Three Strikes, You're Out

By Paul Gray

A month ago, only cynics believed the owners of the 26 major-league baseball teams would seriously consider putting the 1990 season in danger. Management's Feb. 15 lockout of players from spring-training camps in Florida and Arizona was largely seen as a negotiating ploy, a bit of bluff and bluster that might hasten agreement on a new contract and get the game going on time, before any serious money was lost. The events of last week, though, proved the cynics correct. Talks between the club owners and the Major League Players Association remained deadlocked. In an eleventh-hour gesture, Commissioner Fay Vincent offered to order the training camps open if the players' union promised not to strike later in the season. The union response was prompt: no deal. With that, hopes that opening day would take place as scheduled, on April 2, virtually vanished.

The issues dividing the two sides are of such stupefying triviality that even dedicated fans have trouble paying attention. The prime obstacle to a new contract is a disagreement over when players should be eligible for the rather arcane process of salary arbitration. The owners insist on three full years of service, a concession they won in negotiations back in 1985; the players want that figure rolled back to two years. Aside from that issue, the two sides are also haggling over a minimum big-league salary; the players want $105,000, and the owners are offering $90,000, up from $68,000 under the previous contract.

Such figures suggest how removed baseball people -- owners and players -- have become from most ordinary Americans who follow the sport and, in one form or another, pay the freight. The business of baseball has never been better, and the sport is awash in cash. While an entry-level salary of $90,000 may not seem terribly shabby, it is peanuts in today's major leagues, where the average annual wage exceeds $500,000. Simple, slavering self-interest should have dictated that both sides do everything possible to keep the dollars rolling in. A new television contract with CBS will bring the owners $1.5 billion over the next four years. In addition, individual teams have cut deals with local cable-TV distributors that are worth tens of millions of dollars annually. How could the owners seriously put all this at risk, simply to bring the players to heel over comparatively paltry sums?

Yet that is what is happening, beggaring all notions of propriety and common sense. The reason: unbridled, boundless greed. The owners show all the symptoms of terminal cupidity. During the past five years, they have used every stratagem -- including illegal collusion to restrict the movement of free agents -- to keep their hired help from gaining more of baseball's skyrocketing revenues. They have cried poverty but refused to let the players take a gander at the books.

The players occupy a slightly higher moral ground, though only in comparison with their unspeakable employers. Given the way they have been lied to and cheated by the owners in the past, the players would argue, why should they not grab all the gusto they can now? No reason, really, except the danger that they will besmirch their livelihood in order to enrich it.

Fandom is akin to love. When one partner in this transaction turns brazenly mercenary, something less savory develops. Baseball, as its devotees never tire of arguing, is America, writ small but indelibly on green grass between white lines. When the current tawdry spectacle moves out of hotel rooms and onto diamonds, the breakthrough should prompt not only cheers but also some sadness that the springtime rite of innocence and rejuvenation has been sullied by avarice and bad blood.

With reporting by David E. Thigpen/New York