One treasurer's report

By Roger Kahn

Byplay

Are athletes making too much money? they wanted to know. Are high salaries ruining sport? With first basemen earning $250,000 a year, can anarchy be far behind? I had been traveling. Boston. Minneapolis. Pittsburgh. Toronto. Fort Worth. The landscape and the weather and the accents changed. The theme of the questions persisted. Money.

A long time ago, Robert Frost said he disliked college because the professors not only knew the answers but knew the questions. The old man understood media truth when media were still referred to as the press. Questions, not answers, preside. If you can get enough sober people asking enough loaded questions, you have carried the day or at least confused it beyond redemption. As I traveled, sports fans seemed to have lost every sense of focus.

I was not supposed to be discoursing on money. My publisher had flown me far from customary skies to talk about my book. But practicing on-the-air civility, I offered a few economic answers no more radical than Adam Smith's. We have a reasonably free society. People, including people who play first base, are privileged to offer their skills to the highest bidder. Personally, I prefer this to either monopoly sport or socialized sport. A lot I knew, said a radio listener in Dallas. The goddam greedy athletes were ruining the game.

For as long as I can remember, entrepreneurs have mingled sport and avarice in perfect laissez-faire. A promoter named Mike Jacobs sent Joe Louis forth to fight an opponent each month. Years later, when all the checks were deposited, Jacobs retired. Louis had to beg the IRS for mercy. As president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Branch Rickey wrote himself a contract that included a percentage of receipts from the sale of players developed on 20 Dodger farm teams. Rickey spent his final years calculating compound interest. Some players whom he sold for $150,000 are now unemployed. Historically, you did not make millions playing ball. You made millions by owning a ball club. I recall no consistent campaign against the ancient robber barons of sport, except in the Daily Worker, which had a limited following.

Across the past decade, the old baronies have vanished. First, new leagues began in football, basketball and hockey. That destroyed monopolies. Then athletes began to learn rudiments of individual and collective bargaining. Lawyers, agents and hardheaded union men took up their cause. Finally, courts asserted that former restrictions against free bargaining for ball players were anachronistic enough to be invalid. At long last for athletes, the time is free. And what does the sports fan cry? Pity the owners.

The daily press covers the new economics voraciously and impetuously. Details of Catfish Hunter's contract with the Yankees made staid front pages. Sports sections ring with the dull strife of labor negotiations. A hundred newspapers run performance summaries of what they call baseball's Millionaires' Club. The paycheck appears to have become more important than the batting average. The fans read. The fans respond. Alms for the owners.

Certain friends, from Howard Cosell to a Marxist novelist, see a foul conspiracy at play. The press is corrupt. Club owners buy and sell journalists. The press is a tool of sports management. Why don't I write that?

Mostly because such stuff is nonsense. The ethics of contemporary sportswriters probably are of a higher order than the ethics of lawyers. Self-criticism among sportswriters is more cutting than self-criticism among physicians. Most sportswriters are outrageously opinionated. With an infinitesimal number of exceptions, the opinions are not for sale or rent.

Sportswriters spring to cover player-salary stories because those stories are unprecedented and sensational. They sell papers. Club owners then leap in with calculated news leaks and bleatings of poverty. In a few months we may read reams about Johnny Bench's salary demands and nothing about the Cincinnati Reds' operating profits. The Bench story will be simple and direct. The Reds' ledgers, if they were available, would probably make sense mostly to C.P.A.s. News judgment, not corruption, is at issue. The Bench negotiation is news.

Meanwhile, in our economic system, Bench is worth everything he can get. High salaries are not ruining the Reds or any team or any sport. Despite reckless expansion not one team in an established league has yet gone broke.

Blunt Bill Veeck told me how things are, during a layover in Chicago. Richie Zisk, an unsigned White Sox, hit two home runs in an important game, and I remarked that with each homer, Zisk was getting more expensive.

Veeck looked about at a crowd of 40,000 customers. "Yes," he said, "and with each home run we're better able to afford him." I believe that's how free enterprise is supposed to work.

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