contests and heedless expansion certain to dilute the quality
of the game. Traditionalists may look back on 1993 with
nostalgia as the last old-fashioned baseball season.
</p>
<p> Most fans believe the threat to the game is purely
economic: in no other corner of America is the dictum so widely
held that money is the root of all evil. Richard Ravitch, the
labor negotiator for the owners, loudly claims that 18 teams
lost money last year. What is certain is that 300 of the 700
players on big-league rosters this season will earn more than
$1 million each. Barry Bonds, the National League's Most
Valuable Player, deserted the Pittsburgh Pirates in the
off-season for greener pastures--a record $43.75 million,
six-year contract with the San Francisco Giants, a
second-division club that reportedly lost $10 million in 1992
and almost left town.
</p>
<p> Bonds earning about $40,000 a game? How can the Giants
afford that? As Peter Magowan, the Giants' new managing partner,
tells it, signing Bonds was a prudent move. "We had three guys
playing left field last year at $2.5 million," he explains.
"People keep talking about $43 million for Bonds, but he's
getting less than the $7 million average during the first year.
You throw in 150,000 more fans, and that's $1.5 million off that
cost. And we have a much better team." This kind of baseball
economics makes as much sense as Ronald Reagan's promise to
balance the budget by cutting taxes and increasing defense
spending.
</p>
<p> Asked about his grand-slam salary, the mercurial Bonds
immediately compared himself to the National Basketball
Association's rookie marketing sensation. "I love Shaquille
O'Neal to death," Bonds said. "He makes $40 million, and I don't
hear nobody tripping. I'll be the first to say he deserves it.
But I've been putting in my time. I have to win two MVP
trophies. And now people say, `You ain't this; you ain't that.'
I mean, what do I have to accomplish?"
</p>
<p> How easy it is to depict baseball as a simpleminded
rogues' gallery of ego-driven owners and selfish superstars. In
fact, Bonds' salary is not out of whack, especially compared
with that of a journeyman shortstop like Spike Owen (lifetime
batting average .243), who signed a three-year, $7 million
contract with the Yankees.
</p>
<p> Baseball is indeed facing a grave crisis, but it is
primarily political and not economic in nature--a question of
governance and power relations rather than the law of supply and
demand run amuck. The vacant office of the commissioner of
baseball symbolizes the void at the center of the game; the post
has remained unfilled since a majority of owners forced the
resignation of Fay Vincent last September. Vincent's so-called
sins included his prickly independence and his determination to
use his powers to act "in the best interests of baseball" and
his aborted attempt to limit the freedom of TV superstations,
which control the lucrative Chicago Cub and Atlanta Brave
franchises.
</p>
<p> Bud Selig, the affable car dealer who owns the Milwaukee
Brewers, has been serving as de facto commissioner since
September. "We'll have a commissioner," Selig insists. "We have
a search committee in progress. But it's hard to say when." A
shrewd guess is not until there is a new baseball labor
agreement. The owners fear that a new commissioner--no matter
how limited his formal mandate--would try to avert a
spring-training lockout in 1994 as Vincent did in 1980. "The
owners have decided that they get along better without a
commissioner," theorizes the unrepentant Vincent. "Any
commissioner with any strength is going to cause trouble for
them." Fans view a charismatic commissioner, like the late Bart
Giamatti, as their tribune, the only person in the game who
stands for something more than economic self-interest. But many
owners just don't get it. Carl Pohlad, owner of the Minnesota
Twins, asks with puzzlement, "Why does finding a commissioner
get more public attention than choosing the chairman of IBM?"
</p>
<p> Now that the season has begun, these backstairs,
off-the-field maneuvers have scant fascination for the fans.
What matters to them is the pressing issues of the day:
</p>
<p>-- Can the star-crossed Cleveland Indians, a young team
that has not won a pennant since 1954, recover from the tragic
death of two pitchers in a late-March boating accident? (Yes,
if there is any justice in the game.)
</p>
<p>-- Will George Steinbrenner, returning like Banquo's Ghost
from a two-year suspension as Boss of the Yankees, fire manager
Buck Showalter the first time the team hits a two-game losing
streak? (Absolutely not. Showalter is safe unless the Yankees
lose three straight games.)
</p>
<p>-- Have the Blue Jays lost too much starting pitching to
repeat as World Champions? (Yes, the Baltimore Orioles will edge
them out in the American League East.)
</p>
<p>-- Are the new National League expansion franchises, the
Colorado Rockies and the Florida Marlins, as hapless as the 1962
New York Mets? (Not unless the Rockies persuade Marvelous Marv
Throneberry to make a comeback.)
