The records race evoked such immortal names as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Ted Williams, reminding fans of why baseball remains America’s mythic sport. The “field of dreams” is deeply interwoven in this country’s culture, as a new book, “October 1964,” by David Halberstam, and a forthcoming PBS series, “Baseball,” by “Civil War” creator Ken Burns, remind us. So it wasn’t really surprising that, even with the strike imminent and the fans. according to polls, suffused with contempt for both sides, more than 325,000 showed up Thursday at the 10 ballparks to provide the players with a last hurrah. Fans at Yankee Stadium unfurled a banner that pleaded in un-Bronx-like tones, YA’LL COME BACK NOW, YA HEAR?
That doesn’t appear likely to happen soon. Baseball’s eighth work stoppage in 23 seasons has all the earmarks of a long one, destined to stretch well into September and possibly to wipe out October’s playoffs and World Series. After weeks of vitriolic noises from both sides, the chorus came down to a couple of one-notes: Salary cap, insist the owners; No way! reply the players. The charade they laughingly called negotiations continued through Wednesday. Fans, who largely viewed the dispute as a battle between greedier and greediest, hoped for a last-minute settlement to save the season. But by Thursday there wasn’t enough intellectual energy in the dialogue to merit even a meeting-if you don’t count joint appearances by union head Donald Fehr and management’s Richard Ravitch on the “Today” show in the morning and “Larry King” at night. By Friday afternoon, the two sides returned for a brief, futile session. “If the two parties are as strong as they pretend to be,” says the Chicago Cubs legendary broadcaster Harry Caray, “this could go on through 1995.”
History suggests that the owners, as they always have done in the past, will fold long before that, particularly when threatened with the loss of $5 million per club in postseason TV revenues. Several suggested that a salary cap, which would reduce team spending for salaries from 58 to 50 percent of baseball revenues, is hardly nonnegotiable, and they threatened to inject themselves directly into the bargaining process. But what may keep the owners steadfast is the very fact that they are so divided among themselves. Any agreement requires 21 votes, three quarters of the teams. There’s a sizable enough group of small-market owners promising to block any settlement that, they believe, doesn’t address their needs-namely a device that enables them to compete economically with the wealthier teams. “You can’t cave in 20 times and make a joke out of baseball,” says Marge Schott, owner of the Cincinnati Reds, who could be kissing off a first-place finish.
No one’s laughing now, certainly not the players who, by contrast, are in lock step behind Fehr and better positioned to weather the financial hit. They have already earned most of their 1994 salary , which averages $1.2 million per man. And next month they’ll be able to tap to the tune of 8165,500 a player-a $200 million rainy-day fund from licensing revenues. Thus there was no audible dissent in the dugouts as players gathered their gear and waxed philosophical. There was probably no more poignant exit than Cal Ripken Jr.’s postmidnight departure in the rain from Baltimore’s Camden Yards. The 33-year-old shortstop was on target to surpass Gebrig’s “unbreakable” 2,130-game playing streak next June. At his age, every lost day threatens that quest. “The reality of the situation didn’t hit home until this moment,” said Ripken as he emptied his locker into a cardboard box. “In a perfect world we’d continue to play, but we’re not in a perfect world.,, Other players sounded slightly more optimistic. “Every strike gets resolved,” said San Francisco Giant Barry Bonds, who was bidding for his third straight MVP award. “The season will start again somewhere down the road. There will be baseball.”
Of course there will. The only question is when. “Hope only screws up your judgment,” said dispassionate union chief Fehr. Not that there isn’t plenty of passion. Indeed the problem may be that there is too much. There is so much distaste, bordering on sheer hatred, and distrust between the two sides. The owners didn’t even get around to offering their proposal until mid-season, six months after the basic agreement had expired. While Ravitch chose to talk in lofty tones about what’s “good for baseball,” others on the management team preferred to characterize the problem as a simple matter of “money-grubbers.”
Polls show that more fans fault the players, but only because they are more visible. It’s ultimately hard to blame them for their reluctance to relinquish what the owners willingly, almost enthusiastically, lavished on them. There has been so much obfuscation on the owners’ part first they claimed that 19 teams were money-losers, then reduced that number to perhaps 12-that the union is now skeptical of any financial numbers the owners produce. The National Basketball Association, which has been considered a model of management-labor relations, got its pioneering agreement, including a salary cap, only after opening up its finances and convincing players that franchises would fold and jobs would be lost.
That won’t happen in Major League Baseball. Some franchises are clearly in trouble. But don’t be surprised if the players display no more sentiment than owners have in the past. If the Los Angeles Dodgers are actually losing money, as recently claimed, should Brooklyn ready the welcome mat? The Milwaukee franchise that Bud Selig, Brewers owner and baseball’s acting commissioner, is so concerned with saving was once the Seattle Pilots. And before the Brewers arrived in Milwaukee, there were the Braves, who played there a lucky 13 seasons after leaving Boston and before departing for Atlanta. Only 10 of the current 28 teams trace their civic roots back before the ’50s.
There isn’t a team that some prospective owner isn’t dying to buy or that some other city-Tampa-St. Pete, Phoenix, Buffalo wouldn’t embrace. Eli Jacobs helped puncture the owners’ sad song last year when he sold the Baltimore Orioles for $173 million just four years after buying them for $70 million. Union associate general counsel Gene Orza raised the daunting specter of “socialism.” The owners, he said, talk like “Adam Smith when they’re selling and Joseph Stalin when they are buying.”
