Without Deal, Baseball Would Be In Shambles

Acting commissioner Bud Selig likes to talk about baseball being in the “early stages of a very powerful recovery.”

Now that the sport at last has a labor agreement all but in place, Selig perhaps is right. The team owners voted, 26-4, Tuesday to approve the deal completed by their negotiator, Randy Levine, and Players Association chief Donald Fehr, and the union almost certainly will ratify the agreement during its executive board meeting next week in Puerto Rico.

The agreement is to last through 2000, with an option year at the discretion of the players.

The healing process for baseball was under way before Tuesday’s vote by the owners at an O’Hare Airport hotel. The ravaged national pastime had begun to work its way back from the major league players’ nearly eight-month strike, which wiped out the 1994 World Series and led the owners to open spring training in ‘95 with replacement players on the field.

Baseball just completed its first uninterrupted season since 1993. It just completed the initial season of a lucrative television contract with NBC and the Fox network. Attendance figures weren’t back to pre-strike levels, but they were better than those during the angry-fans backlash period that followed the longest, costliest and most bitter work stoppage in professional sports history. In short, baseball seemed to be recovering.

All of that could have been reversed Tuesday. Nov. 26, 1996, could have been remembered as the game’s gloomiest day since Sept. 14, 1994 - the day Selig announced there would not be a World Series for the first time in 90 years.

The owners had voted, 18-12, on Nov. 6 in Rosemont, Ill., to reject the deal that was crafted by Levine and Fehr during three days of whirlwind bargaining - Aug. 9-11 - in New York, then modified and completed on Oct. 24. That convinced the union’s leaders that Chicago White Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf - in their view, the hardest of the management hard-liners - was in charge of the owners, manipulating the labor process through Selig. And Selig, the Milwaukee Brewers owner who failed to endorse the deal at the owners’ meeting three weeks ago, was either unwilling or unable to sever his ties with Reinsdorf and nudge the settlement across the finish line, in the view of the union’s leaders. Fehr adamantly refused to change any of the fundamental elements of the agreement when the owners approached him about renegotiating it, and said that Selig “torpedoed” the deal.

The nearly 4-year-old labor dispute had followed a doomsday scenario when it reached a crossroads before, and it was headed in that direction again. In August, the owners threatened to ask U.S. District Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to lift the injunction of March 1995 that restored the terms of baseball’s expired collective bargaining agreement and led the players to end their 232-day strike minus a settlement with the owners. That would have allowed the owners to make another attempt - probably next winter - to declare an impasse in negotiations and unilaterally impose an economic system to their liking.

That, union officials have said, would have led the players to consider another strike. And baseball perhaps could not have survived another strike, at least not another one so close to the one from which it still is recovering.

This time, however, the war didn’t resume. Reinsdorf insisted to reporters in Chicago that his team’s signing of free-agent outfielder Albert Belle to a record five-year, $55 million contract last week had no impact on the outcome of Tuesday’s revote. But many owners were outraged when Reinsdorf followed the Nov. 6 rejection of the labor deal by making Belle the game’s first $11-million-a-year player. Reinsdorf most certainly gets punished by Tuesday’s vote: Not only will the White Sox have to pay a payroll tax and contribute money to the clubs’ revenue-sharing fund, but the ace of their starting rotation - Alex Fernandez - becomes eligible for free agency with the players being credited with the service time they lost while on strike.

The owners have projected that the clubs will suffer combined losses of at least $100 million per year, on the average, with this labor deal in effect. But, as Levine told them during his Nov. 6 presentation, it’s far better than the alternative. The industry will come close to breaking even in the final stages of the deal, Levine argued then. Sagging smallmarket teams such as the Pittsburgh Pirates, Kansas City Royals and Montreal Expos will get the financial boost they need from the owners’ revenue-sharing plan. Interleague play goes into effect next season, and the owners hope that sort of innovation for this tradition-laden sport - plus the Fox TV influence - will help win back the young fans who have been wooed away by basketball in recent years.

The owners get the mechanism they sought to curb players’ salaries, even if it isn’t as restrictive - or doesn’t last as long - as they’d wanted. The players avoid a firm salary cap.

No one seems ecstatic about baseball’s labor deal. Relieved probably is a better description. Maybe that’s a sign that a compromise truly was forged.