The two houses of baseball met last week in New York and set what appears to be an irrevocable course toward baseball’s eighth work stoppage in just 22 seasons. The players rejected the owners’ proposal to combine revenue-sharing with a salary cap, an artificial lid similar to ones in the Nation-al Basketball Association and the National Football League. The owners in turn bounced the counterproposal, which would liberalize today’s already lucrative salary structure. Formalities concluded, the players’ union announced a walkout deadline of Aug. 12. “A strike is a last resort,” said union head Donald Fehr. “No one wants to play ball more than the players do.”
That remains to be seen. A late-season strike that is not quickly settled threatens that most hallowed of American institutions, the World Series. It is also a dagger aimed at the owners’ purses: they earn about $140 million in television revenue from postseason play. No games, no commercials, no money. Baseball’s statisticians can measure everything but the relative greed of these baseball rivals. On one side is the deep-pockets set, the owners who purchase franchises for record sums (the most recent sale was the Baltimore Orioles for $173 million last August) and then spend profligately on mediocre talent. On the other side are today’s sultans of swagger, who pocket an average salary of $1.2 million and gleam with disdain for the fans.
Helpless to save the games they love, fans in Cleveland and New York – cities with first-place teams – have threatened a job action of their own. They’re organizing a prestrike boycott that would, presumably, send a tough message to both owners and players. “These guys ought to sit down and realize that they are sitting on a golden goose laying the fattest golden eggs,” says Frank Sullivan, founder of Fans First in Cleveland. Mixed metaphors aside, Sullivan’s problem is that the players and owners don’t believe him. Their assumption is borrowed from Kevin Costner – if we play, they will come back.
Too bad the strike wasn’t threatened last year, a season notable mostly for its length. This has been a comeback year for baseball. The simplest of stratagems – the “live ball” struck by an occasional “corked” bat – seems to have reinvigorated the game. Stars like Matt Williams and Ken Griffey Jr. are leading assaults on some of the game’s greatest records (chart), efforts that won’t even rate an asterisk if a strike aborts the season. A strike also sabotages the first year of the owners’ realignment scheme, which has made pennant races all-inclusive affairs. Seven sub-.500 teams are battling to win baseball’s two western divisions. The fans have rewarded this odd arrangement with record ticket sales.
None of this seems to matter to the two sides, whose mutual distaste now rivals the world’s worst ethnic hatreds. The players’ choice of Aug. 12, earlier than expected, was designed to score some public-relations points. They could have waited a week to earn their mid-August paychecks before exiting. It also makes their strategy apparent. They are giving the owners, who have always folded under pressure in the past, a little extra time to come around before throwing away the postseason money. “One of the reasons you set a strike date is to focus attention that negotiating isn’t infinite,” says Fehr.
However, management’s negotiator, Richard Ravitch, couldn’t muster even the slightest encouragement. “We’re really quite far apart at this point,” says Ravitch, whose most damning comment was to compare the players’ stubbornness to that of the previous generation of owners. But the current batch may prove pretty stubborn, too. Even the optimists among them envision a prolonged strike, some see it extending into next season, and at least one, the Chicago White Sox’s outspoken owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, has raised the possibility that baseball will not resume play until the 1996 season.
How fans will respond to a strike of any serious duration is the biggest question. The National Football League exhibition season will be in full swing by Aug. 12, and pro hockey and basketball camps will open soon after. By next April fed-up fans may even decide to extend their World Cup flirtation and give Major League Soccer a chance. Nah. But baseball’s hold on the younger generation of fans is already tenuous. Owners and players alike seem blind to the possibility that baseball could move from America’s pastime to simply its past.
