The Last Great Season

By WALTER SHAPIRO PORT CHARLOTTE

THE STORM CLOUDS HAD PASSED OVER, leaving behind a cool, clear Florida evening, a perfect night for the grandest spectacle that baseball could offer: Nolan Ryan pitching in a spring-training ball park so intimate that there are no bad seats. Ryan, "the Wizard of Whiff," 46 years young (Bill Clinton's junior by five months), was dazzling against the New York Yankees on this mid- March evening. For the 5,000 lucky fans, all that mattered was the explosive pop of Ryan's fastball into the glove of Texas Ranger catcher Ivan Rodriguez. During his five-inning stint, Ryan (he of the record seven no- hitters) flirted with perfection: four strikeouts, no walks and only a dinky two-strike single to mar the ledger.

Afterward, in the Ranger locker room, his medical-marvel right arm wrapped in an ice pack, Ryan grew pensive. What bothered him, as he looked ahead to his record 27th and, alas, final big-league season, was not the intimations of his own baseball mortality but rather the odd sensation of pitching to five- time batting champion Wade Boggs in a Yankee uniform. For 11 seasons, Boggs was as much a part of the Boston Red Sox as the fabled Green Monster wall in Fenway Park's left field. Now he had changed to pinstripes (part of the off- season free-agent frenzy in which 91 veteran players shifted teams), and it troubled an old-school ballplayer like Ryan. "It's just a sign of the times," he said. "We grew up expecting a major-league team to protect its nucleus and be pretty much the same from year to year. It's not that way anymore."

Ryan's lament can serve as the one-sentence epitaph for major-league baseball: it's not the way it was growing up. Slowly but surely, this most memory-laden of sports, this pastoral isle in a world of flux, is being ripped from its traditional foundations. Watching his World Champion Blue Jays take batting practice, Toronto manager Cito Gaston mused about the eight free agents his team did not re-sign in the off-season, including future Hall of Famer Dave Winfield. "What disappoints me is all the guys who won't be there on opening day to get their World Series rings," Gaston said. "It's just the business side of baseball."

This week, as the cry "Play ball!" heralds America's ode to spring, how tempting it is to avert our eyes from the business side of baseball. How we want to believe the game on the field is what counts, not the internal problems of a $1.6 billion entertainment industry.

Cherish the moment, bleacher bums, for this April's budding of baseball may be our final frolic in the sun. Next year there might not be baseball at all, if the owners stick to their resolve not to open the spring-training camps unless the players agree to hold the line on salaries. Already the game has lost its supreme arbiter; for the first time since 1921, a season will open with no commissioner of baseball or heir apparent. In the counting houses off the field, schemes are being hatched to transform the leisurely unfolding of the 162-game season into a juiced-up MTV video, complete with expanded play- offs, wild-card teams, Monday-night interleague contests and heedless expansion certain to dilute the quality of the game. Traditionalists may look back on 1993 with nostalgia as the last old-fashioned baseball season.

Most fans believe the threat to the game is purely economic: in no other corner of America is the dictum so widely held that money is the root of all evil. Richard Ravitch, the labor negotiator for the owners, loudly claims that 18 teams lost money last year. What is certain is that 300 of the 700 players on big-league rosters this season will earn more than $1 million each. Barry Bonds, the National League's Most Valuable Player, deserted the Pittsburgh Pirates in the off-season for greener pastures -- a record $43.75 million, six-year contract with the San Francisco Giants, a second-division club that reportedly lost $10 million in 1992 and almost left town.

Bonds earning about $40,000 a game? How can the Giants afford that? As Peter Magowan, the Giants' new managing partner, tells it, signing Bonds was a prudent move. "We had three guys playing left field last year at $2.5 million," he explains. "People keep talking about $43 million for Bonds, but he's getting less than the $7 million average during the first year. You throw in 150,000 more fans, and that's $1.5 million off that cost. And we have a much better team." This kind of baseball economics makes as much sense as Ronald Reagan's promise to balance the budget by cutting taxes and increasing defense spending.

