From the archives: Baseball fans deserve real solution

This article was originally published in Newsday on April 1, 1995

AT THE TOP of 1st Avenue yesterday, five stories high, with stories about baseball players winning a court decision from the owners already in the afternoon papers, there was Ken Griffey Jr. It was one of those Nike advertisements that you see sometimes on the side of a building. There still is one on 42nd Street for Dwight Gooden, Gooden still up there and bigger than life, even though the paint has begun to chip and fade. Griffey looks terrific in Seattle, though, following through on his home-run swing at 1st and Stewart.

And all the way across the ad, they had kept a record of the home runs Griffey hit last season, painting one white line after another, like a picket fence, until you finally got to 40. There was plenty of room for more home runs at 1st and Stewart. There were 50 games to play when the 1994 season ended, so Griffey could have gotten to 50 home runs easily. Maybe he could have gotten to 60.

"You know what I was thinking today," a mailman, who simply gave his name as Paul, was saying yesterday afternoon, staring up at Griffey, high up there above Puget Sound and the whole city of Seattle. "I was thinking about what Griffey would think about someday if he retired with 499 home runs, or 599. What if he has a chance to catch Aaron someday, and gets hurt with 20 home runs to go, and never plays again? I wonder if he is going to want last season back."

The mailman Paul shook his head. "I wonder if any of those guys care about last season as much as we do." He got into his truck, which he had parked on Stewart, and drove away.

Last season is gone forever, for Griffey and everybody else. There is still a chance for this season. The baseball strike should be over already. The owners and the players should have been in a room together yesterday, because they are so close now on all the issues that have shut down the game since last Aug. 12. Griffey lost his chance to chase Babe Ruth that day and so did Matt Williams. The Yankees lost their chance to get back to the World Series, and Cal Ripken's extraordinary pursuit of Lou Gehrig's record had to be put on hold, along with baseball.

The owners and players were not together, because they never can get together on anything.

In New York City yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor issued a federal injunction against baseball owners. She ordered the owners to restore free-agent bidding, salary arbitration and other provisions of the expired collective-bargaining agreement between the players and the owners. Now the players say they are willing to go back to work, the owners are hiding, and baseball is still on hold, where it has been since last Aug. 12.

The players act as if they got some great moral victory from Judge Sotomayor. They did not. Nothing was solved yesterday, because there still is no agreement between the owners and the players. There was no judge anywhere who ruled in favor of baseball fans, the ones on 1st and Stewart in Seattle or anywhere else. There was no protection in court for baseball yesterday, which means that the owners and players could ruin next season the way they ruined last season.

Donald Fehr, the executive director of the Players Association, finally found a judge. He thought Congress might save him by repealing the owners' antitrust exemption. Congress couldn't save him and neither could Bill Clinton. Now the National Labor Relations Board issued its complaint against the owners and Judge Sonia Sotomayor has kicked the owners in the teeth.

But all Judge Sotomayor did yesterday was restore old work rules. She did nothing about a new collective-bargaining agreement. If Fehr and the players think people will embrace their sport knowing that there could be another strike before the season is over - Fehr would not give a no-strike pledge - then they have turned as stupid as some of the owners they have been fighting.

This needs to end now. The owners and players are closer than they ever have been on the issue of a luxury tax on team payrolls. All that has to be worked out is the rate of the tax and the figure at which it kicks in. They all should have been in a room last night and into this morning and through this day hammering all that out. But the posturing continues.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor could unfortunately order an injunction against that. So if baseball players finally won something in court yesterday, baseball fans and baseball did not.

"A rather sweeping opinion," Fehr said about Sotomayor's decision, which took her 45 minutes to read.

It was all of that. The conclusion is that the owners, until the past couple of weeks, had not bargained in good faith. And they have not. Neither have the players. For months, Fehr stood up, usually late at night, and whined about another "in-your-face" proposal from the owners. Then he turned around not long ago and offered the owners a plan for a luxury tax that would have affected exactly one team, the Tigers. Fehr, of course, made his offer sound as if it were a sacrament.

The longer this went on, the more Fehr and his players started to look as shrill and stubborn as the owners. Of course you had to side with the players, when forced to choose. The alternative was to root for White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, who is one of the biggest phonies we ever have had in sports. Reinsdorf screams about free-agent salaries and how they are killing baseball, then turns around and makes the White Sox baseball team a free agent by threatening to move it to Florida. The state of Illinois threw money at Reinsdorf, and gave him a new Comiskey Park.

The owners were supposed to have the players on the run by now. Now it seems to be the other way around. Give Fehr that, he kept his people in line, even across the last few months when it seemed he was the one refusing to negotiate. But if Fehr thinks that he can start a season without a new agreement, with baseball fans thinking there could be another strike this season or even next, then he has rocks in his head.

And here is one last question for Don Fehr, who seemed so happy yesterday: If he can start this season without an agreement, how come he couldn't finish the last one? How come we couldn't find out if Junior Griffey and Matt Williams could hit 60?