Hawks Make Labor Deal Difficult

Ask any player if he wants a strike, and he would say no. Ask most owners, and their answer would be the same. But then there are the "hawks," the hard-line owners who would risk destroying Major League Baseball while claiming they're trying to save it.

Padres owner John Moores spoke for the hawks when he said eight to 10 owners were prepared to shut down baseball for an entire season to get the labor agreement they wanted. But a moderate owner, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the hard-line group consists of no more than six members, and several were likely to fall in line with the 75 percent that commissioner Bud Selig needs to approve a new deal.

Union chief Donald Fehr cares more about free-market principles than pennant races, but it is the hawks who pose the greatest threat to a settlement, the hawks who want to hit a negotiating grand slam and accomplish their long-standing goal of crushing the players' union. By refusing to compromise -- and adding allies -- these seven owners could assemble a boardroom version of Murderers' Row:

Jerry Reinsdorf, White Sox. Jerry Baseball, he's not. Did Reinsdorf ride the bench in Little League? He acts as if he despises the sport.

He built the worst of the new ballparks. He briefly made the reviled Albert Belle the game's highest-paid player. And his team again is an underachieving mess.

Perhaps MLB should consider itself lucky. If Derek Jeter played for the White Sox, Reinsdorf would run him out of Chicago, Michael Jordan style.

Carl Pohlad, Twins. It would be one of the most delicious scenes in major-league history: Selig awarding the World Series trophy to Pohlad, his co-conspirator in the plot to eliminate the Twins.

Pohlad worked the current system to his benefit the past two seasons, turning small operating profits by pocketing his revenue-sharing proceeds. Alas, Pohlad couldn't get MLB to eliminate his team before many of his young stars were due raises, and his payroll increased $27 million in 2001 to its current $40 million.

Moores. His off-the-field troubles far exceed any player's. Moores' failing computer software company, Peregrine Systems, is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for alleged fraudulent accounting practices. Fortune Magazine lists him as No. 14 in its "Greedy Bunch," an honor he "earned" by cashing out $646 million in Peregrine stock; the company now is trading at 41 cents per share.

Moores' ownership of the Padres doesn't inspire confidence, either. The team reached the 1998 World Series with the game's 10th-highest payroll. Voters approved a new ballpark two weeks later, and Moores hasn't spent since, fielding a bottom-six payroll each of the past three seasons.

David Glass, Royals. The next agreement might compensate the Royals for their lack of revenue but not for their lack of a clue. Glass says that in professional sports, "you have a responsibility to your competitor, not only to keep him in business but to make sure he's competitive." Well, the Royals sure were helpful to the A's when they traded them Jermaine Dye and Johnny Damon and received little in return.

Using the so-called "competitive-balance tax" to assist teams like the Royals, Tigers, Devil Rays and Brewers is like leaving part of your estate to an irresponsible nephew -- or trying to fix the leaky roof at Milwaukee's Miller Park.

Drayton McLane, Astros. He followed a familiar pattern, spending freely, then preaching restraint. None other than George W. Bush, then general managing partner of the Rangers, reprimanded McLane for more than doubling the Astros' payroll after McLane purchased the team in 1993.

"Drayton is going to learn," Bush said then. "Today's glorious signing can be tomorrow's bust. Sometimes, you just can't satisfy the public or the press."

The Astros remain a model organization, but the opening of a new ballpark in 2000 didn't provide the expected panacea. Take heart, Mr. President: McLane no longer is trying as hard to satisfy the public or the press.

Stan Kasten, Braves. Of course he's a hawk; he's president of the NBA Hawks as well as the NHL Thrashers. Like Reinsdorf, Kasten was part of the 1998-99 NBA lockout that shortened the regular season but produced a favorable settlement for the owners. He longs for a similar outcome in baseball -- especially at a time when the Braves' owner, AOL Time Warner, no longer is in position to support a high payroll.

