It's a new ballgame now, as they say. No matter how the confrontation between baseball owners and players eventually comes out, odds are the sport will be different. For one thing, fans in the future will hear much less about the National Pastime and much more about baseball, the multi-billion-dollar business. The strike is an old-fashioned economic power struggle, more reminiscent of the ideological battles of the '20s and '30s than of the pragmatic labor-management world of the '90s.
The owners have a right under our free enterprise system to put a lid on their employees' salaries, if they have the strength to get away with it. And the players have a right to insist on a free market for their labor, if they can make it stick. What's different in this situation is the fact that baseball doesn't operate under free-enterprise rules. It has an exemption from the federal anti-trust laws that are designed to confine powerful economic interests to a level playing field. That exemption is not well understood, even, it seems, by the owners who hide behind it.
Baseball's exemption rests, not on an act of Congress, but on a legally dubious ruling by the Supreme Court in 1922. The court's opinion was an exercise in sentiment, not in constitutional law. A first-year law student would get a flunking grade for turning in a paper of comparable legal quality. For decades, both Congress and succeeding Supreme Courts have shied away from tackling the issue. The owners may finally have provoked legislators into taking a hard look at what has become a privilege that is hard to justify. Without the exemption, the balance of power in the baseball business shifts drastically away from the owners.
Most baseball fans seem to be equally unhappy with owners and players. It's hard to work up sympathy for either. Both sides have been obdurate in the negotiations. But it is worth remembering that the players have good reason to mistrust the owners and to believe their objective is not just a cap on salaries but also breaking the union. It's also worth remembering that the union's strength is in part a product of the owners' harsh tactics in the past. There's a lot of merit in the players' argument that the real issue in the standoff is not their salaries but the owners' desire to reconcile the conflicting needs of large-market versus small-market clubs.
Neither the unfair labor practice complaints nor a campaign to repeal the anti-trust exemption is likely to be resolved in time for spring training next year. The prospect of fielding mediocre replacement teams is too distasteful to contemplate. Only the belated onset of common sense and a grasp of reality, mostly by the owners, will save major league baseball as we have come to cherish it.