A Win for the Fans

By Evan Thomas

They toil at a summer's game in sweatshops that are green and airy. The rank-and-filer earns an average of $363,000 a year, not counting shaving-cream endorsements. A major-league baseball player is hardly your typical working stiff.

No wonder, then, that the fans were loudly unsympathetic when the athletes' union went on strike last week. "The players are greedy," groused St. Louis Cardinal Rooter Greg Errion. "They have no regard for the fans. It's 'What can I get for me today?' The luster of ballplayers as American heroes has dulled." Nor did the fans feel very sorry for the owners, who, despite their poor-mouthing, toss about millions of dollars, largely, it sometimes seems, for the privilege of hanging about their employees' locker room.

Perhaps it was the boos and catcalls that made the players and the owners settle so quickly. Or the coolly persuasive presence of Peter Ueberroth, the former Olympic czar turned baseball commissioner, who publicly positioned himself as the fans' representative. Or the sheer cost of the walkout: on average, $2,000 a day in salary per athlete, $1.17 million a day in revenue per owner. In any case, the players had barely finished packing up their gloves and blow-dryers to head home last week when word filtered out that the strike was over. By Thursday, two days after the lights had gone out at ball parks across the country, the cracking bats and beery roar of major-league baseball again filled the muggy August air. Boston Bartender Michael Shain approved. "People don't want to read about contract and salary disputes in the sports section," said Shain, who manages the Batter's Box near Fenway Park. "It was the one place in the paper where those things could be avoided."

Though the strike was fought over such accountants' terrain as TV-revenue shares and profit-loss sheets, the real issue was the shifting balance of power between the players and the owners. For about a century the players were professional gladiators, glorified by the fans and the press, to be sure, but held in bondage by the owners. Until the early '70s, players had little alternative to taking what was offered except to become a holdout. Salaries were relatively low, even for established stars. In 1954 M.V.P. Willie Mays earned $25,000, about the equivalent of what a utility infielder makes in today's dollars.

Then in 1973 players won the right to submit salary disputes to an independent arbitrator. The arbitrator was compelled to choose either the club's offer or the player's demand, and salaries inevitably rose. True deliverance came two years later, when players won freedom from the so-called reserve clause that tied them to one team for as long as the owner wanted them. Now players with six years' experience could in a sense sell themselves to the highest bidder. The combination of arbitration and free agency sent salaries spiraling sevenfold in less than a decade, from an average of $44,000 in 1975 to more than $360,000 this year.

The clubs' annual revenues in the same period only quadrupled (to $624 million), and as the talks got under way nine months ago, owners began pleading that they could not afford the salary race. Forecasting losses of $90 million a year by 1988 and warning that major-league baseball was in jeopardy, they demanded that the players follow the example of the once fiscally battered National Basketball Association and establish a cap on salaries.

The players did not go for the pitch. If baseball was such an invalid, they asked, how come attendance was up 50% since the mid-'70s, some franchises were selling for as much as $50 million and owners of supposedly weak clubs could still dangle million-dollar contracts before .250 hitters? Last April, prodded by Commissioner Ueberroth, the teams agreed to open their books to the players. An accountant hired by the owners promptly scaled back the losses originally claimed by the clubs from $43 million last year to $27 million. The players' accountants, meanwhile, insisted that the owners actually made $9 million, but hid their income from such sidelines as ball-park concessions.

As the accountants fenced, the talks drifted listlessly, and the Aug. 6 strike deadline loomed. The players and owners remained far apart on two major issues. Under the old contract a player could take a salary dispute to arbitration after he had played in the majors for two years. The owners wanted to raise the eligibility requirement to three years and limit any salary increase to 100%. The players refused to budge from the status quo. The other sticking point came over pensions. Traditionally the owners have given one-third of national television and radio revenue to the players' pension fund. With a new TV contract worth $1.1 billion over six years, the players' share under the old formula would have risen from $15 million a year to $60 million. The owners instead offered $25 million; the players demanded at least $40 million.

Only when the players walked out did both sides compromise. The players agreed to raise the eligibility requirement for arbitration for new players from two to three years. The owners, for their part, agreed to drop the salary-cap proposal. On the owners' contribution to the players' pension fund, the two sides compromised at an average of $32.6 million a year for the next five years. The early reading was that the players on balance had prevailed, though in fact they mostly held on to earlier gains.

Commissioner Ueberroth formally entered the negotiations only after the key compromises had been made, but the final five-year agreement closely resembles a package he had started pushing a week before the strike deadline. Ueberroth chose to take a more visible role in the negotiations than did his predecessor Bowie Kuhn during the 1981 players' strike, which lasted 50 days. Indeed, Kuhn had kept such a low profile that reporters blackly joked that the strike never would have happened if Kuhn had been alive. Like most past baseball commissioners, Kuhn was widely regarded as the owners' man, hired to do their bidding. Ueberroth struck a more independent stance, even siding with the players on the crucial issue of the salary cap. He argued that the free market should set players' salaries.

Some reporters accused Ueberroth of running for higher office and began referring to him as "Senator." Charged Boston Globe Sportswriter Peter Gammons: "Maybe there wouldn't have been a strike if Ueberroth hadn't encouraged players to believe that he'd step in on their side." But when the strike was settled, a more typical opinion was voiced by a New York Post headline: IT'S PETER THE GREAT.

Ueberroth himself firmly declared, "I played no role. It was Lee MacPhail [the owners' representative] and Don Fehr [the players'] who put baseball back on the field." Both MacPhail and Fehr, however, give the commissioner credit for keeping them at the bargaining table. And Ueberroth conceded later, "I put myself at risk. We couldn't let a strike happen." The aura of miracle worker that enveloped Ueberroth when he turned a huge profit on the 1984 Summer Olympics may have dazzled some owners. "His presence hung over the negotiations like the ghost of Banquo," declared Baltimore Orioles Boss Edward Bennett Williams.

The settlement kept alive a season of lively pennant races and record-breaking performances. But it did not go very far toward solving baseball's most critical financial problem: the growing gap between the rich clubs and the poor ones. Unlike pro football, which divides a pot of national televison money equally among its 28 teams, baseball relies more on local television revenue. The owners in big media markets, such as George Steinbrenner of the New York Yankees and Peter O'Malley of the Los Angeles Dodgers, understandably are not eager to share their advantages with less well-endowed clubs, like the Seattle Mariners. They argue, with some justification, that the prices they paid to get into the game reflected their lucrative market potential. Nonetheless, in the bidding wars that are a fixture of baseball in the '80s, the wealthier owners can simply buy the better players. Since winning is the best way to draw fans to the park and sponsors to TV and radio, the poor just get poorer. The Cleveland Indians, for example, have managed to hold salaries down to less than half the league average, but they also are 34 games out of first place.

Unlike most businessmen, the successful owners cannot afford to drive their competitors into bankruptcy, since they have to have opponents to play against. Under the agreement worked out last week, the owners are expected to set aside a portion of national TV revenue to help struggling clubs, but the details were still to be specified.

For the players, such financial concerns were far off at week's end as they returned to doing what they longed to do, chasing fly balls and elusive records in ball parks filled with fans. This is the real world of baseball, which is itself a beautifully unreal world. Magically last Thursday night, the man of the hour ceased to be Peter Ueberroth and again became Pete Rose. --By Evan Thomas. Reported by Thomas McCarroll/New York, with other bureaus

With reporting by Reported by Thomas McCarroll/New York, with other bureaus