Insider | Short Hops | Love Letters
One of the big reasons the players have beaten the owners to a pulp in negotiating rooms over the past 30 years is as obvious as the scowl of concern on commissioner Bud Selig's face these days.
All you had to do was pay attention over the past several days as Texas owner Tom Hicks, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, Royals owner David Glass and Padres owner John Moores stepped up to the rhetoric podium and took their hacks.
While the players union traditionally bands together more tightly than a pack of wild coyotes in times of turmoil, the Lords of the Game mostly are a disparate group with 30 different agendas and nearly as many different sets of wants and needs.
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| George Steinbrenner isn't happy with the prospect of smaller clubs sharing his big-time revenues.(Allsport) |
In time during negotiations -- whether it's days in, weeks in or months in -- these different agendas begin to surface and the owners splinter into their various factions, and eventually they authorize a new agreement with the players -- one that historically has been much more beneficial to labor than management.
In these final days before the players' Aug. 30 strike deadline, with negotiations at a fragile point and tensions running high, it's impossible to accurately decipher posturing from sincerity.
One thing, though, is clear: Over the past several days, as Selig has worked behind the scenes to cut a deal with the players that makes all of the owners happy, it is becoming increasingly evident that there is no such breed.
Hicks, who has grossly overpaid several players over the past two seasons and infuriated most of the owners along the way, suddenly has found religion. Overnight, he has transformed himself from the biggest gambler in the temple to a Gospel-quoting, cost-containment-preaching convert.
Moores, who is aligned with the most militant faction of hard-liners demanding radical change to the game's economic system -- a group that also includes Glass, Minnesota's Carl Pohlad, Houston's Drayton McLane, the Chicago White Sox's Jerry Reinsdorf and, now, suddenly, Hicks -- sent a shot across the union's bow this week by saying he's prepared to shut the game down for all of the 2003 season, too, if that's what's necessary to bring the game's salary structure under control.
Steinbrenner, the game's 800-pound gorilla, knows there is a militant group of low-revenue owners out hard after his money, and he finally reached the boiling point last week.
He lashed out against some of the game's have-nots, including Glass, and the Yankees quietly are threatening legal action if the new Basic Agreement -- whenever it is signed -- strips the Yanks of an inordinate amount of their local television and radio revenue streams.
It was quite a week for the Lords, what with Hicks sailing his yacht off the coast of San Diego and stopping in to lunch with Moores, and with the Yankees retaining the services of David Boies, the lawyer hired by Al Gore's camp during the presidential-election, Florida-hanging-chad chaos of 2000, for a possible suit against the commissioner and Major League Baseball.
"It's quite a concern, because I see it hurting the union and the players, and I see it hurting us (the Yankees) and other big-market clubs," Steinbrenner told the New York Times, clearly forging an Odd Couple alliance between himself and the union and practically inviting Selig to levy that infamous $1 million fine against him for violating the commissioner's gag order.
In laying out his opposition to revenue sharing, Steinbrenner used the little ol' Kansas City Royals as a metaphor.
"I'm sure that even a guy like David Glass, who was a brilliant businessman when he was running Wal-Mart, when Target came next door, he didn't say, 'Here, we're doing fine, take some of mine,'" Steinbrenner said.
To which Glass wasted no time responding, in the Kansas City Star: "At Wal-Mart, or in the retail business (in general), you have no responsibilities to your competitors at all. You don't have to worry about whether they stay in business, whether they do well or don't do well. All you've got to worry about is your own performance.
"In professional sports, you have a responsibility to your competitor, not only to keep him in business but to make sure he's competitive. Because if he isn't competitive, he doesn't stay in business, and then you don't have anybody to play."
Glass continued: "I don't blame (Steinbrenner) for trying to protect what he has. If the rest of us had as much revenue as he has, we might take that kind of selfish approach as well."
But few other owners have Steinbrenner's cash, so instead they awkwardly push forward in an uneven scrum, en masse, the poor kids on the block mustering their courage to back the class bully into a corner and take some of his gum.
Or, as Colorado owner Jerry McMorris put it: "The hawks are circling."
Make no mistake, it's not just Steinbrenner's money that's in question here. In their latest proposal, the owners' plan would be to tax any club exceeding a $102 million player payroll at 37.5 percent for the first instance, 42.5 percent for the second, 47.5 percent for the third and 50 percent in the fourth year.
