mentor is still out there on the sideline, watching and waiting to see what Fehr does with the back end of a 30-year winning streak.

This is about legacy and reputation and how the sports and business writers of the future will look back on this sparring session between longtime adversaries late in the summer of 2002.

This is about history.

Or, in the view of former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, possibly too much of it.

Vincent, who preceded Selig and was forced out in 1992 after an owners uprising spearheaded by Selig, said he believes there will be a strike after Friday’s deadline passes “because I don’t think these two guys can really make a deal.

“It’s very hard for them. They have a lot of history. People see this as Selig’s big negotiation--he controlled the negotiations for 25 years, he ran the [Player Relations Committee] for a long time and never had any success whatsoever. I think it’s going to be very hard, in his eyes, to fail again.”

Fehr, on the other hand, is heading a team that has never known anything but success. Baseball has had eight work stoppages since 1972, but after each of them, the players returned to the field without having made a single major concession. The baseball players union is riding one of the greatest dynasties in the history of professional sports--and Fehr has been entrusted with preserving it and nurturing it, even if the landscape is almost unrecognizable from Miller’s heyday in the 1970s.

“I think this time it’s much more complicated,” Vincent said. “Baseball is really sick, so for the first time, I think Fehr is going to make really significant concessions. That might be perceived by some as a loss--and I think that’s the problem here. It’s viewed in terms of wins and losses and not in terms of a partnership.

“It’s hard to imagine Selig and Fehr sitting down and saying, ‘We have to trust each other, we have to work together, we’ve got to build this for baseball. The two of us have to do something discontinuous and very smart.’

“This isn’t going to happen. There’s too much history and they don’t trust each other.”

Selig and Fehr go back 25 years, to 1977, when Miller hired Fehr as general counsel for the Players Assn. and Selig was an eager overachiever within the ranks of baseball ownership. Once considered a hero in Milwaukee for airlifting the Brewers out of Seattle to replace the already-departed Braves, Selig enjoyed that buzz, but found it fleeting. He wanted more, so he threw himself into good-for-the-game projects that included heading the Player Relations Committee, which meant many long hours staring across a table at Fehr, who replaced Miller as executive director of the union in 1983.

The climb continued into the early 1990s, when Selig, believing Vincent as commissioner was too conciliatory to the players, lobbied his fellow owners for a no-confidence vote and finally got it in September 1992, leading to Vincent’s resignation. Selig replaced Vincent as “acting commissioner,” an interim gig that lasted nearly six years--including the 232-day strike of 1994-95--until he was elected “permanent commissioner” in 1998.

From there, the reputations of Selig and Fehr went their separate ways. While Fehr could count his successes as tangibly as his constituents counted their millions, Selig flailed about as if he had a public-relations death wish: announcing his plans to eliminate several teams within days of the most exciting World Series in years, being mocked by Gov. Jesse Ventura in front of Congress, getting booed at home in Milwaukee after calling off a tied All-Star game when both teams ran out of pitchers in the 11th inning.

Heading into these latest negotiations, Fehr versus Selig was billed in the media as a marquee mismatch: the class valedictorian against the class clown. If Selig had grown tired of hearing it, this, at last, was his chance to do something about it.

Selig knows he will make his legacy with these negotiations. And legacy, in Miller’s estimation, is a major concern of Selig’s.

“Oh, I think so,” Miller said. “This type of man, definitely ... I think that between the two, there’s no doubt in my mind that Bud Selig is the more neurotic one about this. Don is far more of a realist than Bud has ever shown.”

Baseball writer and historian Leonard Koppett says a victory, or a public perception of a victory, is important “emotionally and psychologically” for the owners in general and Selig in particular.

“Look, he’s a human being,” Koppett said of Selig. “I’m certain he would rather be admired than castigated. There’s no question about that.

“In my judgment, much of the criticism made of him is unfair. He makes a bad public impression, that’s true. But that’s neither here nor there. The fact is, he isn’t making decisions that determine what’s going to happen. He’s reflecting the decisions of his side, which is what he’s supposed to do. The commissioner is the employee of the owners.

“Quite honorably, he’s supposed to be putting forth and expressing to the public what the ‘owners’ position’ is, or should be. So to make a monster of him is wrong. And even more so to make a monster out of Fehr, who is even more scrupulous about doing what his constituency wants done. His constituency obviously has a lot more confidence in him than the owners as a group have in Selig.

“Selig is an inappropriate commissioner because he’s a club owner himself. That tarnishes his position. But [the owners] did that with their eyes open.”

If Selig is driven by the underdog fantasy of rallying a perennial loser to an unlikely victory, Fehr has been charged with the role of bullpen closer. Handed a big lead, he has been told to protect it at all costs, even if the ballpark dimensions are nowhere near as friendly as they were when Miller had the ball.

Of the two assignments, Fehr’s could be the most difficult.

“I think Don does feel some pressure to uphold the Miller standard,” broadcaster Bob Costas said. “I think part of that pressure is because Don by and large believes the same things--and also because Miller never had to concede anything. Now it’s apparent that Fehr is going to have to concede something in this case.

“The enlightened view of that isn’t that Fehr would have failed if he has to concede something. It’s only stubborn ideologues who would view it that way. He could certainly be a statesman if he steps forward with a plan that wouldn’t be just fair to the players but would help improve the game.

“I think the Players Assn. people are generally smarter than the owners. They could probably come up with a better plan. If the measure of success and the measure of enlightened leadership is never giving anything back, then [Fehr] is going to lose. But if the measure is striking a fair deal under the circumstances, he’s got a good chance to do that.”

Costas said he doesn’t believe Fehr “cares about his place in history from a personal standpoint. He’s not a guy who thrives on the spotlight, I think. Ideologically, however, he believes that the players’ positions, as they were set forth in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, are unassailable. And to concede on any of them isn’t just a practical business decision, it’s an abdication of principle.

“And that makes it very difficult to make a business deal.”

Miller says he talks “once or twice a week” with Fehr. Now 85 and nearing the end of his second decade of retirement, Miller still has an active role as sounding board and advisor for Fehr. And, on occasion, he will publicly criticize Fehr for making what he considered an unnecessary concession to the owners.

How does he assess Fehr’s performance during this negotiation?

“From the outside, it looks like he has done his best to negotiate, to give some ground, even though I don’t think he believes that there’s any merit whatsoever to the owner issues,” Miller said. “Nevertheless, he’s giving them more than the benefit of the doubt, he’s moved along and made some concessions and we’ll see.”

Last weekend seemed to crystallize the Selig-Fehr stalemate, when both sides spoke as if an agreement was imminent, only to wind up scheduling dueling conference calls with the media after the union proposed gradually phasing in increased revenue sharing over the next four years.

With no less than a minor victory in hand, Selig pushed for more and wound up with nothing.

Having made enough concessions for what appeared to be a reasonable agreement, Fehr succumbed to either second thoughts or second-guessing and beat a hasty retreat.

“[Selig] said before this started he wanted his blue-ribbon committee report to be implemented,” Vincent said. “Well, there’s not a chance in the world that’s going to happen. But I think at least before the pullback--that is, before the union said they wanted to phase in the revenue-sharing over four, five years--up until then, I thought Bud had a deal that was pretty attractive.

“I said it was about 30% of what he hoped to get, but 30% that nobody else has had. It was a significant set of concessions, I thought. Now it’s changed. And it changes every day.”

So there they stand as the strike deadline approaches, Selig and Fehr, polarized by philosophies and constituencies.

And, quite possibly, paralyzed by legacy and history.