The owners do have genuine problems. The disparity in operating revenues, largely a product of widely varying local TV and radio deals, has been compounded this year as the national television contract shrank in half Last year the Yankees had revenues of $107.6 million, while the Montreal Expos had to make do with just $46.2 million. Montreal clearly can’t pay the same salaries as New York; the Expos have the second lowest payroll in baseball and leads the league in losing big-name free agents. What the owners haven’t been able to demonstrate is how that translates into smaller-market teams’ inability to compete. “You can shoot that theory right in the butt,” Yankees owner George Steinbrenner told The Philadelphia Inquirer last week. Indeed this season the Expos, built from the bottom up with a first-rate farm system and superb scouting, have the best record in baseball. The relatively poor Minnesota Twins have won two World Series in the past seven seasons, two more than rival American League rich clubs like Boston, New York and Chicago.
What makes this strike more of a shame than baseball’s previous labor disagreements is that baseball, after a prolonged slump, had finally seemed to get things right this season. A lively ball propelled the game’s best hitters to new heights. At one time, records for home runs, runs batted in and doubles appeared in jeopardy. The record hunt served to focus attention on a remarkable collection of young hitters like Griffey, Jeff Bagwell, Frank Thomas, Matt Williams and Albert Belle.
Stories on the sport actually began to appear that didn’t include the word “hering.” What sports fan could afford not to pay attention when each league boasted a candidate for the Triple Crown, last achieved in 1967, or when San Diego’s estimable Tony Gwynn had a chance to become the first hitter since the immortal Ted Williams in 1941 to hit over .400 for a season? All the hitting obscured the fact that the most remarkable effort of the season may have been a pitcher’s. In a year in which earned-run averages have gone ballistic, Atlanta’s Greg Maddux, who could become the first pitcher ever to win three straight Cy Young awards, threw a shutout Thursday against the Rockies to lower his ERA to 1.56, the lowest figure for a starting pitcher in almost a decade.
But 1994 hasn’t been just a showcase season for individuals. There were exciting new contending teams as well. The-Expos, whose only previous postseason experience came ironically after winning the second half o 1981’s strike-altered season, had the powerhouse Braves thinking about that new wildcard berth in the playoffs. The Yankees, a beautifully balanced team with key players added during owner Steinbrenner’s suspension from baseball, was about to provide one of the game’s classiest players, Don Mattingly, with his first taste of postseason play. And the Indians were finally ready to retire their status as the league’s longest-running joke, a solid shot for their first postseason appearance in 40 years.
Even splitting the leagues into three divisions, denounced by traditionalists as a grievous offense, proved to be a commercial -if not exactly an esthetic -success. In the American League West, four teams that last year would have been consigned to baseball’s second division and the dog days of September were battling for a playoff spot despite being a cumulative 57 games under .500. Baseball may have dreaded the embarrassment of a sub-.500 team winning a division. But that was more than offset by nights like Wednesday when three of those “contenders” played at home and drew almost 90,000 fans. With seven weeks to go in the season, fully 16 of the 28 teams were positioned to compete for a playoff spot.
While it is hard to muster much sympathy for any of the principals (there are virtually no principles involved) in this dispute, there are real victims at each major-league venue. The strike is truly devastating to the vast supporting cast of vendors, ushers, ground crews and others in the community who are dependent on the baseball industry. When the Red Sox closed shop, 450 nonplayers were dumped off the payroll. Some 1,200 were out of work at Houston’s Astrodome. “They get more money, and we get nothing,” said an angry concession worker, Sharon Davis.
Since its opening last year as the first of the new old-time ballparks, Camden Yards has been a veritable boomtown. Suddenly pink slips are more prevalent than paychecks. Bartender Eric Cotton, 23, got laid off from Pickles Pub, which depends on the ballpark crowd for 75 percent of its business. Cotton, who is earning money to return to grad school, plans to live in a tent on the Pickles roof for the rest of the season, a symbol of the strike’s invisible casualties. “If you don’t have a 95-mile-an-hour fastball, you have to get an education,” he says. “I have nothing to lose. What am I going to do without that income?”
True fans are, of course, asking themselves what they’re going to do without baseball. For one thing, the major leagues don’t have a patent on the game. Baseball goes on even through the strike. The minorleague game can be a pretty appealing alternative (box). More eclectic fans will probably tune in to football a little earlier than usual. And with football in gear, basketball, now virtually a four-season sport, can’t be far behind.
So the far more serious question is: what might baseball do without its fans? After past strikes and lockouts, the fans quickly renewed their allegiances. But this strike, laying waste to such a potentially epic season, could prove different. it follows a decade in which owners and players alike have already squandered a great deal of loyalty and affection. FIELD OF GREED, as a Camden Yards banner proclaimed, may be a judgment that sticks for a while.
Most knowledgeable observers expect the strike to last at least several weeks. A mid-September settlement might produce a rude awakening for the game. Roger Angell, The New Yorker magazine’s veteran chronicler of the sport, admits to some pretty dark thoughts. He writes: “A resumption of play on, let’s say, September 19th would coincide exactly with the opening of the 0. J. Simpson trial in Los Angeles -at which point we may all discover, in the ratings and in our lowdown hearts, just what the great American pastime actually turns out to be, here in the mid-nineties.”
This nation should be large and diverse enough to handle a big murder trial and a pennant race, too. just not this year. By September any strike settlement might be too late. Fans might not see a reasoned solution, but rather a cynical accommodation aimed only at salvaging the league’s lucrative new three-tier playoffs. Sure the diehards would watch. But the average fan may choose to utter one of baseball’s most enduring phrases. “Wait till next year.”
