Loosening Up at Last

For nearly three weeks Florida and Arizona boasted some of the most elegant of America's unemployed. Locked out of their spring-training camps because of a dispute with the baseball club owners, major leaguers were all over the sunny sandlots at loose ends. The Cincinnati Reds' third baseman, Pete Rose, arrived in his Silver Shadow Rolls-Royce to work out at a West Tampa park normally used by Little Leaguers. New York Mets Pitching Ace Tom Seaver cadged $2 each from a pickup team of ballplayers to buy baseballs for early-March makeshift practice sessions. Like a youthful playground gang, a group of Oakland A's slipped through a hole in the fence of their sealed ballpark in Mesa, Ariz., to sneak in a little illegal batting practice.

Finally last week the padlocks came off the ballparks and spring training began. Even though the labor dispute was not resolved, Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn ordered the camps opened because, he said, "the fans are the most important people around, and starting the season on time is what they want." What he did not say was that most of the owners and players want exactly the same thing, since the financial health of all depends on playing ball. The camps will not get into the full swing of exhibition games until this week, and with at least the pitchers needing nearly a month to get their throwing arms into shape, the April 8 scheduled opening of the regular season is perilously close.

The continuing labor impasse was over baseball's reserve clause--the long-rankling method by which owners indenture players to one team in order to recover the cost of developing major leaguers and to protect poorer clubs from being outbid and ultimately destroyed by richer clubs. Last December an arbitrator struck down the system and ruled, on cases brought by Pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally (now retired), that the standard baseball contract's one-year renewal clause was just that and nothing more. A player, he held, would become a free agent after playing for his team without a new contract for one year.

The owners had always interpreted the clause to mean that each year of play mandated an option for the next year, thus adding up to a kind of perpetual renewal. Horrified by the arbitrator's ruling, they went to federal court to challenge it. When the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals turned them down two weeks ago, the owners intensified efforts to right the situation by negotiating with the players a new version of the general baseball contract that guides and supplements the individual contracts the players sign. For the first time abandoning the reserve clause's perpetuity principle, they had proposed that every player be bound to a club for "eight and one"--eight years plus one to play out his option. But Marvin Miller, 58, the shrewd, tough executive director of the players' association, countered that he could not bargain away rights the arbitrator had already granted.

The owners feared chaos in baseball: the mass breakaway of players who as free agents would sell their services to the highest bidders, raising superstar salaries out of sight and tilting the competitive balance of the leagues to the clubs with the most money. Oakland Slugger Reggie Jackson, for one, seemed a super star likely to put himself on the open market. To add fuel to the fears, Los Angeles Dodger Pitcher Andy Messersmith, armed with his December arbitration victory, began entertaining bids last week from at least four teams. Nonetheless, the owners finally "bit the bullet," said American League President Lee MacPhail. At least they chewed on it. Last week in what they called their "final and best offer," they proposed to let present major leaguers play out one-year options on current contracts and become free agents. But each would then be put in a "reentry" pool where only eight of the 24 teams (including his old club if it wished) could bid for his services, with the teams that finished lowest in the previous year's standings allowed first crack at being among the eight.

Who Understood? Then, once this present disorder has been worked through, the owners proposed that all future contracts have a "seven and one" clause that would allow seven-year veterans to demand they be traded or permitted to enter the free-agent pool following the option year. "The nice thing about this," joked Chub Feeney, MacPhail's opposite in the National League, "is that Lee and I are the only ones who understand it." Next day Marvin Miller said he understood it and did not much like it, particularly the interim offer dealing with current contracts. The eight-team limit on bidding still left the players with less than the wide-open auction they had won from the arbitrator's ruling, said Miller, and he remained afraid that the players' association could be sued by individual members if it signed away that legal right. But many of the players were itchy. Player representatives from the teams reportedly voted 17 to 6 not to reject outright the "take it or leave it" offer. They pointed out that parts of the fine print had not even been filled in yet, but indicated that some compromise might be acceptable. Fifteen minutes after the player representatives adjourned in Tampa, Kuhn issued his order to open the camps.

Negotiations will go on, even into the season if necessary. But it is far from clear that an agreement will be easily achieved. Many hard-line owners had not wanted to go even as far as the offer did. Responds St. Louis Cardinal Outfielder Lou Brock: "The owners are afraid to make changes when they know they have to. They are on a string of hope not based on reality." For the moment though, everyone was looking forward to the altogether more enjoyable prospect of getting the game back on the field. Whatever was finally resolved across the bargaining table, it seemed clear that after nearly a century, baseball's perpetual reserve clause would be ejected from the game.

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