Strikes and Balls

In Baseball's Labor Game, Reporters Miss the Signs


The second reason is that their opposition among the baseball owners is exempt from antitrust laws, which means, in practical terms, that the owners don't really negotiate. They can simply present a list of demands to the players and stall with the implicit threat of declaring an impasse and imposing their own conditions.

That's the way every baseball negotiation has gone since the first work stoppage in 1972: The players ask for the status quo, while the owners demand givebacks based on claims of economic woe supported by figures nobody else gets to see. You'd think the local sports press would, by now, have acquired some insight into the business of sports, but if the recent baseball negotiations prove anything, it's that media have made giant strides in reverse.

The spitting began a couple of years ago when Commissioner Bud Selig introduced a "Blue Ribbon Panel" to study and report on Major League Baseball's economic situation. What should have been noticed at the outset was that there were no potential dissenting voices among the panelists, which certainly was no coincidence as all were selected and approved by Major League Baseball. Not only were there no experts selected by the players, there also were none from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), the group that verifies all baseball statistics for the Hall of Fame. "Apparently," says Doug Pappas, editor of the SABR newsletter Between the Lines, "we're only safe to use on issues that don't involve money."

Not everyone bought the panel's conclusions, namely that baseball was suffering from a lack of revenue sharing between so-called large and small market teams. (Both Forbes and SABR scoffed at the panel's numbers.) But enough did, including The New York Times, who swallowed MLB's position hook, line and sinker in its editorial pages. The rest of the media either went along or, like the Daily News's Mike Lupica, were full of pent-up resentment and ready to jump on any excuse to slam the players. During the negotiations, Lupica, who started his career as an "alternative" sportswriter for the Boston Phoenix, metamorphosed into Dick Young. His favorite refrain, "It's all about money," failed to address the basic question of why so many players with long-term contracts, players who stood to gain nothing and had plenty to lose by striking, were willing to hold out in order to secure the same rights they had enjoyed for the next generation.


What should have been driving fans to fury was the nonsensical chant of "competitive balance, competitive balance" that was funneled through the press directly from the commissioner's office. After years of irresponsible expansion fueled by the greed for fat entry fees, it suddenly became the moral imperative of the commissioner's office to see that Oakland, Minnesota, and St. Louis be able to compete with so-called big-market franchises. No one noticed that in fact these franchises were near or at the top of their divisions and had been competing quite well for several years on their own limited income.


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