Asked about his grand-slam salary, the mercurial Bonds immediately compared himself to the National Basketball Association's rookie marketing sensation. "I love Shaquille O'Neal to death," Bonds said. "He makes $40 million, and I don't hear nobody tripping. I'll be the first to say he deserves it. But I've been putting in my time. I have to win two MVP trophies. And now people say, 'You ain't this; you ain't that.' I mean, what do I have to accomplish?"

How easy it is to depict baseball as a simpleminded rogues' gallery of ego- driven owners and selfish superstars. In fact, Bonds' salary is not out of whack, especially compared with that of a journeyman shortstop like Spike Owen (lifetime batting average .243), who signed a three-year, $7 million contract with the Yankees.

Baseball is indeed facing a grave crisis, but it is primarily political and not economic in nature -- a question of governance and power relations rather than the law of supply and demand run amuck. The vacant office of the commissioner of baseball symbolizes the void at the center of the game; the post has remained unfilled since a majority of owners forced the resignation of Fay Vincent last September. Vincent's so-called sins included his prickly independence and his determination to use his powers to act "in the best interests of baseball" and his aborted attempt to limit the freedom of TV superstations, which control the lucrative Chicago Cub and Atlanta Brave franchises.

Bud Selig, the affable car dealer who owns the Milwaukee Brewers, has been serving as de facto commissioner since September. "We'll have a commissioner," Selig insists. "We have a search committee in progress. But it's hard to say when." A shrewd guess is not until there is a new baseball labor agreement. The owners fear that a new commissioner -- no matter how limited his formal mandate -- would try to avert a spring-training lockout in 1994 as Vincent did in 1980. "The owners have decided that they get along better without a commissioner," theorizes the unrepentant Vincent. "Any commissioner with any strength is going to cause trouble for them." Fans view a charismatic commissioner, like the late Bart Giamatti, as their tribune, the only person in the game who stands for something more than economic self- interest. But many owners just don't get it. Carl Pohlad, owner of the Minnesota Twins, asks with puzzlement, "Why does finding a commissioner get more public attention than choosing the chairman of IBM?"

Now that the season has begun, these backstairs, off-the-field maneuvers have scant fascination for the fans. What matters to them is the pressing issues of the day:

-- Can the star-crossed Cleveland Indians, a young team that has not won a pennant since 1954, recover from the tragic death of two pitchers in a late- March boating accident? (Yes, if there is any justice in the game.)

-- Will George Steinbrenner, returning like Banquo's Ghost from a two-year suspension as Boss of the Yankees, fire manager Buck Showalter the first time the team hits a two-game losing streak? (Absolutely not. Showalter is safe unless the Yankees lose three straight games.)

-- Have the Blue Jays lost too much starting pitching to repeat as World Champions? (Yes, the Baltimore Orioles will edge them out in the American League East.)

-- Are the new National League expansion franchises, the Colorado Rockies and the Florida Marlins, as hapless as the 1962 New York Mets? (Not unless the Rockies persuade Marvelous Marv Throneberry to make a comeback.)

-- Is Bo Jackson's epic recovery from hip-replacement surgery for real? (That Bo can play at all is a miracle, but it is still sad to see him as just another slow slugger without a defensive position.)

-- Is this the year for young stars like St. Louis Cardinals centerfielder Ray Lankford and Blue Jays second baseman Roberto Alomar? (Yes, mark them down as smart-money candidates for MVP.)

But the real on-the-field question is rooted in the political structure of the game: Can baseball survive the growing imbalance between the rich clubs and their poor, small-market cousins? Ravitch is not far from the mark when he warns, "Baseball is getting like Latin America. We'll have rich and poor and no middle class." Already there are signs that the traditional strength of baseball, the competitiveness among rival teams, is in serious jeopardy.

