Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 25, 1995 TAG: 9506280042
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY CHARLES BENNETT JR.
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"Root, root, root for the home team while the home team roots through your pockets, searching for the treasure it needs to pay $5 million for a pitcher."
Those words were spoken by a baseball fan at Chicago's new Comiskey Park, described by author John Helyar as a baseball emporium for the '90s, designed not only to show the game but also to hawk merchandise and generate revenue to keep pace with player salaries as they spin out of control.
"Lords of the Realm" is not a book about baseball but a book about labor. Labor, and its relationship between management and union, by baseball men who started out hating the whole notion of labor relations. Major league players saw themselves as players, not union members; major league team owners saw themselves in control and detested anyone, especially a union, questioning their authority.
Such was the early equilibrium: benevolent lords and compliant servants. The lords showered praise and perks on the servants - a car, a $100 bill. They earned revenue from gate attendance - not from TV or merchandise. Owners kept the same players year after year unless the owner - not the player - decided otherwise.
Owners could trade or sell players, but players could not move on their own because of a clause in each contract known as the "reserve clause." Owners, free from competitive bidding, paid players only modest salaries (in 1951, average $13,000; highest $100,000). Yet if they paid modestly, they also earned modestly. The Chicago Cubs paid players out of concession revenue, and charged $1 for bleacher seats into the 1970s.
This cozy relationship began to unravel when the players as a group asked for a pension fund. The owners were offended by this affront and refused to cooperate. The issue led to the formation of the Major League Players Association, and to its first leader, Marvin Julian Miller.
Miller had an extensive labor background and was a thorough researcher and union educator. Characteristically, the owners hated him; he was another affront. Miller patiently educated the reluctant players, overcoming their dark suspicions about unions, and rallied the association behind him. Then he helped them win their pension, increasing the fund from $1.5 million to $4.1 million per year, and next, very significantly, pushed the owners to agree to arbitration as a means of resolving union/management disputes, replacing that role by the baseball commissioner.
It was arbitration that ultimately adjudicated and invalidated the "reserve clause." It had provided that a team had the right to the services of a player for the year following his last contract year. Owners and players had historically construed it to mean what it seemed to say: that the player was bound to one team for one year at a time for his whole career unless the team decided not to renew the contract. Miller agreed that the reserve clause gave the team the right to sign the player the year following the last contract year, but argued that if the player played a second year without a contract, he was a free agent - free to choose any team he wished.
Miller waited for a test case and finally found one in 1975: pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally. He submitted their cases to arbitration and won.
What had held the lord and servant equilibrium together for years and years was now gone. The owners fired the arbitrator, but proved powerless to control what Miller had unleashed. In 1975, the average salary was $35,000 and top, $250,000. For 1976, Messersmith received $1 million, and top salaries reached $3.5 million.
Miller offered the owners a limit on free agency partly from recognition that total free agency was unfair to the owners who had spent large amounts developing players through the minor league system, and partly in recognition that free agency was meaningless if all players were free agents (the law of supply and demand would depress salaries). After significant negotiation, including a lockout by the owners, the owners finally offered what Miller had secretly been wanting all along, free agency after six years, and the right to have salaries decided by arbitration after two years.
Since then, interrupted by strikes and lockouts and endless negotiations, salaries have increased relentlessly as owners have shown no ability to resist competitive bids for players. And as salaries rose each year, all boats rose in the rising tide. A new breed of skilled agents quickly became expert in the most recent high salary and its comparison with the next to appear in arbitration or the free agent market.
In "Lords of the Realm," Helyar does not seek or find a solution. Instead, he educates us about the history and the issues. He presents it in painstaking detail and in readable, indeed riveting style.
Next time, next strike, we can still be mad at the players, at the owners; we cannot be mad from ignorance.
Charles Bennett Jr. is a Roanoke lawyer.
by CNB