Baseball: A Win for the Fans

They toil at a summer's game in sweatshops that are green and airy. The rank-and-filer earns an average of $363,000 a year, not counting shaving-cream endorsements. A major-league baseball player is hardly your typical working stiff.

No wonder, then, that the fans were loudly unsympathetic when the athletes' union went on strike last week. "The players are greedy," groused St. Louis Cardinal Rooter Greg Errion. "They have no regard for the fans. It's 'What can I get for me today?' The luster of ballplayers as American heroes has dulled." Nor did the fans feel very sorry for the owners, who, despite their poor-mouthing, toss about millions of dollars, largely, it sometimes seems, for the privilege of hanging about their employees' locker room.

Perhaps it was the boos and catcalls that made the players and the owners settle so quickly. Or the coolly persuasive presence of Peter Ueberroth, the former Olympic czar turned baseball commissioner, who publicly positioned himself as the fans' representative. Or the sheer cost of the walkout: on average, $2,000 a day in salary per athlete, $1.17 million a day in revenue per owner. In any case, the players had barely finished packing up their gloves and blow-dryers to head home last week when word filtered out that the strike was over. By Thursday, two days after the lights had gone out at ball parks across the country, the cracking bats and beery roar of major-league baseball again filled the muggy August air. Boston Bartender Michael Shain approved. "People don't want to read about contract and salary disputes in the sports section," said Shain, who manages the Batter's Box near Fenway Park. "It was the one place in the paper where those things could be avoided."

Though the strike was fought over such accountants' terrain as TV-revenue shares and profit-loss sheets, the real issue was the shifting balance of power between the players and the owners. For about a century the players were professional gladiators, glorified by the fans and the press, to be sure, but held in bondage by the owners. Until the early '70s, players had little alternative to taking what was offered except to become a holdout. Salaries were relatively low, even for established stars. In 1954 M.V.P. Willie Mays earned $25,000, about the equivalent of what a utility infielder makes in today's dollars.

Then in 1973 players won the right to submit salary disputes to an independent arbitrator. The arbitrator was compelled to choose either the club's offer or the player's demand, and salaries inevitably rose. True deliverance came two years later, when players won freedom from the so-called reserve clause that tied them to one team for as long as the owner wanted them. Now players with six years' experience could in a sense sell themselves to the highest bidder. The combination of arbitration and free agency sent salaries spiraling sevenfold in less than a decade, from an average of $44,000 in 1975 to more than $360,000 this year.

The clubs' annual revenues in the same period only quadrupled (to $624 million), and as the talks got under way nine months ago, owners began pleading that they could not afford the salary race. Forecasting losses of $90 million a year by 1988 and warning that major-league baseball was in jeopardy, they demanded that the players follow the example of the once fiscally battered National Basketball Association and establish a cap on salaries.