Spirit of the Rules, Part II

C AN Lee MacPhail do it again? Last year MacPhail emerged as baseball's Solomon, solving the Yankees' raging pine-tar crisis while serving as American League president. Now he is head of the Player Relations Committee and must handle the protest by the Yankees over losing Tim Belcher to the Oakland A's in baseball's cuckoo compensation draft.

MacPhail, who used to be the general manager of the Yankees before George Steinbrenner began operating the club out of his size-9 5/8 hat, must wonder why the Yankees are involved in so many of his hardest cases. For once, the Yankees were not the instigators but were rather innocent victims of one of baseball's more ludicrous practices.

Under the agreement that settled the labor dispute of 1981, when one team signs a free agent from a second team, the second team is then allowed to draft a player in compensation for the loss. But the irrational part is that the second team does not necessarily draft from the team that took its player. It drafts from a pool of unprotected players, usually taking somebody from the roster of some other team.

''When the settlement was reached, I likened it to a concrete glider,'' says Roy Eisenhardt, the president of the Oakland A's, after his team astutely soared into New York and plucked Belcher, a young pitcher the Yankees had just signed.

''You have to look at this settlement in the context of a strike,'' says Eisenhardt, a nonpracticing lawyer and law professor who had just taken over the A's in 1981 and had little to do with the settlement. ''I felt it was horribly complex and did not solve some of the disagreements. Any lawyer could have said: 'What if?' ''

The way it works out, the player selected as compensation is usually some poor unprepared city bumpkin from New York. This has happened twice already this year. The Mets, so heavily laden with talent, could protect only 26 of their best players like Craig Swan, Ron Gardenhire and Junior Ortiz, and they lost their best pitcher, symbol of excellence and link with the past, 39-year-old Tom Seaver.

While Met fans were howling for Frank Cashen's scalp and making plans to visit the Hayden Planetarium, the Cloisters and the Aquarium at Coney Island instead of Shea Stadium this summer, not many baseball executives were sniggering at the sortie by the Chicago White Sox, who were allowed to hit upon the Mets because the Toronto Blue Jays had lured Dennis Lamp with money.

''You only hope your number doesn't come up,'' Eisenhardt says, making the draft sound like Russian roulette.

The bullet slipped into the chamber while the gun was pointed at the Yankees' head last week. The A's lost Tom Underwood to the Baltimore Orioles on Monday, and 24 hours later they took Belcher from the Yankees. The Yankees had signed the young pitcher on Jan. 31, long after the 26-man protection lists had been frozen.

There is no suggestion the Yankees were trying to hide Belcher. They had not been able to agree on terms until he set an ultimatum for Feb. 1 for his return to college for the spring semester. So they signed him, and they lost him.

''It's a mess,'' says Murray Cook, the general manager of the Yankees. ''We never had the opportunity to protect Belcher. We were told the 26-man list could not be changed. If we had a chance to protect him, we'd have no complaint. I was stunned.''

Eisenhardt said his organization checked with an official of the Player Relations Committee and was told that any unprotected player could be drafted. With Bowie Kuhn finishing up his extended term, there is little likelihood of any action from the commissioner's office. It is all up to Lee MacPhail.

Last summer, as American League president, MacPhail cited ''the spirit of the rules'' in deciding that George Brett's game-deciding home run should stand, after the umpires had originally upheld the Yankees' protest of the pine-tar-smeared bat. MacPhail must use the same criteria in this dispute.

The compensation draft has already been exposed as having serious flaws. It forced the Mets into making one of the more grievous decisions in the club's history, based on the assumption that the White Sox didn't need starting pitchers, that lightning wouldn't come down on the Mets.

''This indicates that everybody would have been better off if they had left everything alone,'' said Donald Fehr, the acting executive director of the Players Association, two weeks ago. ''The system forced the Mets to make choices they didn't want to make. The system put the Mets in a position to make choices and run risks. It's needless and it's silly.''

At least the Mets made their decisions knowing exactly which players would be on their roster. The Yankees protected their 26 players before signing Belcher. They could not have put him on their protected list by the time he signed.

''It had crossed our minds, but we didn't think he was selectable,'' says Cook. ''We had no idea Underwood was going to sign. What if he never signed? We couldn't reach an agreement with Belcher and ask him not to sign. That's illegal. As highly scrutinized as we are, we'd never do it.''

Eisenhardt, a bright and decent man, sounds almost, but not quite, apologetic about selecting Belcher. He says, ''It's a tribute to the fine young talent in the Yankee organization.''

Cook says: ''Oakland knows it's unfair, but fairness and common sense are not always applicable in the legal sense.''

Last summer Lee MacPhail dared to make a decision based upon ''the spirit of the rules.'' Tomorrow he should tell Oakland, ''Sorry, our mistake,'' and let the A's pick somebody else. When things quiet down, maybe some of the parties to the 1981 settlement can try to remember why a third team should be penalized. What is the spirit of that rule?

photo of Tim Belcher