Ability to pay for talent is a surprisingly difficult issue to analyze because the balance sheets of individual teams are as closely guarded as the intricacies of the CIA budget. Moreover, the ego rewards of owning a winning ball team dwarf the psychic payoffs from traditional business. Henry Aaron -- not the slugger but the Brookings Institution economist -- recently chaired a joint labor-management study commission that examined the finances of baseball. But even Aaron is uncertain whether teams are actually losing the money they claim. "I would like to know who owns the law firm that does the work for a team. I'm wondering whether some teams have sweetheart deals with some TV contracts," he said. "But I can't be very specific. No one, including me, spent as much time delving into the details as the subject warrants."

Owners have been pleading poverty since Babe Ruth was hitting home runs for a Baltimore, Maryland, orphanage. The owners wailed that the sky was falling back in 1976, when the Major League Players Association -- then and now the most powerful union in sports -- first won the right for its members to become free agents and sell their services to the highest bidder after six years in the majors. But instead of all the stars flocking to New York City and Los Angeles, the law of unintended consequences prevailed: no World Champion has repeated since the 1977-78 Yankees.

Logic argues that, sooner or later, player salaries have to eclipse revenues for small-market clubs. In the past decade, baseball salaries have escalated nearly as fast as inflation in Russia. The going rate to re-sign superstars who anchor a franchise (Kirby Puckett with the Minnesota Twins, Cal Ripken with the Orioles) has doubled in the past two years, from $3 million to $6 million a season. Up until now, most owners have managed to keep ahead of their exploding payrolls thanks to ever rising franchise values, a threefold leap in marketing revenues, a 25% jump in ball-park attendance since 1983, and most of all, the golden-goose $1.1 billion national-television deal that baseball signed with CBS in 1989.

But the money-losing CBS contract expires after this season, as does a $400 million cable deal with ESPN. "Baseball is spending money that it's not going to have," warns a sports-broadcasting executive. Bill Giles, president and general partner of the Philadelphia Phillies and chairman of the owners' television committee, reckons that the new TV agreement to be negotiated this summer will bring in around $200 million a year (about $6 million per club) rather than the current $400 million. Small wonder that, facing a $7 million- per-team shortfall, some teams appear to be feeling the pinch.

The Pittsburgh Pirates' spring-training camp in Bradenton, Florida, should have been alive with the bristling confidence of a pennant contender. After all, the black-capped Pirates have won more games than any other team in the 1990s and, in Sisyphean fashion, came within one agonizing out of making it to last year's World Series. Instead, leaning against the batting cage, Pirate manager Jim Leyland talked bravely about "looking forward to the new challenge of putting this team together." The sad truth is that the proud Pirates have been decimated by the exodus of free agents.

"We're the classic small-market team," said Ted Simmons, the club's adroit general manager. "Take these four names -- Bobby Bonilla, $29 million; John Smiley, $18 million; Doug Drabek, $19 million; and Barry Bonds, $43 million. It would have added up to almost $110 million to keep them. We couldn't do it." So these days, Bonilla is a Met; Smiley hurls for the Cincinnati Reds; Drabek has jumped to his hometown team, the Houston Astros; and Bonds is a Giant, in both team and contract size. But don't hang the skull and crossbones at half-staff for the Pirates quite yet. "No one or two players can replace Bonds or Drabek," Simmons conceded. "But 25 men can. Baseball history is replete with the truth that this is a team sport."

This David-vs.-Goliath struggle is part of the enduring charm of the game. Most fans, other than hometown fanatics, enjoyed last season's spectacle of wealthy clubs like the Dodgers and the Red Sox finishing in last place in their divisions with lineups filled with high-price, low-performance malcontents. A small-market club, the Twins, won the World Series in 1987 and 1991. But the architect who built these championship teams, the Twins' boyish general manager, Andy MacPhail, is worried that Minnesota will be hard pressed to compete in the future, even though it just re-signed Kirby Puckett to a $30 million, five-year contract. "The new development," MacPhail warned, "is that large-market teams like Atlanta and Toronto now have both the revenue and the ability to spend it well."

