Still Upset About the Labor Dispute? Welcome the
Villains to Fenway
June’s first homestand gives Sox fans an extra reason to
pull for the home team. The Red Sox will host the Brewers and the
White Sox, the two clubs owned by the villains of the 1994-95
labor dispute.
Everyone knows Milwaukee owner Bud Selig, Acting Commissioner for
Life since the 1992 coup which ousted Fay Vincent. Selig has now
governed baseball longer than three of the eight
“real” Commissioners, holding the owners together as
they collectively drove Major League Baseball off a cliff. In
several Washington appearances, Selig alienated Congress to the
point that Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont accused him of trying to
“mislead the Senate” by giving “testimony that
turned out not to be true,” and conservative Utah Senator
Orrin Hatch said, “I am fast becoming convinced that a
majority of the owners are trying to break the Players’
Association.”
But while Selig gets most of the bad press, White Sox owner Jerry
Reinsdorf has actually done more to destroy the game. However
wrongheaded he might be on the specifics, Selig does what he
thinks is best because he genuinely loves the Brewers, his home
town of Milwaukee, and baseball. Reinsdorf, on the other hand,
loves nothing more than his own bank account.
For example, rather than threatening to move the Brewers from
Milwaukee, one of baseball’s smallest markets, Selig agreed
to contribute $90 million toward the $250 million cost of a new
stadium. Reinsdorf told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel,
“It’s absurd that he’s putting up that kind of
money.” Reinsdorf added, “Selig’s too nice a
guy. He doesn’t like to play hardball, but that’s the
only game you can play with politicians.”
No one’s likely to call Reinsdorf “too nice a
guy.” In 1988, when the White Sox wanted a new park, he
issued an ultimatum to the State of Illinois: build him a new
$150 million stadium with tax dollars or he’d move the team
to Tampa/St. Petersburg. New Comiskey Park was built with $10
million/year in direct payments from the city and state, plus the
proceeds from a special 2% tax on all hotel and motel rooms in
Chicago. Thanks to the taxpayers’ generosity, Reinsdorf now
pockets an extra $10 million per season from New Comiskey’s
luxury boxes.
While orchestrating Fay Vincent’s ouster in 1992, Reinsdorf
set the tone for the upcoming labor negotiations. “You do
it by taking a position and telling them we’re not going to
play until we make a deal, and being prepared not to play one or
two years if you have to.”
That really worked well, didn’t it? Especially when
Major League Baseball’s bargaining position -- demanding
that the players refuse to accept the high salaries owners freely
offered them -- was so contrary to the basic principles of a
market economy that even George Will and Rush Limbaugh sided with
the players. For Reinsdorf, a true throwback to the 19th-century
robber barons, government, taxpayers, and employees alike are
mere tools to be manipulated in the single-minded pursuit of
profit.
Perhaps the best summary of the Selig/Reinsdorf era came from new
Hall of Famer Jim Bunning, now a Republican Congressman from
Kentucky. Proposing to repeal Organized Baseball’s
antitrust exemption, Bunning observed: “Major League
baseball operates as a cartel in classic monopoly fashion. The
owners, not market forces, dictate how the supply of its product
will be allocated. The antitrust exemption shields major league
baseball from market forces and makes competition impossible. . .
. Baseball has a problem because the owners have been unable to
reach agreement on how to share revenues between small market
teams and large market treams. But, instead of hammering out an
agreement, they are now trying to arbitrarily impose a salary cap
on the players to force the players to solve the owners’
problem for them.”
But is there a problem? Is Major League Baseball teetering
on the edge of financial ruin? Are small-market teams unable to
compete? I’ll address these issues next month.
Copyright © 1996 Doug Pappas. All rights
reserved.
Originally published in the June 1996 issue of Boston
Baseball.
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