Posted on 08/17/2002 1:11:13 AM PDT by BluesDuke
Baseball's "Labour Trouble": Overdraft at the Memory Bank?
by Jeff Kallman
A rather splendid New York Yankee pitcher, Ed Lopat, grew up to become a rather splendid Minnesota Twins scout. It would have been rather more splendid if only his employer at the time hadn't been the bottom-feeding Kansas City Athletics. Scouting a wiry Cuban outfielder, Lopat was singularly unimpressed. "This kid," he reported to the Athletics, "will never hit in the big leagues."
Until that kid's knees betrayed him about a decade later, a Rookie of the Year award, three American League batting championships, one American League pennant, and a couple of American League West championships made the Twins awful grateful that Steady Eddie and the Awful A's didn't know Tony Oliva when they saw him.
And my point is? Most baseball fans are likelier to remember how the A's blew Tony Oliva than they are to remember such small details as just who and what provokes baseball's incumbent "labour trouble," concerning which the Major League Players Association has at last drawn its (30 August) line in the sand. (Baseball's "labour trouble" is really management trouble, of course. But why let the truth interfere with a comfortable prejudice?) And baseball fans being overdrawn at the memory bank are precisely what baseball's mandarins and the blowhard sports media count upon.
Especially the mandarin who doubles as baseball's commissioner.
Real world: A CEO tells his board, his stockholders, and his division or franchise chieftains that, under his committed and visionary leadership, the corporation pulled in $3.5 billion in revenues last year, the seventh straight year in which the revenues went up, up, up, and yet we still managed to lose $519 million. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a CEO who would be lucky if all he got was a drop to the unemployment line from a high-altitude airplane with a hole in his golden parachute.
Club Bud World: Bud Selig delivered that very news - about the $3.5 billion 2001 revenues and the $519 million lost, despite a seventh consecutive season with a revenue spike - right along with his tawdry attempt to exterminate his market competitor while fatting its chieftain by the slaying. The only punishment meted out to Selig was a three-year contract extension and a pay raise to a reported $4 million a year.
In the seven seasons from 1995 through 2001, Major League Baseball's revenues went up 156 percent, an extra $2.1 billion per year on average. Says whom? Says MLB's very own "Report of the Independent Members of the Commissioner's Blue Ribbon Panel on Baseball Economics" itself, plus MLB's own updated supplement to that report.
News flash: Less than half of that 156 percent, seven-year revenue spike went toward player salaries. So where, oh where, asks the Society for American Baseball Research - which was not invited to send a representative to the "independent" Blue Ribbon Panel, despite being the people baseball trusts most with Hall of Fame research - did that slightly more than half of the seven-year revenue spike go?
"We know where it's not going," writes Doug Pappas, chairman of SABR's Business of Baseball Committee. "Teams aren't operating more farm clubs. They haven't doubled the salaries of their scouts, ticket agents, or secretaries. Stadium rents haven't doubled. With inflation running roughly 17 percent from 1995 to 2001, clubs aren't paying twice as much for supplies and equipment."
Pappas's eight-part deconstruction of Budonomics should be required reading for anyone wishing to claim baseball's so-called crisis is the fault of those greedhead players or those marauding, imperialistic New York Yankees. Maybe those eight parts will also help deconstruct the rampaging rhetoric. Who knows? You might end up reminding yourself, as Pappas writes, that revenue sharing - as has already been practised, and as yet posited to the Players Association - contains two serious problems:
"First, it doesn't require recipients to try to compete," he writes. "Owners can simply pocket the money, treating it as a no obligation subsidy...The second problem results from a definitional ambiguity. 'Small-market team' can mean either 'low-revenue team' or 'team that plays in a small metropolitan area.' Since a team's revenues are largely dependent on its marketing and its on-field performance, the second definition is more meaningful...but MLB's revenue sharing formula uses the first definition exclusively."