These issues are prelude to the coming baseball labor negotiations -- a titanic clash in a sport that has already endured a season-crippling player strike (1981) and three owner lockouts (1972, 1976 and 1990). The owners, under the leadership of Ravitch, claim to be determined as never before. Their proposal, likely to be formally offered around the time of the World Series, combines the carrot of enhanced revenue-sharing among rich and poor clubs (currently the Yankees' local TV contract is worth 20 times as much as the Seattle Mariners') with the fearsome stick of team salary caps. The probable result: small-market teams like the Pirates could afford to sign more free agents, but the salary cap would likely mean that overall player salaries would be frozen at something near current levels. "Partnership" is the new owner buzzword, for as Selig puts it, "We need to have a mature and reasoned partnership with the players."

There is only one problem with the idea: it is anathema to the Players Association. There are hints that the union might be willing to negotiate away salary arbitration (a jury-rigged system for setting the compensation of younger players that is a major cause of payroll inflation) in exchange for, say, free agency after four rather than six years. But the Players Association refuses to believe that a reduced national-TV contract justifies givebacks, contending that the owners have just kept on spending in the face of this long-anticipated drop in revenues. "If the Chicago White Sox are unwilling to give money to the Milwaukee Brewers," argues Don Fehr, the union president, "it suggests either that the owners don't consider this a serious problem or else they want the players to solve it for them."

With positions hardening on both sides before the bargaining even begins, only a true optimist (like a long-suffering Cubs or Indians fan) would plan on attending many games during the imperiled 1994 season. But what lies ahead for 1995 is even more ominous for baseball traditionalists: the owners seem determined to cheapen postseason play by doubling the number of play-off teams.

The plan, backed by a lopsided 27-1 straw vote at the most recent owners' meeting, would split each of the two 14-club leagues into three rather than the current two divisions. A second tier of play-offs would be created by also vaulting the second-place club with the best record (the wild-card team, terminology borrowed from pro football) into postseason play. "Fans are looking for an opportunity for their teams to be winners more often than they are now," contends John Harrington, president of the Red Sox. He piously insists that the owners "are not doing this to increase revenue," but there is only one other likely justification for so debasing the play-offs. The Red Sox, after all, haven't won a World Series since 1918.

Phillies owner Giles, who heads the TV committee, has a plan to make expanded play-offs and interleague play irresistible to the networks. The play-off games would be played simultaneously and, to boost ratings, aired only on a regional basis. (Guess what, fans, that means you would be unable to watch three-quarters of the play-offs.) Adding allure to the regular-season TV package might be Monday-night interleague games. And the last item on Giles' agenda: "If we go to three divisions," he said, "we'll have to expand to 30 teams."

Expansion is that rare issue that unites labor and management: the union imagines 50 more jobs for fringe major-leaguers, and the owners picture two more syndicates of rich investors anteing up around $100 million each to join the most exclusive club in America. With the new Colorado Rockies likely to draw 4 million fans and the Florida Marlins marketing themselves to the nation's fourth largest state, why not put two more major-league cities (maybe Phoenix and St. Petersburg) on the map by 1996? There's only one problem with this beautiful scenario: virtually no team in baseball except Atlanta can point to five solid starting pitchers. Just ask Detroit Tigers manager Sparky Anderson, who went without a victory in 16 straight spring-training games because his pitching staff resembles that of the Bad News Bears. "Pitching's been thin for so long," he moans, "that I just don't think it can get any thinner. Already you're seeing the thinning of the thin."

As the storm clouds gather beyond the outfield walls, the only consolation is to live for the moment -- to get out to the ball park, to cheer like mad, to savor every game of this last shining season. Fans live on unrealistic hopes, so maybe it isn't an impossible dream for someone -- perhaps a commissioner selected by both the owners and the players -- to save this grand game from its own greed and folly. In the meantime, here's hoping Nolan Ryan finally gets a chance to star in a World Series.

With reporting by Patrick E. Cole/Scottsdale and David E. Thigpen/New York