The latest, greatest threat

Clock starts ticking toward another baseball disaster

Negotiations are a slippery thing. You work up a little hope, you put down a little faith, you talk about a common goal and, the next thing you know, you're yelling at each other from opposite street corners with nothing to show for all your effort but a big headache and a six-figure legal bill.

In baseball, it happens every day.

It has been a strange week in Major League Baseball's latest labor negotiations, one that began with the owners and players chugging along to nowhere in particular. The mood flipped, almost overnight, to hope and optimism over the possibility of the two sides actually settling on a new collective bargaining agreement.

And now it's all degenerated into the sobering threat of a players' strike. Circle Aug. 30 on the calendar. Two weeks. The latest, greatest threat is here.

Nothing that has happened in these baseball negotiations should be a surprise to anyone who has been a witness to the game's labor problems over the past 30 years. The surprise in this particular negotiation, if there has been one, was that both sides thought that they could reach an agreement without the players setting a strike date.

So much for that silly little notion.

"There's a game that has to be played, for whatever reason, and it's not unique to baseball," said Atlanta pitcher Tom Glavine, the National League player rep. He's talking, of course, about the negotiating game.

If there were a pro league for negotiating, Major League Baseball would be a major-league player in that, too.

"There's going to be gamesmanship up until the final minute," Glavine said. "There always is."

Glavine was a key figure in The Great Strike of '94, the one that canceled the World Series and soured so many people on baseball. He learned from it. He has become the mostly positive public face of the players during these latest negotiations.

He has said for weeks that a strike date would have to be announced to prod the owners and players into making a deal. Then he, too, was fooled into thinking that setting a strike date might not be necessary.

It just goes to show you that even a hardened negotiating veteran like Glavine can be pulled into the muck once in a while.

A couple of lockers down from Glavine in the Braves' clubhouse on Thursday, the team's player rep, pitcher Mike Remlinger, already had been sucked in to the mess up to his sanitaries.

"I have gone," Remlinger said, "from being as optimistic to being as pessimistic as can be."

There's probably no need to be overly pessimistic about this mess just yet. The strike date, needed or not, does a couple of things.

First, it scares the heck out of everybody. The players don't set strike dates and not hold to them. If Aug. 30 comes and no agreement is there, the players will walk. Sure as that. And that means a lot of money out of a lot of rich people's pockets, owners and players alike. Rich people like their money.

Secondly, the strike date pushes the two sides into action. Sometimes, especially early on, it's not particularly productive action. The sides will talk tough. They'll point fingers. They'll fret about the pressure and the upcoming deadline.

But, in time, the two sides will cross the street to meet again. The give-and-take and pull-and-shove and bitch-and-moan of negotiations will ensue. The talks will be intense.

"It could take 20 minutes," Glavine said. "It could take 20 hours."

It also could take 20 of something a lot longer than that.

A strike date, remember, does not mean the players will strike. The threat of a strike, quite possibly, could be the best thing that could happen to these negotiations. The next two weeks will tell.

This will end in one of two ways. The two sides will agree to a deal in the next two weeks, averting a strike (or keeping it down to a real short one). The postseason will be played. Baseball will survive.

Or the two sides will dig in, The Great Strike of '02 will come, the postseason will be wiped out and another World Series lost.

And the next time the owners and players start screaming at each other, nobody will be listening.

John Donovan is a senior writer for CNNSI.com. Comments? To e-mail Donovan, click here.

 

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