Tom Hicks, Rangers. It's only appropriate to save the most ridiculous for last. Awarding Alex Rodriguez the richest contract in history actually was one of Hicks' better moves, at least compared with the wasteful deals he gave Chan Ho Park, Todd Van Poppel, Jay Powell and Juan Gonzalez last offseason. Now, with his team headed toward a second straight last-place finish, Hicks wants to be saved from himself.

Not to worry -- watching the Rangers squeeze under the luxury-tax threshold will be more amusing than watching Anna Nicole Smith squeeze into a tight miniskirt.

Senior writer Ken Rosenthal covers baseball for The Sporting News. Email him at kenrosenthal@sportingnews.com.

...it's been the owners giving in all along to these crybabies.

Oh? Giving in? To what - free agency? Let's see...

"There's no loyalty left." A canard. Pre-free agency, the average player turnover per team was 4.2 players a season. Post-free agency, the average player turnover per team has been...4.3 players a season. Big deal. Pre-free agency, incidentally, "loyalty" was a rather subjective business, if you didn't realise it: pre-free agency, the players had not a damn thing to say about whether they'd be staying with their team or going elsewhere. (Did you know that, of the 127 Hall of Famers who played prior to the free agency era, almost 80 percent of them played with more than one team and sometimes as many as five? Remember - they had no say in it.) The "loyalty" issue is one of the reddest herrings in the game's contemporary argument.

The owners didn't "give in" to free agency; they got dragged into it kicking and screaming after they lost in arbitration, as damn well they should have lost. Consider: Their misapplication of the ancient reserve clause enabled them to control a player's employment, to sell or trade them at will (and not strictly in the interest of competitive improvement; anyone who thinks owners didn't trade players over personal issues or disputes had better read some baseball history and fast), regardless of the player's wishes or the fans' wishes (to name just one example, St. Louis fans were ready to burn Gussie Busch in effigy when he dumped Enos Slaughter in the mid-1950s, and Philadelphia fans practically went apeshit when Connie Mack fire-sold a second A's championship running team in the 1930s, including a number of Hall of Famers). It took the Andy Messersmith case to throw out the reserve clause - and, by the way, Messersmith took it to an arbitrator in the first place not because of his salary (he had been negotiating a new contract but money was not the issue between him and the Dodgers) but because he wanted a no-trade clause in his contract - he wanted to stay a Dodger or, at least, have a say in where he might go if they did want to trade their then-ace pitcher - after he pitched a stellar season without a contract and ended up winning his case. (Did you know: Had the owners enforced the old reserve clause strictly to the letter, players in the pre-free agency era could have had their free agency after a maximum of two seasons with their incumbent club? It was - of all people - Minnesota's then-owner Calvin Griffith, during a salary dispute with Tony Oliva, who admitted as much in a newspaper article; Messersmith's representatives unearthed the article and pop went the reserve clause.)

"Competitive balance." Well, now, wasn't that some competitive balance baseball had in all those pre-free agency years when the New York Yankees were winning all those pennants and World Series, when the New York Giants were winning all those pennants, or in a decade in which the World Series featured, almost exclusively, the Yankees and either a) the Brooklyn Dodgers, or b) the New York Giants (as was the case from 1947-56, the three exceptions being the Cleveland Indians twice, the Boston Braves once, and the Philadelphia Phillies once)? Reality check: The only reason the old imperial Yankees finally bowed out of the World Series picture was because, looking to overvalue the team in order to sell it, then-owners Dan Topping and Del Webb all but deliberately parched the once-vaunted Yankee farm system before they sold the club to CBS...who couldn't run a baseball team if they'd gotten remedial training from Branch Rickey himself. The Yankee collapse of 1965-73 occurred entirely under and because of CBS's ownership, who completely undermined the farm system and scouting system for the years it owned the team, simply because CBS had nobody on board who knew a damn thing about baseball and tended to fire anyone who did. Just ask Red Barber (who got canned when, doing a Yankee broadcast on television in 1966, he ordered a camera to pan around a damn-near-empty Yankee Stadium as the Yankees hit last place, to tell viewers kind of what the real story, and a sad enough one, was).

