Sunday, May 19, 2002
Say it ain't so
Labor strife could prematurely end season - again
By Howard Wilkinson, John Byczkowski and John Fay
The Cincinnati Enquirer
They stood by the hundreds in the Saturday morning chill, hoping to buy tickets for the last regular-season Cincinnati Reds baseball game at Cinergy Field on Sept. 22 — assuming there is a baseball game on Sept. 22.
A strike looms for Major League Baseball. Reports last week said the players could walk out as early as August, same as they did in 1994, the last time there was a work stoppage. That one came with the Reds in first place, same as they are now, and wiped out the rest of the season and the postseason.
Reds fans John Dobson, 23, and Brandon Roberts, 23, drove three hours from Manchester, Ky., to get to the Cinergy ticket windows at 5:30 a.m. Saturday. The strike threat upsets them — as fans, more than as ticket holders to the Cinergy finale. The Reds move next door into Great American Ball Park next season — assuming there is a next season.
“The last time they shut the game down, it left a void in my life,” Mr. Dobson said. “A strike would not be good for anybody.”
That's because the last strike showed fans they could fill that void with entertainment alternatives. And some areas needed years to persuade an angered public to return to the ballpark. The Reds reached the National League Championship Series in 1995, but didn't come close to filling their stadium for the two home games.
“I don't think any player wants to be on strike, especially after everything that's gone down — 1994, Sept. 11,” said Reds captain Barry Larkin, the team's player representative in 1994. “I think it would be catastrophic to the game of baseball.”
A ninth work stoppage since 1972 could prove especially deflating here, where the Reds are an early-season surprise. Coming off a 96-loss season, they are succeeding in a day when small-market teams struggle to compete. That struggle has become so great, it is the core of the labor dispute that has put baseball on edge since the Collective Bargaining Agreement expired in November.
It is time to give the little guys a better chance to win, the owners say. The gap between the haves and have-nots has grown into such a grand canyon that, according to the owners, the Montreal Expos had local revenue of $9.8 million and a $30.6 million payroll last year vs. the New York Yankees' local revenue of $217.8 million and $120.9 million payroll.
Worse still, according to the owners, the industry itself is in trouble. Only two teams (Yankees and Cleveland) operated profitably from 1995 to 2001, the owners say, and operating losses last season totaled $232 million for the 30 teams. Commissioner Bud Selig tried unsuccessfully to eliminate two teams during the off season and Thursday told the Los Angeles Times that “six to eight can't exist another year, another year and a half.”
Baseball's claims of poverty have been met with skepticism, considering the teams produced about $3.5 billion in revenues last year compared to about $1.4 billion in 1995. But when Major League Baseball executive vice president Sandy Alderson met with the Enquirer last month, he said there is no disputing the competitive imbalance.
After all, from 1995 to 2001, the 15 teams with the highest payrolls won 219 playoff games. The 15 teams with the lowest payrolls?
Five.
“If we don't have competition,” Mr. Alderson said, “we don't have a sport. ... It might be wrestling.”
So the owners propose:
• Fifty percent of each team's locally produced revenue go into a pot divided evenly by baseball's 30 teams.
• A 50 percent “luxury tax” on all payrolls exceeding $98 million.
The Major League Baseball Players Association also wants to address competitive imbalance in a Collective Bargaining Agreement. But the union wants smaller increases in revenue sharing, a so-called “split pool,” with 20 percent of a team's locally produced revenue going to the 25-lowest revenue-producing teams.
And no luxury tax.
To hear the union tell it, a luxury tax is downright un-American.
“We think in this country that is a pretty bizarre notion — that you would penalize somebody for hiring someone,” Donald Fehr, players' union executive director, told the Chicago Tribune recently.
A union source told the Tribune that the owners' proposal would cost the Yankees $80 million of their $100 million in growth in local revenue from 1996 ($94 million) to 2001 ($194 million).
The owners contend a minimum payroll would keep the have-nots from simply pocketing the new money — and that revenue sharing would spur middle-class teams to up their own payrolls.
“Why would they assume that?” Mr. Fehr told the Tribune. “Player markets are competitive marketplaces, all right? If you have Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles and Chevrolets, and the price of Cadillacs falls because the people who buy Cadillacs aren't buying, is that likely to increase the price of Oldsmobiles? No serious economist or businessman thinks that's true. So the question is why would you believe the spending would increase in the middle, especially if you believe Bud Selig's numbers that everybody's going broke?”