Never mind the "measure of civility and compromise that was absent in 1994," as Los Angeles Times baseball columnist Ross Newhan describes this year's, especially this week's, rounds between the owners and the players. And Newhan is incontestably correct that there has been a noticeable enough lack of fustian between them, even as what began as a "promising" series of bargaining steps (especially the somewhat simply dispatched smaller issues, like steroid testing, international draft, minimum major league salary, and the like) ended with a breakoff in talks and the 30 August line in the sand.
The fresh impasse comes predominantly over a new bid to impose a salary cap. No, it isn't called a salary cap. It is called a "payroll tax" or a "luxury tax," depending upon who is telling or writing. The owners, say Newhan's Times colleague Jason Reid, deems the "tax" imperative "to gain a minimal form of salary restraint on the high-revenue clubs that drive the market and, in the view of many owners, prevent competitive balance."
Say this much for baseball's mandarins: They are smarter than they were in 1994, even if not so much smarter as to craft something that could escape hard translation as a salary cap. But they have at least learned the lesson of rhetorical subtlety. The players may not be dumb enough fish to swallow the lines, but an awful lot of fans sure are. Soften the lingo, drain the memory bank. Then sit back and let the talk radio stooges pour gasoline onto the fire and accuse the gasoline makers of arson.
And the owners have a few suicide bombers in their midst, "a militant group of small market owners," whom Newhan says have Selig's ear closer than any other owners. "That group...has been known to conduct its own conference calls devoid of other owners," Newhan reports. And one of those should by his very name bring the defences up on line, real right fast: Jerry Reinsdorf.
The Chicago White Sox owner once buttonholed then-Commissioner Fay Vincent for spending too much time at the ballparks. Reinsdorf was unamused to learn Vincent had enjoyed having a little dugout chat with Nolan Ryan on the day the future Hall of Famer nailed his 300th career win. "Nolan Ryan is a player," Reinsdorf admonished the Commish. "You're the commissioner of baseball. You can't be in awe of a player, I don't care who he is." Oh, the horror - a baseball commissioner watching baseball games like an honest-to-God baseball fan...and rooting, no less, for a baseball player to achieve a respected milestone. Death, where is thy sting?
It was in Reinsdorf's primary possession in 1994, as a matter of fact.Little did the outraged know that the owner who bawled out a commissioner for sitting in awe of the Ryan Express, then pushed for and got the 1994 strike and World Series kill, was himself sitting in awe of Ding Dong Belle.
But you needn't take my word; Reinsdorf has already been Ratted out. "Here's the biggest antilabour hawk of all time, the guy who spent years lecturing...the other owners on financial restraint," wrote Whitey Herzog, in You're Missin' A Great Game. "He wanted to force a strike and he wanted to cancel a World Series, if only just to break the players' backs. He got his way in '94 and put the game on a respirator. Yet the second the thing was settled, who was there backing the Brinks truck up to Albert Belle's house?"
Reinsdorf was such a hawk that he practised financial restraint by telling Belle the truck wasn't leaving until he helped himself to $55 million over five years. Financial restraint ends when the White Sox's intradivisional need to keep Albert Belle out of division rival Cleveland's lineup and get him into theirs before the Indians can re-sign the, ahem, mercurial free agent.
"As a matter of fact, Ebenezer Scrooge got so damned excited he forgot to count," the White Rat continued. "The top salary at the time...was $8 million. Reinsdorf skipped right past nine and ten and went straight to $11 million a year. That was the biggest fast-forward in the history of the salary spiral." At the time, anyway. Did the players put the guns to the Texas Rangers' owner's head and force him to solve the American League's worst team ERA by spending the equivalent of a quality pitching staff on...a shortstop?
But now the strike date is set. (That it can actually be bypassed, if the negotiations get close enough to a final deal that there becomes momentum enough to cancel it out, escapes many.) The owners, as usual, have screwed the pooch and want the players to pick up the brunt of the tab, if not the whole of it. The players, as usual, resist the idea that they should clean up the mess they didn't make in the first place. And Reinsdorf is said yet to be among the "small market" militants closest to Bud Selig's ear?
