Major-league baseball players earn an average salary of about $2.4 million for a six-month season, but they are talking about going on strike.
The Boston Red Sox franchise recently sold for nearly $700 million, but baseball management insists that the game is awash in red ink and headed for an economic meltdown that can only be averted with a dramatic change in the distribution of industry revenues and a new mechanism for controlling the growth of team payrolls.
Clearly, it is the best and worst of times for the national pastime, which appears to be on the verge of its ninth labor shutdown since 1972.
The Major League Baseball Players Association, the union that represents every player with a major-league contract, is contemplating possible strike dates as the sport wades into the second half of the 2002 season. Negotiations toward a new labor agreement with ownership are hung up over issues as disparate as revenue sharing and steroid testing.
"It has always been about us or about them," said Hall of Famer Jim Palmer. "It has never been about the fans. ... It turns my stomach."
Millions of baseball fans fear that this season will end the same way as the recent All-Star Game - cut short while tied 7-7 - with a bunch of guys in suits making a decision that seems to display little regard for the people who really pay the bills.
Fans eventually overcame their misgivings about the sport after the cataclysmic work stoppage that cut into both the 1994 and '95 season and caused the first World Series cancellation in 90 years, but the prospect of another self-defeating exercise in labor/management stubbornness already has had a negative impact on attendance throughout the major leagues. Attendance through the first half of the season reached 36.3 million, according to The Dallas Morning News, off 5.7 percent from last year.
So, what's it all about really?
Labor relations 101
It's about money, of course. Lots and lots of money. Players salaries have been spiraling upward since an arbitrator declared pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally free agents back in 1975, effectively invalidating baseball's "reserve clause," which allowed teams to keep players under contract in perpetuity.
After that ruling, baseball owners were forced to reach a labor agreement with the players union that allowed players to become free agents after completing six years of major-league service and created a highly inflationary salary arbitration system.
Baseball owners have been complaining about runaway payroll costs and competitive imbalance ever since. Their efforts to control the growth of player salaries have led to a series of work stoppages, including a 50-day players strike in 1981 and the 1994-95 strike that precipitated a significant rise in fan cynicism and a sharp short-term drop in overall attendance.
If the 1994-95 fiasco was supposed to be the baseball labor war to end all baseball labor wars, somebody forgot to tell the players and owners, who appear headed in the same direction this summer.
"Nobody on either side wants to go through any of this at any time," said Orioles first baseman Jeff Conine, "but history repeats itself. It seems like every time an agreement has expired, cooler heads have not prevailed as far as getting a deal before something rash has to be done."
The owners insist that the game's top salaries have risen beyond reason, and they have some evidence to support that contention - most notably the 10-year, $252 million deal signed by superstar shortstop Alex Rodriguez in December 2000. In one jump, the Texas Rangers doubled the largest single contract ever awarded to a team athlete in any professional sport, the previous record of $126 million (over six years) held by the NBA's Kevin Garnett.
That contract also highlighted management concerns about the lack of competitive balance between the richest and poorest clubs, since Rodriguez's average annual salary ($25.2 million) - at the time - was as much as some small-market clubs were paying for their entire rosters.
"The clubs have convinced themselves ... that they cannot maintain the status quo," commissioner Bud Selig said last week. "It is not working. In fact, there are people who really believe that of all the alternatives facing us, the status quo is the worst of the alternatives."
Union officials continue to express skepticism about the gloomy economic picture painted by management. The huge price recently paid for the Red Sox by a group of industry insiders (including former Orioles president Larry Lucchino) suggests that fear of an industry-wide economic collapse might be exaggerated.
Negotiations toward a new collective bargaining agreement have been going on for several months, but there has been little progress on the core issues. Union leaders met with player representatives on July 8 to plot bargaining strategy, but chose to delay a decision on a possible strike date.
"Like every player, I hope it doesn't get to that," said Orioles shortstop Mike Bordick. "I hope it gets resolved. We have issues, and we have to find a way to work them out. Nobody wants another work stoppage. Like the fans, we just want to get this thing done."
Selig has ordered owners not to speak about labor issues, and Orioles owner Peter Angelos, a member of baseball's bargaining committee, declined to comment this week.
On the table
The labor agreement currently under negotiation is a complicated document that governs virtually every aspect of the relationship between the players and the owners, from drug testing to draft rules to dozens of items as mundane as the quality of hotel rooms on road trips.
The wide chasm between the bargaining committees, however, centers on a couple of key issues that have broad impact on the economics of the sport. The owners are proposing that teams share 50 percent of local revenues (regional broadcasting, ticket sales, concessions) - clubs already share all national revenue (national broadcasting, licensing deals) equally - to narrow the competitive divide between the richest and poorest franchises. Management also is demanding a 50 percent luxury tax on every dollar a team spends on payroll in excess of $98 million, the proceeds of which also would be redistributed.
That tax, largely aimed at free-spending teams like the New York Yankees, is intended to slow the overall growth of payrolls by discouraging the highest bidders in the annual free-agent market.
