Monday, July 29, 2002
FORUM: Who's not on first? 3 steps to save baseball
By Eldon L. Ham
Guest columnist
The 2002 World Series, if there is one, will be the 99th fall classic. The first Series was a best-of-nine affair with the Pittsburgh Pirates besting the Boston Pilgrims in eight games, an historic 1903 encounter that pitted the league-leading bat of Honus Wagner (.355) against Pilgrims ace Cy Young (28 wins).
This year's World Series should have been the 100th, except for a most unfortunate labor-management misfire that canceled the 1994 Series and a major chunk of the season with it, symbolizing the futility of baseball's relentless labor wars.
GUEST COLUMNIST
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Eldon L. Ham is an author and sports law professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law.
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The strike lasted 234 days, cost the players $350 million in lost wages, and set the owners back nearly $1 billion. The baseball players association had become the most powerful union in all of team sports, an accomplishment which, ironically, may partly explain the implacable crusades that have desecrated baseball since the Curt Flood case of 1969. But as old as the Flood wars may now be, the roots of baseball's singular instability can be traced much, much farther.
In 1922 the United States Supreme Court ruled that major league baseball was not a business in interstate commerce, thus exempting it from the powerful Sherman Act antitrust laws. That ruling gave the owners unbridled power for over fifty ensuing years, and those owners wielded that power ruthlessly. The almighty reserve clause prevented player movement, and owners kept their own players in line with tough bargaining and even threats.
A half-century of pent-up hostility was already brewing when Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood challenged the antitrust ruling. The 1972 Supreme Court essentially found the antitrust exemption anathema to both law and logic, yet it still refused to reverse the ruling. That single event toppled the first in a chain of legal dominoes that would empower the baseball union like none other.
When Flood lost the antitrust argument, he fledgling union headed by Marvin Miller chose to focus on a different source of federal protection: the labor laws. At about the same time, football, basketball and hockey players all won significant antitrust victories, so the ballplayers in these other sports had little incentive to build a powerful union.
But pursuing new avenues in labor arbitration, Miller beat the owners time and again for the better part of two decades until the calamitous strike of 1994. History, though, has marched on, passing both owners and players by.
To endure the modern-day labor wars, owners and players must find a means of optimum cooperation, or at least cordial cohabitation, to avoid killing the pastime goose that had laid the original golden egg of American sports. To do so requires progress and cooperation on at least three fronts to salvage the baseball we as a nation once knew.
1. Baseball needs a salary cap. Without the cap, baseball is the victim of cutthroat free enterprise at the shortsighted hands of a few inexorable owners.
Baseball should either embrace all-out free enterprise and be willing to endure the bankruptcies of teams and other fallout, or it should adopt the “rule of reason” as other sports have done, recognizing that no major sports league can continue to thrive as an economic free-for-all. With the cap, parity, if not assured, certainly becomes king, allowing lesser teams to compete for limited numbers of star players without going belly up.
Such a “rising tide” approach saved the NBA from itself, and now has stabilized the NFL as well. Baseball needs the stability of a salary cap to protect not only player jobs from ax wielding owners but, moreover, to save the owners from each other.
2. The union must also recognize its own limitations: it is no longer an all-powerful island unto itself.
Indeed, the players association is not one union unto itself but, rather, an amalgam of at least three separate factions: superstar players, journeymen, and expendable role players. Each group has its own fears, needs and agenda. Superstars don't worry about jobs, they just want the highest salary the most reckless owner can pay. Journeymen need both fair wages and jobs.
And the role players are desperate to preserve jobs, their agenda being to maximize the number of viable teams at all times. Overspenders such as the Yankees and a few others are golden to superstars but pose a danger to league stability and jobs for the rank and file.
3. Finally, both players and owners must face mounting credibility issues and the pent-up concerns of millions of fans skeptical about the steroids fallout.
Owners are addicted to the marquee value of home runs, possibly whether induced by steroids, the wind blowing out, diluted pitching staffs or otherwise. But players like home runs, too. With frequent accusations of rampant steroid use, coupled with serious long-term health issues for users, it is a natural for both players and owners to demand testing, though perhaps for different reasons. Yet neither side seems to be forcing the issue, jeopardizing the overall integrity of the sport. But neither side should fret: Offensive fire power can be preserved by lowering the pitchers mound again, preserving integrity and saving the long term health of the players.
Will commissioner Bud Selig lead baseball from the abyss as David Stern saved pro basketball? Or will Selig do a crash and burn, reminiscent of the failures of past commissioner Bowie Kuhn?
Baseball flourished virtually uncontested for over six decades until Roger Maris launched home run ball No. 61 into destiny. Forced to contend with the growth of football and basketball, baseball still competed credibly through the 1970's and 1980's; yet from 1994 and beyond, baseball has been precariously vulnerable, and now, especially without turning its legal swords into plowshares of meaningful cooperation, baseball is poised to prove the ultimate maxim of Pogo, business and life: We have met the enemy and the enemy is us.
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FORUM: Who's not on first? 3 steps to save baseball
