For a while there, it seemed that there still was some life and sense left in baseball.
Though disenchanted fans continued to stay away in droves during the regular season, the sport staged a series of riveting games in the postseason playoffs, capped by a World Series in which its centerpiece team–the New York Yankees–returned to its past championship glory and a monster ticker-tape parade.
If the World Series television ratings weren’t exactly blockbuster compared to previous standards, they were good enough to dominate everything else on television during the Series–in fact capturing the top four spots in the Nielsen ratings for the week.
And for good measure, the owners and players, after three years of strife, at last had a labor agreement ready for ratification and celebration–painstakingly worked out in months of talks and compromise between management negotiator Randy Levine and players’ union chief Donald Fehr.
But baseball is nothing if not self-destructive, a fact demonstrated anew in the owners’ overwhelming rejection of the agreement. In so doing, they not only repudiated Levine’s work but made clear again what they think of the fans who are the game’s bedrock.
The owners aren’t saying precisely what they don’t like about the agreement, and it really doesn’t matter; the perennial conflict over who gets the biggest share of baseball revenue is complex almost beyond understanding, and the fans don’t really care.
They do care about having some long-term guarantee of labor peace, and this agreement would have assured it at least through the year 2000. Without it, there is little chance that the game will regain the trust it squandered with the players’ strike that wiped out the end of the 1994 season and World Series.
The owners, through still-acting Commissioner Bud Selig, did say that “there is substantial agreement on the vast majority of issues.” If that is so, it raises the obvious question of why there is no agreement.
All it would take, the owners suggested, would be some “clarifications and modifications” from the union. In other words, reopen talks that already have gone on too long with a union that already believes it has compromised enough. As one owner-insider put it: These guys could win 3-2, but they want it to be 5-0.
There is no telling where this will lead; without a settlement soon, an experiment in interleague play for the 1997 season is almost certainly doomed. And though it is not likely, if the season begins without a contract, there could be another strike or a lockout by the owners–a certain death knell for the game.
The only thing that is certain is that when baseball had the chance to begin restoring some of its past glory, it dropped the ball again.
