Now You See Them, Now You Don't

The major league baseball players throw a knuckle ball

There was a strange stillness . . .It was a spring without voices . . . only silence lay over the fields . . .

Rachel Carson, The Silent Spring

For baseball fans, the thought of springtime without the national pastime was at least as shocking as Rachel Carson's ghostly 1962 musing about environmental death in the season of new life. Spring without the crack of the bat, the call of the ump, the roar of the crowd! Only the players, of all people, shouting "St-e-e-rike!"

Such was the prospect as the end of spring training approached with no new contract between the Major League Players Association and the 26 teams' owners. But then the players' representatives decided to throw the owners not a strike, but a knuckle ball. They voted to 1) skip the remaining exhibition games but 2) open the regular season on time this week and 3) take their walk on May 22, the eve of the Memorial Day weekend, if a new contract is not signed by then.

The off-again, on-again decision gives the players a chance to pick up a few paychecks and some more time to iron out their differences with the owners. It is also fairly savvy, wiping out some exhibition games that do not benefit the players (they are paid only from the start of the regular season) and threatening to stop play only when the crowds start coming around Memorial Day. Said the New York Yankees' Reggie Jackson: "We wanted to try to take some money from the war chest the clubs have been stockpiling." Indeed, the baseball owners demonstrated little faith in the negotiations: they had built up a strike kitty and taken out strike insurance paying them around $1 million a day.

At issue is nothing so mundane as money but rather the future of the free-agent system that has evolved since 1975, when baseball's age-old reserve clause was struck down. Under the court ruling, players could become free agents whenever they played out their options, and the teams they left were not entitled to compensation from the team they moved to. The next year, the players agreed to soften the blow to the owners: they signed a contract that called for a minimum of six years with a team before ballplayers could declare themselves free agents, and each club signing a player had to grant his old team a pick in the amateur draft.

But the owners, in their quest for free-agent talent, pushed salaries to dizzying heights; former California Angels Pitcher Nolan Ryan, for instance, was signed last winter by the Houston Astros for $1 million-plus a year. So now the proprietors are seeking to cool the competition for stars: they have proposed that a club that signs a highly sought-after free agent must allow his former team to take one of its players in return.

The players say this would crimp their prospects on the free-agent market. Certainly the need to surrender proven quality in exchange for open market talent would inhibit many acquisitive owners. But Players Association Executive Director Marvin Miller insists that the game has benefited from interest in high-priced stars. Says Miller: "In the years since free agency, baseball has set four straight records for attendance, gate receipts and TV revenues. Now they say we have to agree to go backward."

The fans, for their part, probably have an equal lack of sympathy for the owners and the players, whose salaries (average this year: $121,900) seem stratospheric even in an age of rampant inflation. In the spring, they have only one nonnegotiable demand: Play ball!

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