Price of peace?

Despite agreement, baseball is still an unbalanced industry

A "historic moment" it may be, this baseball settlement, but only in the sense of the guy who says it feels so good ... after he stops banging his own head against the wall.

Whether it will be a meaningful moment we won't know for awhile, because the issue that mattered most, the competitiveness of baseball, is something that cannot be determined except over time. Me, I'm dubious. I'm just not sure that the field was leveled sufficiently to allow smaller-market teams to have a real chance to compete with the clubs in cities that have significantly larger cable television deals.

The first hint that this deal is successful would be if somebody steps up in the next few months and bids for a franchise that is for sale now. That will tell us that a person with real money is betting this labor agreement really did create a better future for ownership. If nobody buys a team, then I'm not buying the deal.

But we should at least be thankful for small favors: The settlement is better than a strike. A work stoppage would have surely resulted in approximately the same deal -- but only after everybody got hurt and more fans were driven away. Baseball fans are still mad that their emotions were toyed with so cruelly, but I suspect they'll get over it quickly enough now that the games will go on and divert us.

However, two things we can be dead sure of:

1) The biggest loser of all is Peter Angelos, the owner of the Baltimore Orioles. With the owners' promise not to contract, Major League Baseball has to find a new foster home for the Montreal Expos. The most favored site is the Virginia suburbs around Washington (all the more so now that poor Washington is smarting after losing its Olympic bid). The Washington-Baltimore area is just about the same size as the San Francisco-Oakland area, which has never been able to support two profitable franchises. Why should the Chesapeake Bay region be any different from the San Francisco Bay? The Expos' likely move to Washington will thus neatly create two weak franchises where previously there was one weak and one strong.

2) The biggest winner is your friendly major league steroid salesman. The protracted financial negotiations neatly masked the owners' hasty approval of the players' shameful drug plan, which is a travesty unlike any other in the whole sports universe. Baseball remains an absolute pariah in the sincere battle against doping that every other sports entity, the world over, is fighting.

But sometimes the price of peace is expediency. Let us hope that the people and the press will now let the players know how much we disapprove of their cute little dance with performance-enhancing drugs.

And after being so excoriated for so long, Bud Selig deserves a cheer here. Oh, let's say one chorus of Fanfare For The Common Man. Give the commissioner credit. Selig is not particularly articulate but, evidently, all his whining did help convince most of the public that baseball really was in dire financial straits. And the public clearly turned against the players, pressuring them more than they have been in the past.

Realistically, though, it was the state of the union more than the state of the game that forced the players off their ideological high horse. What if the anniversary of Sept. 11 had not been looming? What if we weren't going through trying economic times? Would there still have been a settlement?

We'll never know, but the possibility should allow us to rein in our fondest hopes. Baseball has achieved no more than peace for a time, not peace in our times. If the industry remains as unbalanced as it was before this settlement, Selig's successor as commissioner is going to be presented with just as difficult a task when he takes office in 2006. (And, please, can the owners find somebody besides another owner to take the office the next time?)

Sports Illustrated senior contributing editor Frank Deford's latest novel, "An American Summer" (Sourcebooks Trade), is available now at bookstores everywhere.

 

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