"It should not come as a surprise that we are not enamored of luxury taxes," union executive director Donald Fehr said recently. "We don't think you should be penalized for hiring someone. We think that's a strange thing to do in the United States of America."
Union officials encouraged enhanced revenue sharing during the last labor dispute and agreed to a luxury tax system that transferred millions from the large-market teams to the small-market teams, but have countered this time with a smaller revenue-sharing plan than the one proposed by ownership while objecting in principle to any new luxury tax.
Fehr considers the luxury tax proposal a component of revenue sharing and has publicly called on ownership instead to come up with an aggregate amount of money that the clubs want to transfer among themselves. That way, it would be easier to work toward a compromise and there would be no $98 million soft payroll ceiling to discourage spending.
"If we could agree on a total transfer number - the total that goes from the clubs that pay to the clubs that receive - that probably would be the single biggest thing we could do" to resolve the current dispute, Fehr said.
The owners believe that only a dramatic change in the way baseball does business will adequately address the industry's economic crisis.
It should come as no great shock that the players union would prefer to avoid any dynamic changes that might threaten the status quo. The union has had the best of the labor relationship since the Messersmith/McNally ruling, thanks to some brilliant early maneuvering by legendary union boss Marvin Miller.
Fehr, a longtime Miller lieutenant, has steered the union to further gains and is understandably reluctant to make major concessions that would erode that progress.
Management types, predictably, think that Fehr is the problem. Even Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks, who gave Rodriguez $252 million less than two years ago, brazenly blasted the union leader before Selig re-imposed a media gag order on his fellow owners last week.
"Don Fehr is so used to winning that what he's missing is that there are a lot of owners who are financially indifferent to whether we play or not," Hicks told reporters. "They're going to lose money if we play and they're going to lose money if we don't play."
There also are dozens of non-economic issues to hammer out during the course of each set of labor negotiations, but only one is going to get any headlines. Ownership has proposed a comprehensive drug-testing program to deal with the troublesome steroid controversy that has surfaced this summer.
The union has long opposed random drug testing on philosophical grounds, but might have to give ground on this issue because of intense public pressure to protect the integrity of the game and rank-and-file support among players for a steroid-testing program.
The situation is further complicated by a pending arbitrator's decision over whether baseball has the right to eliminate two franchises without first bargaining over the ramifications with the union.
Ownership originally targeted the Montreal Expos and Minnesota Twins for contraction, but have since agreed to leave the Twins in place at least through the 2003 season. It is unclear what impact a favorable decision from arbitrator Shyam Das would have on the overall labor situation.
What's next
If there is no significant progress on the core issues over the next two weeks, the union might revisit the possibility of setting a strike date to create a greater sense of urgency in the negotiations.
Union officials know that interrupting the season would do serious harm to the public image of the players, but consider the threat of a strike their only real leverage against the likelihood that ownership will stage a lockout after the World Series.
"It's an uncomfortable thing to do," said Atlanta Braves pitcher Tom Glavine, the National League player representative. "If we can get to an agreement without having to do that, we're all for it. Unfortunately, it's our only source of leverage in negotiations. Talking about a strike date is ultimately about getting an agreement. That's what we want to do ... get an agreement."
In 1994, with ownership pushing for a hard salary cap, the players went on strike in mid-August and did not return until the next spring.
Fans did find their way back to the ballpark after the work stoppage, but public discontent over the cancellation of the World Series lingered long enough to put a large dent in attendance over the next few years.
That fan frustration is bubbling up again in the form of numerous advocacy groups who are calling on fans to exercise their economic power to influence both sides of the labor dispute.
"After 1994, which is still fresh in people's minds, most fans are stunned that we are back in this place again," said Heather Holdridge, manager of TakeBackBaseball.com. "It's deja vu all over again. We're moving toward the same scenario as '94. The only difference is that the numbers have gotten bigger."
Holdridge said the number of outraged fans also will be larger this time, partly because of their inability to identify with the "millionaires and billionaires" who are fighting over baseball and partly because of the enhanced ability of fan advocacy groups to interact and coordinate their efforts on the Internet.
"It's obvious that there's a lot of anger going toward both sides," Holdridge said. "We started a 'Dump Bud' campaign, and a lot of people contacted us and said, 'What about Don Fehr?' I don't think the fans trust any of them to take care of the game."
Baseball bounced back thanks to Cal Ripken's uplifting assault on Lou Gehrig's consecutive-games record in 1995, the rise of a new Yankees dynasty and the terrific home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 1998.
No one seriously expects to be so fortunate if the mistakes of 1994-95 are repeated.
"We were really lucky the last time," Selig said recently. "That night of Sept. 6, 1995, in Baltimore was storybook. Sammy and Mark, it was remarkable. People have asked me ... do you think you came back too fast and both sides are now deluded by that? That's a very fair question. I don't think so. I think we all understand what's at stake here."