The union contends that the game itself is healthy. And if a team is in trouble, the union argues, don't eliminate it, move it. The players filed a grievance when Mr. Selig tried to eliminate the Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos after the 2001 season. An arbitrator is expected to decide the case by July 15 — just after baseball's All Star break — and negotiations could be greatly affected.
With the union considering a strike as early as August, that “is going to leave about three weeks for them to get serious about negotiating” and make it tough to avoid a work stoppage, said Joe Sheehan, managing editor of Baseball Prospectus, a Web site and an annual publication. Mr. Sheehan is discouraged by there being no serious negotiating.
“The silence,” he said, “is deafening.”
So why strike? Why set or even talk about a strike date? After all, Mr. Selig has ensured that Major League Baseball will not lock out players this season.
Because the union fears that, once the World Series ends, the owners will declare an impasse and impose their own plan.
“The players don't have power in the off-season,” said Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist from Smith University. “They have power during the season.”
The union, said Cincinnati lawyer Brian Goldberg, agent for Reds outfielder Ken Griffey Jr., sees setting a strike date “as the only way to counteract getting unilateral work rules shoved down their throats.”
But the owners' chief negotiator said talk of a postseason impasse declared by owners is “rank speculation.”
“We've only made one decision, and that is that we're going to make every effort to make a negotiated agreement without a strike or a lockout,” said Rob Manfred, baseball's executive vice president for labor and human resources.
“Their answer is not to try to figure out a proposal that moves towards us; instead, their answer is to try to set a strike date. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.”
Baseball owners have never defeated the players in a work stoppage. The owners even tried bringing in replacement players when the 1994 work stoppage extended into the following spring training, and that didn't work, either. Mr. Alderson calls the players “maybe the strongest union in the United States.”
Mr. Alderson said, for the sake of trying to reach a deal, the owners won't even try to enact a salary cap, which has helped the competitive balance in sports such as football and basketball. But the union will not easily accept a luxury tax that also could stunt salary growth. Not when players contend the game is not at risk.
“Things are perfect,” said Reds pitcher Jose Rijo. “Don't destroy what's working.”
Let the free-market system work, they say.
“We never have wanted to tell people what they have to pay us,” said Aaron Boone, the Reds' player representative. “People laugh about that, but that's the truth. You can't blame a guy for taking the best deal.”
If any players have felt squeezed under the current system, it has been the middle-tier performers. Teams will pay the stars, then fill out their payrolls with younger/cheaper players. But the NFL's salary cap also causes problems.
“They talk about parity and how great that is,” Mr. Boone said of the NFL. “I think it is ridiculous that a team that wants to build its franchise has to let their star players go because they're getting too good and making too much money.”
Gene Orza, the union's second-ranked official, has said negotiations will likely resume May 28. The best the union can hope for, Mr. Sheehan said, is to convince the owners to accept a no-strike/no-impasse pledge and start the process again next spring.
The two sides do agree on one thing: Neither wants a repeat of 1994, when not only were Reds fans were robbed of a playoff race, baseball fans in general missed a much-anticipated assault on Roger Maris' famed home run record of 61 in 1961. Matt Williams (43), Ken Griffey Jr. (40) and Jeff Bagwell (39) were leading the chase when the game shut down Aug. 12.
It took years for interest and attendance to bounce back everywhere, led by another home run chase in 1998, this one successful by Mark McGwire (70 home runs) and Sammy Sosa (66). But even that record has been topped, by Barry Bonds (73) last season, with far less fanfare.
What would another strike do?
“It would ruin baseball for fans,” said Mr. Rijo. “It would be terrible.”
Mr. Boone says players can't expect sympathy from the fans, not with “ridiculous amounts of money involved.” Players, he says, just want the right “to work like every other American.”
His father and Reds manager, Bob Boone, is a former National League player representative himself who concedes he is not that involved in the issues this time around and doesn't know how to resolve this one. But he knows the dangers of not resolving it.
“The key is not to slay the golden goose,” he said. “Work stoppages help no one. ... I think it takes compromise on both sides.
“To not resolve it from both sides would be insane.”
Enquirer reporters Lew Moores and Mark Curnutte contributed.
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Say it ain't so