The union's offer is to tax portions of payrolls over $130 million at a rate between 15 and 30 percent.
According to union chief Don Fehr, seven teams currently have payrolls above the $102 million threshold in the owners' offer:
- The Yankees ($171.2 million)
- Texas ($131.4 million)
- Los Angeles ($118.8 million)
- Boston ($114.8 million)
- Mets ($112.9 million)
- Arizona ($112.1 million)
- Atlanta ($110.4 million)
Those figures include the average annual values of players on 40-man rosters, plus benefits.
Hicks supports even a stiffer tax than the owners have proposed, and his comments to writers in Texas last week only served to strengthen the union's likening the "luxury tax" or "competitive balance tax" -- it's referred to as both by the owners -- to a salary cap in disguise.
"Every team in baseball that has any kind of business sense would try to manage its payroll to stay under that tax threshold," Hicks told the Dallas Morning News. "If this system is implemented, the Texas Rangers will be under the threshold."
Hicks, of course, has exhibited zero business sense -- at least, within baseball's universe -- since taking control of the Rangers in 1998.
Exhibit A, of course, is the 10-year, $252 million contract he awarded Alex Rodriguez before the 2001 season. Then, last winter, the Rangers signed pitcher Chan Ho Park to a five-year, $65 million deal, outfielder Juan Gonzalez to a two-year, $22 million deal and gave two relievers three-year deals: Jay Powell ($9 million) and Todd Van Poppel ($7.5 million).
Hicks says that there are owners out there who want even more than what's on the table now.
"There are a lot of owners who feel we need stronger cost containment and competitive balance," the loquacious Hicks told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "We need to get this fixed so we don't go through the same thing again every seven years."
The Rangers at midweek were in last place in the AL West, 19½ games behind Anaheim, Oakland and Seattle. They also finished in the basement of their division in 2001, the first season of A-Rod.
So maybe Hicks has learned from his expensive errors, or perhaps he has simply seen the light now that he has gotten a few miles on his baseball odometer.
Whatever, two things are clear: Hicks' fiscal irresponsibility -- in the view of many other owners -- seriously damaged the game's economic structure, and his sudden U-turn and alliance with Moores is only the latest chapter in the owners' Helter Skelter history of moving forward with no clear vision.
Take salary arbitration -- perhaps the biggest enemy of all to the owners' wallets. Marvin Miller, who preceded Fehr as head of the players union, sold it in the early 1970s as a way to end holdouts over contract squabbles, and most owners and even then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn thought it was a swell idea at the time.
Former Oakland owner Charlie Finley didn't.
"We'll be the nation's biggest (idiots) if we do this," Finley, who in the end turned out to be much more prophet than maverick, said at the time, as quoted in John Helyar's fine book, Lords of the Realm. "You can't win. You'll have guys with no baseball background setting salaries. You'll have a system that drives up the average salary every year. Give them anything they want, but don't give them arbitration."
Owners voted 22-2 in favor of arbitration -- only Finley's Athletics and the St. Louis Cardinals voted against it -- and it started in February 1974.
That's just one early example of how the game's economic system became a runaway freight train -- and there are many more like this one that illustrate how poor judgment and short-sightedness on the part of the owners have allowed it to happen.
So now they're trying to stop that runaway train.
But while the names and faces in the owners' boardrooms have changed over the years, the basic tenet -- that they each operate in different markets, many with vastly different wants and needs -- hasn't.
So while the Yankees have retained Boies, who is said to be working on a suit the Yankees would file against Selig and baseball if a negotiated settlement with the players sticks them with what they consider to be an unfairly high luxury tax base -- they paid $29 million in revenue sharing last year and would be hit with a bill of nearly $100 million in revenue sharing and luxury tax if the clubs' early proposals had been accepted -- Moores and his group of hawks continue to circle hard.
"The players are ready to strike, and I am prepared to sit out all next season," Moores told the San Diego Union-Tribune this week. "I am ready to sit out as long as it takes for us to get a deal that brings sanity back to the game. I'm not willing to subsidize a game where we have to keep raising ticket prices, where half the teams can't open spring camp with any hope of contending, and we can't change that without a fair and equitable agreement."