</p>
<p>-- Is Bo Jackson's epic recovery from hip-replacement
surgery for real? (That Bo can play at all is a miracle, but it
is still sad to see him as just another slow slugger without a
defensive position.)
</p>
<p>-- Is this the year for young stars like St. Louis
Cardinals centerfielder Ray Lankford and Blue Jays second
baseman Roberto Alomar? (Yes, mark them down as smart-money
candidates for MVP.)
</p>
<p> But the real on-the-field question is rooted in the
political structure of the game: Can baseball survive the
growing imbalance between the rich clubs and their poor,
small-market cousins? Ravitch is not far from the mark when he
warns, "Baseball is getting like Latin America. We'll have rich
and poor and no middle class." Already there are signs that the
traditional strength of baseball, the competitiveness among
rival teams, is in serious jeopardy.
</p>
<p> Ability to pay for talent is a surprisingly difficult
issue to analyze because the balance sheets of individual teams
are as closely guarded as the intricacies of the CIA budget.
Moreover, the ego rewards of owning a winning ball team dwarf
the psychic payoffs from traditional business. Henry Aaron--not the slugger but the Brookings Institution economist--recently chaired a joint labor-management study commission that
examined the finances of baseball. But even Aaron is uncertain
whether teams are actually losing the money they claim. "I would
like to know who owns the law firm that does the work for a
team. I'm wondering whether some teams have sweetheart deals
with some TV contracts," he said. "But I can't be very specific.
No one, including me, spent as much time delving into the
details as the subject warrants."
</p>
<p> Owners have been pleading poverty since Babe Ruth was
hitting home runs for a Baltimore, Maryland, orphanage. The
owners wailed that the sky was falling back in 1976, when the
Major League Players Association--then and now the most
powerful union in sports--first won the right for its members
to become free agents and sell their services to the highest
bidder after six years in the majors. But instead of all the
stars flocking to New York City and Los Angeles, the law of
unintended consequences prevailed: no World Champion has
repeated since the 1977-78 Yankees.
</p>
<p> Logic argues that, sooner or later, player salaries have
to eclipse revenues for small-market clubs. In the past dec
ade, baseball salaries have escalated nearly as fast as
inflation in Russia. The going rate to re-sign superstars who
anchor a franchise (Kirby Puckett with the Minnesota Twins, Cal
Ripken with the Orioles) has doubled in the past two years, from
$3 million to $6 million a season. Up until now, most owners
have managed to keep ahead of their exploding payrolls thanks
to ever rising franchise values, a threefold leap in marketing
revenues, a 25% jump in ball-park attendance since 1983, and
most of all, the golden-goose $1.1 billion national-television
deal that baseball signed with CBS in 1989.
</p>
<p> But the money-losing CBS contract expires after this
season, as does a $400 million cable deal with ESPN. "Baseball
is spending money that it's not going to have," warns a
sports-broadcasting executive. Bill Giles, president and general
partner of the Philadelphia Phillies and chairman of the owners'
television committee, reckons that the new TV agreement to be
negotiated this summer will bring in around $200 million a year
(about $6 million per club) rather than the current $400
million. Small wonder that, facing a $7 million-per-team
shortfall, some teams appear to be feeling the pinch.
</p>
<p> The Pittsburgh Pirates' spring-training camp in Bradenton,
Florida, should have been alive with the bristling confidence
of a pennant contender. After all, the black-capped Pirates have
won more games than any other team in the 1990s and, in
Sisyphean fashion, came within one agonizing out of making it
to last year's World Series. Instead, leaning against the
batting cage, Pirate manager Jim Leyland talked bravely about
"looking forward to the new challenge of putting this team
together." The sad truth is that the proud Pirates have been
decimated by the exodus of free agents.
</p>
<p> "We're the classic small-market team," said Ted Simmons,
the club's adroit general manager. "Take these four names--Bobby Bonilla, $29 million; John Smiley, $18 million; Doug
Drabek, $19 million; and Barry Bonds, $43 million. It would have
added up to almost $110 million to keep them. We couldn't do
it." So these days, Bonilla is a Met; Smiley hurls for the
Cincinnati Reds; Drabek has jumped to his hometown team, the
Houston Astros; and Bonds is a Giant, in both team and contract
size. But don't hang the skull and crossbones at half-staff for
the Pirates quite yet. "No one or two players can replace Bonds
or Drabek," Simmons conceded. "But 25 men can. Baseball history
is replete with the truth that this is a team sport."