News flash: Competitive balance since 1976 has been the best baseball has ever seen, and never mind the Yankees winning the last few American League pennants. (And how come nobody bitches about the Atlanta Braves all but owning the National League West/East over the last decade?) The Yankees aren't invincible; they damn near got knocked off in the postseason by a pair of lesser market teams, and did you know that the only teams who have not been to the World Series since 1976 are: the Chicago Cubs, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and the Colorado Rockies? And does anyone bother to ask or answer the question of why incompetent management, rather than player salaries, has turned (among others) the Kansas City Royals from one of the most competitive teams in the American League into one of the biggest basket cases in baseball? Or, how the utterly incompetent Cam Bonifay, who turned the Pittsburgh Pirates from contenders into pretenders in just a few seasons, utterly destroying that terrific team of the late 1980s-early 1990s, could still end up running the show in Tampa Bay, where the only people who want to see that excuse for a team are those rooting for the opposing team to fatten its standing at the Devil Rays' expense?

Were the owners forced to overspend, misspend, or malspend on players? Did someone hold a gun to their heads to spike the salary levels unreasonably? Was Jerry Reinsdorf, Mr. Financial Responsibility Himself, the man who all but jammed the strike down baseball's throat causing the loss of a World Series (in Whitey Herzog's words, he "put baseball on a respirator"), coerced into backing up the Brinks truck and telling Albert Belle it wasn't leaving until he helped himself to $11 million a year for five years - which was, at the time, three million dollars higher than the top annual salary at the time? Tom Hicks, at a time when his most pressing need was pitching and plenty of it, browbeaten into spending the equivalent of a good enough pitching staff to bring down the team ERA below five with...a shortstop?

And why does it make players "crybabies" if they ask, reasonably enough, that just because the owners have screwed the pooch, refused to manage their clubs reasonably (why the hell should some owners who do know how to uphold and manage a baseball club be strong-armed into keeping those who cannot on what amounts to a welfare teat which will be financed with as little of their own money as possible?), and possibly (not assuredly but possibly) cooked their books to make themselves look worse off than they really are (consider: For all its yapping about "economic disaster," Major League Baseball pulled in an average $2.1 billion a year in revenues from 1995-2001, with less than half going to player compensation, but no accounting for where the other half went, according to MLB's own figures!), it should not be the players who bail them out under arbitrary fiat. It might be one thing if the owners were to deal honestly enough to tell the players, this is what we really have to deal with, and would you be willing to help out in order to try to set things right so we can compete, rather than to say, in effect, We screwed up and you're going to bail our sorry behinds out whether you like it or not. (In case you were wondering, the Arizona Diamondbacks did just about that very thing, with several of their players, reportedly, having deferred various salary dollars in order to help keep the organisation aright, but the Diamondbacks are an exception.)

And, for that matter, why on earth should a team whose ownership and management does it right - good baseball people, smart baseball people, who know how to build a team, and who know that when you pay a player's salary you are not taking a loss but making an investment in your team, among other investments, and who also know how to promote the team and market it no matter where the team is located (it can be done, even outside New York, unless you think the years of St. Louis Cardinals profitability have been a bookkeeping trick) - be forced to support teams whose owners and management do not? Who forced the incoming Tampa Bay Devil Rays to spend all that damned money on high-enough ticket free agents rather than a farm system? Who forced the Boston Red Sox in the John Harrington/Doofus Dan Duquette era to pay their bench more than the Minnesota Twins' entire roster was earning? You think the players don't know these things? Think again. They're not the dummies we'd like to believe them to be.

I don't want to see a strike anymore than anyone else does. But I will not sit back and buy into the canards - and canards they are - pushed upon the uninformed by the ignorant that it's either the greedhead players or the imperialistic Yankees' fault.

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