Last November, Major League Baseball's owners voted 26 to 4 to ratify a labor settlement that their negotiator, Randy Levine, had reached with Donald Fehr, Levine's counterpart with the Players Association. The settlement brought to an end three years of open conflict between Baseball's players and owners that had led to the longest work-stoppage in Baseball history (232 days), including the cancellation of the 1994 World Series.
What Albert G. Spalding, the sporting goods legend and early owner of the National League's Chicago White Stockings (later renamed the Chicago Cubs), once had the honesty to call the "irrepressible conflict between Labor and Capital," had been submerged again.
The Congressional Research Service reported in the winter of 1995 that the salary cap the owners were then proposing would have placed the "greatest share of the cost on players." The cap would have caused the players' share of Baseball's total revenue to decline, from 55 percent in 1994 to 44 percent thereafter, a difference worth some $198 million to the players annually (in 1994 dollars). But only "approximately $38 million would have been transferred to the small revenue clubs via increased revenue sharing to increase competitive balance," the CRS added. "Much of the remaining $160 million presumably would have accrued to the larger-revenue teams (but could not be spent on player salaries [due to restrictions imposed by the salary cap])."
As the CRS report made clear, the salary cap was designed by the big-revenue teams -- such as the New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago clubs -- to reap the biggest cut of the projected $198 million windfall.
It was the threat of this salary cap that forced the Players Association to strike in August, 1994. In fact, it was only the National Labor Relations Board's February, 1995 threat to file unfair labor-practice charges against Baseball's owners that forced them to rescind a salary cap that they had unilaterally imposed on the players two months before. When on March 31, 1995, Manhattan U.S. District Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor issued an injunction against the owners, paving the way for the players' return to the field, the grounds that she cited for her decision were the illegal bargaining tactics of the owners -- not the players, against whom the public's ire nevertheless had been aimed. In an irony that life alone is capable of delivering, there was a 1995 Baseball season -- and there is one this year too -- only because Baseball's owners were caught red-handed in violation of national labor laws.
In his November 27 commentary on the Baseball owners' 26-4 vote to ratify the latest settlement, veteran Chicago Tribune sportswriter and Baseball Hall-of-Famer Jerome Holtzman complained that Players Association executive director Donald Fehr's "portrait of [Chicago White Sox owner Jerry] Reinsdorf as the ogre owner has been strengthened and repeatedly relayed by a dutiful New York press that in the main, sits at Fehr's feet, licking his boots, abhorred at the possibility of an owners' victory." ("Players can thank Reinsdorf for victory," Nov. 27.)
Holtzman was reflecting on the owners' dramatic change of heart towards the settlement, exactly the same deal they had voted by a margin of 18-12 to reject just three weeks earlier. And at least one part of what Holtzman wrote was true: Donald Fehr does regard Jerry Reinsdorf as the most hard-line of Baseball's current crop of owners. But so do a lot of other people
After all, it was Reinsdorf who, upon hearing Baseball's acting commissioner Bud Selig of the Milwaukee Brewers tell the rest of his fellow owners during their November 26 meeting at the O'Hare Hilton that he now "strongly" endorsed the settlement, rose and "delivered a lengthy speech calling for the owners to 'throw down the gauntlet' and pursue confrontation with the players," as the Wall Street Journal reported the day after the owners took their second vote? ("Baseball Pact Is Ratified By Owners," Nov. 27.)
Perhaps then a more accurate conclusion than the one Holtzman drew about the alleged connection between the "New York press" and the famous shine on Donald Fehr's boots would be simply that Fehr has been judicious in his portrait of Reinsdorf, the Ogre of Baseball?
Other questions come to mind. For example: Has the "New York press" (by which it's only fair to take Holtzman to mean the New York Times's sportswriters) really been pining away for the collective humiliation of Baseball's owners?
Well. At least four New York Times sportswriters wrote unflattering material about Jerry Reinsdorf in the month of November 1996 alone. Dave Anderson, Claire Smith, George Vecsey and Murray Chass. But what thisreally a sign of the "New York press's" collective servility before Donald Fehr and the American Labor Movement? Or of the fact that Reinsdorf has done as much as any owner this decade to destroy Major League Baseball?
Reinsdorf has an impressive track record, where militant anti-labor positions are concerned. He has been a leading architect of the conspiracy not to sign free agents in the mid-Eighties; the Spring Training lockout of 1990 (the trial run for 1994); the forced resignation of then-Commissioner Fay Vincent on Labor Day, 1992, and the installation of his puppet, Bud Selig, as acting commissioner shortly thereafter; the owners' illegal bargaining practices over the course of 1994-95; and, ultimately, the decline of Baseball's popularity today. Unquestionably, Major League Baseball would have won a little labor peace for its fans a long time ago, had Jerry Reinsdorf not been so adamantly opposed to it.
More revealing still was New York Times Baseball writer Murray Chass, In Chass's November 3 story about some of the internecine struggles then taking place among the 30 ownership groups that comprise the Baseball cartel, he fingered a mysteriously unnamed Chicago-area sportswriter for helping Reinsdorf plant what Chass called an "attack on [Randy] Levine" in one of the Chicago newspapers.
"In the attack on Levine, in a Chicago paper, unnamed owners called for his dismissal, saying the only reason he would not be fired was that his mother-in-law is a friend of Selig's wife," was how Chass described the smear campaign coming from within the owners' ranks.
"Reinsdorf's hand appeared to be so evident in that attack," Chass continued, "that during a conference call of Major League Baseball's executive council [on Oct. 30], other owners criticized Reinsdorf, a council member, for it." ("A Silent Selig Speaks Volumes About His Take on the Talks," Nov. 3.)
Just three days before, in his "On Baseball" column., Holtzman had quoted an unnamed owner who averred that "Randy's mother-in-law [who's from Milwaukee] is one of Sue Selig's best friends. [Sue is Selig's wife]. What Randy has done is horrendous. Bud is bleeding and very hurt, but there isn't much he can do."
Pretty good smear. In his effort to help Reinsdorf smear Levine, Holtzman went so far as to charge Levine with assisting Donald Fehr in Fehr's effort to smear the owners by "putting a monkey on the owners' back: clearly, they are the ogres," said Holtzman, mocking Fehr and Levine. ("Owners doubt that Levine is the real deal," Chicago Tribune, Oct. 30.)
The verdict is in, sports fans. Throw out Holtzman's defensive nonsense about the "New York press" having sided with the Players Association because of its neo-Marxist sympathies. Just as the New York Times and Donald Fehr have fingered Jerry Reinsdorf the self-seeking, manipulative, power-crazy man that he is, so the Times's Murray Chass fingered Jerome Holtzman what he is.
A stenographer to power.