Baseball owners gear for long fight

Players have won eight labor battles, but this time might be different

Clearly, as we have read recently, the players are greedy.

The owners can’t be trusted.

And Donald Fehr, baseball’s Mr. Sunshine, seems to litter our newspaper with quotes with each passing day.

Blah-blah-blah.

For a sport that prides itself on history, it’s sounding like 1994 all over again.

In that strike, the last noises that we heard before the stadium gates were closed were the crackle of flaming verbiage and the crunch of Italian loafers digging in.

Major League Baseball’s ninth labor-related work stoppage since 1972 appears inevitable.

Though the two sides are scheduled to begin talks this week in an effort to avert a strike, the likelihood of even modest progress is remote. There are no dollar figures to exchange. They won’t be meeting to discuss the commas in the infield-fly rule.

How did it come to this, eight years after the angry bickering that canceled the World Series? How can baseball, with its flag-waving and hymn-singing, ponder such a thought so soon after Sept. 11?

Mostly, because the players don’t care. It’s all been an act, you know.

Throwing the baseballs into the stands. Sammy Sosa blowing kisses. Peel back baseball’s post-1994 happy face, and you’ll find a mostly disinterested Barry Bonds.

And yet, when the stadiums close this time, it will largely be the owners to blame. They want this strike. They are primed for the fight.

And why not? Since 1972, they’re 0-and-8.

In the spring of ’72, negotiator Marvin Miller was ready to tell his players’ union that it was time for surrender. The fledgling union was still unprepared to initiate a labor action against the well-heeled owners. But the players surprised Miller by persisting Reggie Jackson, Tim McCarver and Joe Torre being among the chief persisters and baseball’s players’ association grew to be the most successful labor union in America.

The owners dearly want to change that. To them with 15 new owners since the ’94 strike baseball has been turned upside-down. The players make the rules. The players run the sport. The future, for most of them, is secure.

The owners pay the bills. And for them, the future is uncertain.

Give them a figure, the owners have told the players. How high of a salary does the baseball player of tomorrow expect?

The players historically have refused to answer that basic question. For the past 30 years, the owners have answered it for them with more and more dollar signs.

“A lot of today’s owners weren’t around in 1994,” the Rangers’ Tom Hicks reminded last week. “Things have changed. The political situation in Washington has changed.”

In the middle of the last baseball dispute, President Bill Clinton described the strike as “just a few hundred folks trying to figure out how to divide two billion dollars.”

Let me suggest that President George W. Bush, former managing general partner of the Rangers, won’t be quite so disinterested.

The owners have said that they need a system that restores some semblance of competitive balance a difficult feat when the Yankees have a payroll of $138 million and the Twins are paying $40.2 million.

Ownership has proposed a plan that would distribute 50 percent of all revenues equally. Each team would be required to have a payroll of at least $45 million.

Historically, the players have turned a deaf ear to any talk of a salary cap. While the NFL has surged past Major League Baseball in popularity, baseball players have tsk-tsked pro footballers for their allegedly weak labor agreement.

The major-leaguers seem to agree that the smaller-revenue teams must be helped. But not if the system in any way restricts what the free-spending owners are willing to pay.

It’s hard to sympathize with “workers” who make an average salary of $2.3 million a year. It’s even harder when, for 30 years, the players have never budged an inch or given back a dime in negotiations.

It’s more than the money. It’s the attitude.