Fiddling While Baseball Burns

In 1994, when major league owners wiped out the World Series over a labor dispute with the players, Atlanta Braves president Stan Kasten said of the negotiations, "We weren't playing for a win. All we wanted was a tie." It took two years for that opportunity to come along, and when it did, the owners froze as badly as a hitter caught looking at a fastball down the middle. At week's end they had left on the table for two weeks the best deal they had ever been offered.

Under the proposal, which would carry through 2000 or 2001 (five-and six-year options were on the table), the owners finally could assure their jittery fans that at least five straight seasons would be played without interruption by a lockout or a strike—something that has not occurred in Frank Thomas's lifetime or since Willie Mays, Al Kaline and Jim Bunning were still playing.

The players have offered unprecedented concessions. They've agreed that the player compensation system needs a drag on salaries (in the form of a luxury tax), that the arbitration system is flawed (a three-man panel and no maximum pay cuts are likely to replace the old one-arbitrator system in which cuts were restricted) and that low-revenue clubs need more handouts from their wealthier rivals (increased revenue sharing).

When they should have been closing the deal, though, some owners clucked about having to credit players the 75 days they were on strike as service time. Other owners worried that the deal didn't include enough years with the luxury tax in effect. (The tax would be in place only in 1997, '98 and '99, even if the deal extended to 2001.) "If this deal does blow up," said an owner eager to sign the agreement, "we all should be worried about what's on the other side. If it's not exactly Armageddon, then it puts us right at the precipice of it."

Does that sound like an attractive alternative? Of course not. This is a deal the owners should have signed on Aug. 11 and will sign sooner or later. Minnesota Twins owner Carl Pohlad, for one, took action over the weekend that indicated the owners are coming to their senses. One of at least seven owners who objected to giving players credit for service time, Pohlad suddenly dropped that protest when he re-signed second baseman Chuck Knoblauch to a five-year contract worth $30 million. Knoblauch would have been a free agent after the season if given service credit. Revenue sharing will help Pohlad pay Knoblauch's salary.

"It's a vote of conscience," said one owner who doesn't like the idea of service credit but also recognizes a deal has to be done for the overall good of the game. A reluctance to give service credit is understandable. That said, service time shouldn't be a deal breaker. Owners negotiator Randy Levine bargained this far with service credit on the table. To remove it now would throw off the balance of the deal.

What really bothers some owners opposed to the deal, more than service time, is that the luxury tax, which is designed to rein in the spending of big-revenue clubs, disappears in 2000 and, if a sixth year is added to the agreement, in 2001 as well. "I'm afraid that [the lack of a luxury tax] puts us right back to negotiating off a platform of zero," one owner said, with an eye toward the bargaining that would take place in five or six years. "It puts us in a position of doing something stupid to this game again."

That's one of the reasons why, according to one owner, Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf has been telling his colleagues, "A bad deal is worse than no deal." And it's people such as Reinsdorf who virtually preclude a real partnership between the owners and players from ever happening. The antagonism and the fixation with winning and losing are too deeply rooted to go away. The danger is that a new generation of baseball owners, such as Wayne Huizenga of Florida, will be scarred by their first collective bargaining battles.

That's why you cannot expect labor peace. This is about labor truce.

Better the deal run for seven years with four years of the tax, but as one owner of a small-revenue club said, "It's a step in the right direction. I'd like to see a bigger step, but there's an old saying about building a baseball team: It's not the size of the first step but the direction."