What baseball needs to do now
A few modest proposals to prevent the game from squandering whatever fan goodwill remains.
By King Kaufman
Aug. 31, 2002 | So there won't be a baseball strike. This is unqualified good news. No games were missed, and even better than that, we won't have to hear for a while about labor negotiations, which are boring when they're about your own industry, stultifying when they're about someone else's.
But before we just go back to being regular old fans, dumb and happy, our attractive foreheads unlined by worry about anything other than what's happening on the diamond, let's stop to consider what baseball has to do to fix itself. We don't know all the details of the deal, which still has to be ratified by both the clubs and the players association, but we know enough to know that the mere fact of it, as the lawyers who have been getting way too much ESPN airtime lately might say, doesn't solve baseball's problems.
Baseball continues to have serious issues. Attendance is down and the customers who remain are fuming over a number of things, not the least of which is the game's seeming indifference to them beyond the green stuff that comes out of their wallets.
Here's what baseball has to do over the next four years, when the collective bargaining agreement reached Friday expires:
Owners and players must become partners: This old-school labor-management divide has got to go. The players are no longer exploited workers. They're successful capitalists, which is why they so often sound like management ("Let the free market rule!") during labor negotiations. The owners are capitalists too. They should put aside their outmoded employer-employee roles and realize that they're all on the same side -- the side that collects money from fans and then divides it up.
And what do successful partners do? They tell each other the truth, share information, work for the common good. The owners should open the books to the players -- the real books, not the ones that have all the accounting tricks that show that, say, the Chicago Cubs, who are owned by the Tribune Company, make $27 and a box of coffee mugs each year by selling their games to WGN television, also owned by Tribune Co.
Baseball's a private business. Much as I'd like to see the books, the owners shouldn't have to show them to me or to you or to grandstanding members of Congress. But they should open them up to the players, say, "Look, here's how much money there is. Now, let's figure out how to run this game right."
Open-book management is the only way players will ever trust owners, who have been claiming for more than a century that whatever proposal is on the table will bankrupt the game, and have always been either wrong or exposed as liars. The players won't have to worry that a proposal the owners claim is meant to solve a problem such as competitive imbalance isn't really an attempt to cut into the players' share of the profits, which is to say salaries. Players believe the owners are lying now about the poor financial health of baseball and of individual teams. They're justified in thinking this. That mistrust goes away when the books are opened up.
Fix the game's image: As if there weren't enough to dislike about baseball -- the high prices, the surliness of the players, the inability or unwillingness of some clubs to put a decent team on the field, the designated hitter rule -- Major League Baseball, the company, has for several years been on what has to be the most bizarre and disastrous public relations campaign in the history of American commerce. "Our product stinks!" we've been told. "The game is sick! Your home team has no chance!"
The obvious first step, now that the immediate reason behind this campaign, an attempt to get a better deal from the players, has gone away, is to get some new marketing people. I'm no expert at these things, but I have picked up over the years that one of the better ways to sell your product is to talk about how good it is, not how bad it is.
But baseball has to do more than just stop whining. It has to lose the incredible tin ear it's developed when it comes to the wants and needs of the customers. It has to empathize with the fans, act like it knows how fans think.
The best way to do that would be to get rid of Bud Selig. There are those who say that he's a tenacious backroom guy who gets things done, that he gets a bad rap because he lacks charisma on television. But it's much more than that. Even putting aside the issue that the commissioner of baseball should be a neutral, statesmanlike figure with the best interests of the game in mind, rather than a representative of the owners, Selig is bad for the game precisely because he comes across so poorly. He simply doesn't understand what fans want to see and hear. That came through in his bungling at the All-Star Game and it came through again Friday at the press conference announcing the settlement.