"In 1990," Bill Madden of the New York Daily News wrote in early July, "baseball owners took in $1.3 billion in revenues and spent $495 million of it on players' salaries, leaving $805 million to spend on everything else. Last year, those figures had nearly tripled...Yet, we are told a fifth of the teams are on the verge of bankruptcy...where did it all go? Obviously not on players' salaries...which is the only way to directly affect competitive balance. So who's kidding who here when it comes to more revenue sharing addressing baseball's competitive balance?"
Two days earlier, there came the much-respected journalist and baseball historian, Leonard Koppett, writing in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to remind anyone who cared to listen that baseball's good old days (read: before the free agency era, when the players were "more loyal" thanks to the owners' abuse of a certain contract clause to bind them like indentured servants) were, in terms of "competitive balance"...well, not so great.
"(From 1919 to 1922, the Yankees) bought Babe Ruth and nine other players, plus the manager, from the Red Sox, who had won four World Series from 1912-18 and finished second twice," Koppett wrote. "The Yankees won six pennants in eight years while the Red Sox fell into the second division for fifteen consecutive years, eight of them in last place...All of that without free agency...
"Free agency's full effect wasn't felt until 1982. Up to then, teams based in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles finished first 87 times, while Cleveland, Detroit, and Washington did so 14. Since 1982, of the 30 teams...26 have placed first at least once, including Arizona, San Diego, Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland, Oakland, Seattle, Texas, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Houston, and St. Louis. Which era seems more competitively balanced to you?"
Ponder if you must the wherefores behind various owners looking to punish the Yankees because George Steinbrenner does what they should be doing: reinvesting revenues and profits back into his team, sustaining his arduously rebuilt farm system, finding and securing new additional revenue streams, as even "smaller market" teams used to do in various ways (you really think the St. Louis Cardinals became a multi-state regional attraction just by sitting there collecting redistributed wealth?).
Ponder, too, why it is so that we should demand baseball players accept, basically, what we would never ourselves tolerate - abrogation of our right to work wherever we please, so long as it is mutually agreeable between ourselves and our prospective bosses; or, demands by our bosses that we clean up the mess left by their screwing the pooch repeatedly enough. For that matter, ask yourself the last time you got into a hearty discussion after the game over how Jerry Reinsdorf blew that 98 mph heater past Jeffrey Loria, or how Carl Polhad threw Peter Angelos out at the plate.
And, then, ask yourself how fast today we would hang any baseball player who dared to justify earning more than President Bush (himself a former baseball owner) by saying, as Babe Ruth said of his earning more than President Hoover: "Because I had a better year." What was then (and still, actually) just the good ol' Bambino for you would be, now, grounds for a necktie party.
Setting a strike date does not automatically mean another baseball shutdown. But at least it is time for fans to pay close attention at last to who and what might really make it so.
And while you do, you might care to return to Eddie Lopat. When he wasn't screwing the Tony Oliva pooch, he was making himself one of a score of reasons why there became a Major League Players Association in the first place.
Graduated from scout to general manager, he promised a player a certain salary raise, while the two chatted one on one at some gathering or other. Come time to talk contract formally, the player reminded Lopat quietly of that conversational promise and asked, respectfully enough, that it be made good for this year's paycheck. Lopat had only two words for him: "Prove it." Ahhhh, baseball's "good old" days.
Did you watch the Met's 40 year " Amazing " tribute, last night ? It brought tears to the eyes.
I loved the old Mets, which is WHY you missed on fantastic show, last night. They had fans select an " AMAZIN' " team. Rusty Staub ( so fat, as to be almost unrecognizable ), Hodges' wife, Staw's boys and a film clip, from him , Kooz, Tom Terrific, and on and on. The film clips were wonderful. I'm SO sorry you missed it. I had wrongly assumed that cable was carrying it. :-(
There is almost NOTHING, like the memories of the Miracle Mets winning ; except, perhaps, when the Giants won. LOL
Rusty was even FATTER, than he was in '85.
Okay, so it was softball, not baseball -- I'm a chick, that's all they'd let us play in high school. But most of the scents, smells were the same!
Thank you for yet another WONDERFUL article!!
Gotta admit, it was a loooonnnngggg time between "cracks" for that poor bat.
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