Tuesday, August 27, 2002
Strike seems inevitable, unfathomable
By Hal Bodley
USA TODAY
This time next week baseball parks may be quiet and empty. Millionaire players might be scrambling for tee times at their favorite golf courses or getting reacquainted with wives and children.
Another baseball strike.
I can't believe the people who run this once-great game are poised to let it happen again. It's like holding up your wrist, slashing it with a knife to find out if it bleeds.
TOP TEN
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Top 10 reasons why the players will strike ... or won't strike
The expectations of a walkout vary according to the daily report off the negotiating sessions. We have our own ideas, some serious and some irreverent, on why players will or won't strike.
Why players will strike
1. Tradition: Work stoppages are as much a part of baseball as bats and balls. This would be the ninth work stoppage since 1972. In three decades not a single bargaining agreement has been reached without a players' strike or owners' lockout.
2. Players on average make $2.34 million a year. With that kind of money, why change the status quo by making concessions?
3. The owners might call it a luxury tax, but players consider it a poorly camouflaged salary cap, the same issue that led to the 1994-95 strike that lasted 232 days. The owners withdrew their demand for a salary cap.
4. The union has been on a winning streak since it was formed in 1966 under Marvin Miller. Miller's successor, Don Fehr, doesn't want to spoil a perfect record with too many concessions.
5. The owners are again crying wolf. Players don't buy management's annual pronouncements that some teams are close to bankruptcy. Commissioner Bud Selig says 25 teams are losing money.
6. Why prolong the Montreal Expos' misery, if baseball is going to get rid of them anyway. And fans in Detroit and Milwaukee, where the two worst teams in baseball play, get a much-needed break.
7. At last players can check out “Survivor,” “Friends” and the rest of the fall TV premieres.
8. Temperatures are expected in the high 20s in New York during October's World Series week.
9. Nobody wants to bat against Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson in the postseason.
10. Bud Selig.
Why players won't strike
1. The owners, never as well organized as the players, will cave in the final hours. Owners have never been able to get their main agenda approved by the union.
2. Players realize they'll lose millions, and a long strike would force teams to cut back payrolls and lower salaries, accomplishing precisely what the owners want.
3. This time, several teams actually might go out of business, leaving hundreds of fringe players without jobs.
4. Players don't want to come off as the greedy guys in these times of economic uncertainty, especially on or around Sept. 11. In last week's USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup poll, 43 percent of baseball fans said they were on the side of the owners, compared with 30 percent in favor of the players and 23 percent favoring neither side.
5. Nobody wants another World Series in November.
6. Players will remember the stadium workers who'll lose their salaries, money these people budgeted to make mortgage payments, car payments, living expenses — and that walking a picket line means mingling with people who have real jobs.
7. Owners will say: “We were just kidding on the luxury tax idea.”
8. Who can stand nights without “Baseball Tonight” and mornings without box scores?
9. President Bush will be furious.
10. Neither side wants to kill baseball.
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If the players do walk on Friday they may wake up in May and wonder what happened. They'll be millions poorer, scrambling to find jobs with fewer teams and asking themselves what happened to baseball.
Owners, many of whom may have to declare bankruptcy, will look at each other and wonder if forcing a strike was worth it.
It certainly wasn't worth it eight years ago when the players struck for 232 days, causing cancellation of the World Series for the first since 1904. From an owner's standpoint that strike accomplished nothing. Baseball is in far worse shape today than it was the first few years after the longest strike in pro sports history ended.
The message today is don't let it happen. The problem is nobody's listening. That's too simplistic.
What we need is a miracle.
Gary Roberts, Tulane University law professor and one of the nation's foremost experts on sports law, offers a solution: He says the discomfort the union is having with revenue sharing and luxury tax could be eased if players had some guarantee transferred revenue would be used for salaries.
“What the players have always complained about, and with good justification, is that by taking $80 million or so from the Yankees and giving it to the Twins and the Expos, that money will not be used for salaries,” says Roberts, former president of the Sports Lawyers Association. “The Yankees would have used it for salaries; now they won't.
“If part of management's proposal was to create a system that transferred a huge amount of money, say from the Yankees, they could build into it some kind of formula that would guarantee to whatever extent the Yankees' payroll goes down, that amount must be guaranteed to be used for player salaries.”
Roberts says the “effect of the system would not be to reduce total player salaries, but to essentially put a cap on the high-end salaries and bring up the middle and lower-class salaries of players who're playing for small-market teams.”
The union is intent on monitoring what revenue-sharing and luxury-tax funds are used for.
Union chief Don Fehr says he met with Commissioner Bud Selig the morning of Hall of Fame induction ceremonies at Cooperstown, N.Y., and discussed that subject.
“They had a proposal for a minimum payroll ($45 million) which we didn't accept for a significant number of reasons,” Fehr says. “Selig asked if we'd be opposed in principle to a general understanding that revenue-sharing dollars would be used to improve the team's ability to compete.”
The money might go to major league players, to the farm system, to hiring scouts, investing in a new stadium, even to hiring a new general manager.
Fehr said he didn't think there was a problem with that. Saturday, a proposal was made by the union “that since we were going to examine how the revenue sharing was going to be used, there ought to be some reporting mechanism and some judgment as to whether those guidelines the commissioner and I agreed to were being adhered to.”
Roberts says there must be more of an emphasis to help the lower-salaried players.
Philadelphia backup catcher Todd Pratt is a good example.
“I'll stick by the union if we walk, but sometimes I don't feel like the union sticks to players like me,” Pratt told the “Philadelphia Inquirer.”
“I'm just sick to my stomach about this,” he adds. “I relate more to the people in the stands than to either side. I can't believe that both sides can't figure this thing out. It's a joke.”
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Pratt, now 35, was 27 and also a backup catcher when the players struck in 1994.
“The only thing I remember is losing money for nothing,” he says. “Nothing got solved. It seemed like everything the union said and did was already prepared before the strike even started. I feel the same way I did then.”
Pratt, who is earning a career-high $650,000 during a season when the average is $2.3 million, says the union told players like him salaries would be spread out among everybody, “but they weren't.” He adds when the Phillies voted on a day for the strike date, “it definitely wasn't Aug. 30.”
Roberts says a huge problem is the fact that a small percentage of the players earn the most money. According to USA TODAY research, the top 5 percent of players earn 25 percent of an overall payroll of about $2 billion. The top 10 percent earn 40 percent of the overall payroll.
Roberts says unlike 1994 the two sides are not arguing over concepts. “They're quibbling over numbers. The problem is they're so far apart on the numbers that de facto they really are disagreeing on the structure,” he says.
Can a strike be avoided?
“If I were a betting man, I'd bet that we're going to have a strike,” he says.
Not what we wanted to hear.
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Strike seems inevitable, unfathomable