On the other hand, it should be noted, Moores' Padres are scheduled to move into a new ballpark in 2004, a venue in which ticket prices will be significantly higher than they are in Qualcomm Stadium -- with or without a Padre-friendly labor agreement.
Moores says there are "eight to 10" other like-minded owners who are staunchly aligned with him. The number is important, because passage of a new Basic Agreement requires a three-quarters' majority of teams to sign off on it.
"I'm hopeful (the tough issues) will be resolved so we can continue playing," said Hicks, Moores' new brother-in-arms. "If they don't get resolved, I'm determined -- and a lot of owners are determined -- that we would need to fix baseball once and for all. I don't think it makes sense to have any Band-Aids for this and then go through this again six or seven years from now. The sport has serious issues that need to be fixed."
What will happen over the next several days leading up to the Aug. 30 strike deadline isn't clear.
What is clear is that the owners, the Lords of the Game, have reached another pivotal point in their role as its caretakers.
"What's happening now is a repeat of 1994 because these same problems were never resolved," Bruce K. Johnson, an economics professor at Centre College in Danville, Ky., told the Baltimore Sun recently. "They are trying to put Band-Aids on the problem and it's not a scratch -- it's an illness that could be terminal if there's another strike and a mass exodus of fans."
Both sides now
As Moores vented and Steinbrenner sputtered and Hicks wiggled, the players union this week attempted to decode the mixed signals as negotiations forged ahead.
"I think it shows the different ends of the spectrum," Atlanta pitcher Tom Glavine, one of the most intelligent thinkers on the union's side, said this week in San Diego when asked about Moores' comments about shutting the game down in 2003. "There are some owners out there who are of the mindset, I guess, where they want a strike so they can fix the system. Other owners want to get a deal done.
"That's part of the problem. There have always been differences. There are 30 markets. It's tough to make everybody happy. Not everybody wants or needs the same thing. To try to please everybody is difficult."
Glavine didn't flinch at the militancy of Moores.
"That's not surprising," he said. "He's one of the guys we heard from the get-go was like that. When you hear comments like those, I don't know how much good it does."
Both players and management have spent significant time this summer attempting to get their message out, trying to win the ground war of public relations -- particularly management. Selig, vice-president Sandy Alderson and others have visited newspaper editorial offices around the country spinning their side of the story.
"I don't think there's any question they've spent an awful lot of time on the PR side of it before negotiations got serious," said Glavine, one of the most visible players during the 1994-'95 labor negotiations but someone who has vowed to be less visible this time around. "Is it good for the process? Is it bad for the process? I don't know.
"I don't think it's a hard battle for them to win. People usually aren't very sympathetic to the players. People just want us to get a deal done. But a lot of things they do leave us scratching our heads."
But given baseball labor history, that's not too surprising.
"You have to take the information you have, assess it, see where it fits, or where it doesn't fit," Glavine said. "I think a lot of it, too, is the emotional side of it. Whatever optimism there was ended last Friday (when the players announced the Aug. 30 strike date). When that happens, you tend to get emotional, players and owners.
"When that happens, the side of you that wants to fight comes over you."
Glavine did fire one warning shot back at owners who suspect that the players might not have the stomach for a strike again after going through the turmoil in the mid-'90s.
"You know what? If anybody feels like at this point in time, they still have to test us, then that worries me," Glavine said. "If nothing else over the past few years, we've proven our unity."
Sound bite
Cleveland closer Mark Wohlers: "It's going to get settled at 11:59 and 59 seconds on Aug. 29. That's when the deal will be made. I'm a strong union guy, but I don't think we're that stupid or the owners are that stupid not to get something done.'"
The list
When Arizona's Curt Schilling notched his 21st victory of the season Wednesday, he walked just one Cincinnati Reds batter -- Sean Casey -- to leave his walks total at an astonishingly low 20.
He is attempting to become only the fourth ERA qualifier since 1900 to finish the season with more victories than walks. The others:
1. Christy Mathewson, New York Giants, 1913: 25 victories, 21 walks.
2. Mathewson, Giants, 1914: 24 victories, 23 walks.
3. Slim Sallee, Cincinnati Red Legs, 1919: 21 victories, 20 walks.
4. Bret Saberhagen, New York Mets, 1994: 14 victories, 13 walks.
