Bud Selig's buddies
Even good writers are doing bad stories on the issues behind the looming baseball strike. Why is the media peddling the owners' line?
By Allen Barra
July 18, 2002 | I've been covering sports business -- which by definition means mostly baseball business -- for 22 years now. There have been times when I've been amused, surprised, peeved and angered by the coverage of labor problems in the sports press, but 2002 is the first time I've ever felt disgusted. A collective insanity seems to have spread into nearly every corner of sports media, and in some of those corners -- I'm thinking of talk radio as typified by the hosts on WFAN -- it's a form of hysteria.
As I write this, it looks very much as if Major League Baseball is going to have another strike. In point of fact, it has been looking this way for more than two years, or ever since commissioner Bud Selig came up with the idea for a "Blue Ribbon Panel" to evaluate baseball's economic situation. That was the first sign that Selig was planning a war, and the panel actually had some limited success in winning over the press and public. Even the New York Times supported its conclusions in an editorial. Amazingly, no one in the press seemed to notice that the panel contained not a single representative of the Players Association or even of the Society for American Baseball Research, SABR, the organization that baseball trusts with its Hall of Fame research.
Why was SABR excluded? "Because," says Doug Pappas, editor of Between the Lines, the SABR newsletter, "Selig knew very well that our figures (about the economic state of Major League Baseball) weren't going to jive with their figures."
The figures that Selig has been tossing around are in fact believed by almost no one, but the constant and dire predictions of economic disaster, always just around the corner, have been enough to stir a significant portion of the press and public into a heated backlash against the players and the Players Association. Worst of all have been the chorus of "A plague on both your houses!" comments from veteran sportswriters like Sports Illustrated's Frank DeFord and the Washington Post's Tom Boswell, writers who have all been around long enough to put the issues in perspective but who prefer to take the easy way out by fanning the flames of fan anger and resentment.
What are the issues involved in this year's labor problems? Exactly the same ones that have been involved in every work stoppage since 1972. And every single one of those stoppages was preceded by the owners' making new demands of the players -- demands that would restrict their hard-won right to free agency -- while the players were prepared to accept the status quo.
Please read that sentence again carefully before proceeding. Got it? OK.
The next logical question would be: Why do these things keep happening in baseball? And the answer is, They keep happening because the baseball owners remain exempted from antitrust laws, which means, in practical terms, that unlike management in other labor discussions, the baseball owners don't have to actually negotiate. They can simply stall, stall, stall, finally declare an impasse, and try to impose their own conditions on the players. This got them in trouble with the National Labor Relations Board in 1994, but it's a Republican administration with an unproven court this time around, so Selig feels he has nothing to lose by testing it.
Now, let's review the issues involved and see how the media has gone about dropping the ball on each one. Here are the four biggest points of contention in ascending order of importance:
1. Drug testing. This is also a phony issue, and it's no secret that it has exploded into a public issue at the same time the owners are putting pressure on the Players Association. The owners have every reason to want to clamp down on drugs like cocaine, which devalue their property, the players; they have no strong desire to see performance-enhancing drugs banned so long as the players who are using them are helping them to sell tickets. Does anyone really think that, say, the owners of the San Francisco Giants want to have their star slugger tested at random and then suspended for using steroids just before say, the start of the playoffs?
Drugs are a potentially big issue, and one that has to be taken seriously by both labor and management. If there was not threat of a strike, it would probably be allowed to grow into the major issue in baseball. But there isn't the slightest sign that the owners regard steroid testing as an issue worth going to the barricades for. There are many reasonable ways to approach the subject of steroid testing, and the owners haven't tried any of them. For the time being, we can reasonably assume that this is simply something with which they hope to distract the Players Association at a crucial moment.