Baseball Beware

We weren't surprised. Of the more than 85,000 votes cast by fans in an SI online poll last weekend, 73% said they expect a major league players' strike to obliterate the postseason. If that were to happen, 66% said they would no longer be interested in baseball.

"If there's a strike, there won't be baseball for a long, long time," Detroit Tigers pitcher Jose Lima said last Friday, after the players set a strike date of Aug. 30. "We can't afford that. Not because of the money, but because the fans will go away. That's my fear, that 95 percent of the fans will go away. It's a scary moment for baseball."

Two fan advocacy groups were already organizing a Nationwide Walkout on Baseball, beginning with Wednesday's games.

The timing of a strike, never good, has been made worse by the 5.3% decline in attendance this season and the one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The sport, after all, cloaked itself in patriotism last fall, with New York Mets players wearing FDNY caps, Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Curt Schilling penning a letter to America and ballparks serving as virtual town halls that the President himself frequented, culminating with his rousing appearance at the World Series.

"We want to stay away from September 11 and anything in September," Pittsburgh Pirates first baseman Kevin Young said regarding the strike date. "That's a very sensitive month, let alone the day itself." If the players do strike on Aug. 30, they will have, at most, 12 days to get a deal done before the anniversary of 9/11.

While owners and players still have work to do on revenue sharing, a worldwide draft and testing for performance-enhancing drugs, none of those issues are deal-breakers. The future of the game comes down to this: What penalty should teams incur for running up large payrolls, and at what point should a luxury tax kick in? The tax proposed by the players, based on 2002 payrolls, would hit only one team, the New York Yankees, at an average annual cost of $6.73 million over the next three years. The owners' plan would generate tax bills for seven or eight clubs, with the Yankees, at their current payroll, paying an average of $30.62 million annually over the next four seasons. The two sides also have to agree on how the money collected would be distributed.

Owners have characterized their system alternately as a luxury tax and a competitive-balance tax, while the players equate it to a salary cap. The latter interpretation reverberated when Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks interrupted his yachting off the coast of San Diego last week to opine that "every team in baseball that has any kind of business sense" would keep its payroll under the tax threshold.

"I think there is a threshold, and there is a tax that can get a deal done," Mets pitcher Al Leiter said on Friday. "We have to find a number that doesn't hurt many teams" Finding such a number will take significant compromise from both sides—hardly a hallmark of baseball's labor history.

In the end, in the inevitable last hours before the St. Louis Cardinals are supposed to play the Chicago Cubs on the afternoon of Aug. 30, the players will have to judge the intentions of the owners—Do they really want a compromise deal? Do they plan to implement their own economic system after the season if the players don't strike?—and decide what to do.

But in the back of their minds will be the overriding question, Is a strike worth the damage it would inflict on the game?