</p>
<p> This David-vs.-Goliath struggle is part of the enduring
charm of the game. Most fans, other than hometown fanatics,
enjoyed last season's spectacle of wealthy clubs like the
Dodgers and the Red Sox finishing in last place in their
divisions with lineups filled with high-price, low-performance
malcontents. A small-market club, the Twins, won the World
Series in 1987 and 1991. But the architect who built these
championship teams, the Twins' boyish general manager, Andy
MacPhail, is worried that Minnesota will be hard pressed to
compete in the future, even though it just re-signed Kirby
Puckett to a $30 million, five-year contract. "The new
development," MacPhail warned, "is that large-market teams like
Atlanta and Toronto now have both the revenue and the ability
to spend it well."
</p>
<p> These issues are prelude to the coming baseball labor
negotiations--a titanic clash in a sport that has already
endured a season-crippling player strike (1981) and three owner
lockouts (1972, 1976 and 1990). The owners, under the leadership
of Ravitch, claim to be determined as never before. Their
proposal, likely to be formally offered around the time of the
World Series, combines the carrot of enhanced revenue-sharing
among rich and poor clubs (currently the Yankees' local TV
contract is worth 20 times as much as the Seattle Mariners')
with the fearsome stick of team salary caps. The probable
result: small-market teams like the Pirates could afford to sign
more free agents, but the salary cap would likely mean that
overall player salaries would be frozen at something near
current levels. "Partnership" is the new owner buzzword, for as
Selig puts it, "We need to have a mature and reasoned
partnership with the players."
</p>
<p> There is only one problem with the idea: it is anathema to
the Players Association. There are hints that the union might
be willing to negotiate away salary arbitration (a jury-rigged
system for setting the compensation of younger players that is
a major cause of payroll inflation) in exchange for, say, free
agency after four rather than six years. But the Players
Association refuses to believe that a reduced national-TV
contract justifies givebacks, contending that the owners have
just kept on spending in the face of this long-anticipated drop
in revenues. "If the Chicago White Sox are unwilling to give
money to the Milwaukee Brewers," argues Don Fehr, the union
president, "it suggests either that the owners don't consider
this a serious problem or else they want the players to solve
it for them."
</p>
<p> With positions hardening on both sides before the
bargaining even begins, only a true optimist (like a
long-suffering Cubs or Indians fan) would plan on attending many
games during the imperiled 1994 season. But what lies ahead for
1995 is even more ominous for baseball traditionalists: the
owners seem determined to cheapen postseason play by doubling
the number of play-off teams.
</p>
<p> The plan, backed by a lopsided 27-1 straw vote at the most
recent owners' meeting, would split each of the two 14-club
leagues into three rather than the current two divisions. A
second tier of play-offs would be created by also vaulting the
second-place club with the best record (the wild-card team,
terminology borrowed from pro football) into postseason play.
"Fans are looking for an opportunity for their teams to be
winners more often than they are now," contends John Harrington,
president of the Red Sox. He piously insists that the owners
"are not doing this to increase revenue," but there is only one
other likely justification for so debasing the play-offs. The
Red Sox, after all, haven't won a World Series since 1918.
</p>
<p> Phillies owner Giles, who heads the TV committee, has a
plan to make expanded play-offs and interleague play
irresistible to the networks. The play-off games would be played
simultaneously and, to boost ratings, aired only on a regional
basis. (Guess what, fans, that means you would be unable to
watch three-quarters of the play-offs.) Adding allure to the
regular-season TV package might be Monday-night interleague
games. And the last item on Giles' agenda: "If we go to three
divisions," he said, "we'll have to expand to 30 teams."
</p>
<p> Expansion is that rare issue that unites labor and
management: the union imagines 50 more jobs for fringe
major-leaguers, and the owners picture two more syndicates of
rich investors anteing up around $100 million each to join the
most exclusive club in America. With the new Colorado Rockies
likely to draw 4 million fans and the Florida Marlins marketing
themselves to the nation's fourth largest state, why not put two
more major-league cities (maybe Phoenix and St. Petersburg) on
the map by 1996? There's only one problem with this beautiful
scenario: virtually no team in baseball except Atlanta can point
to five solid starting pitchers. Just ask Detroit Tigers manager
Sparky Anderson, who went without a victory in 16 straight
spring-training games because his pitching staff resembles that
of the Bad News Bears. "Pitching's been thin for so long," he
moans, "that I just don't think it can get any thinner. Already
you're seeing the thinning of the thin."
</p>
<p> As the storm clouds gather beyond the outfield walls, the
only consolation is to live for the moment--to get out to the
ball park, to cheer like mad, to savor every game of this last
shining season. Fans live on unrealistic hopes, so maybe it
isn't an impossible dream for someone--perhaps a commissioner
selected by both the owners and the players--to save this
grand game from its own greed and folly. In the meantime, here's
hoping Nolan Ryan finally gets a chance to star in a World
