Baseball Owners

PHOENIX -- For the first time, a major-league official acknowledged yesterday that baseball owners are aware of -- and are closely monitoring -- the financial problems of Orioles owner Eli S. Jacobs.Although he declined to discuss specific steps owners may be taking, Bud Selig, chairman of the executive council and baseball's de facto commissioner, said he and American League president Bobby Brown speak often with Jacobs about the team."Baseball is aware of the problem. There has been a lot of communication between Dr. Brown and Mr. Jacobs, and between Mr. Jacobs and myself.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- In case anyone hasn't noticed, this is not a perfect world. There usually is a gap between the way things are and the way things should be, and that is certainly true of baseball's winter meetings.Representatives of all 28 major-league teams have converged on the Galt House Hotel for a week of meetings, trade talks and free-agent negotiations. The annual winter convention also includes a full complement of minor-league activities, but that just takes us back to the fact that this is not a perfect world.

It probably was a coincidence that NFL owners decided to knock two years off their collective bargaining agreement with the players union on the same day No. 3 draft pick Matt Ryan agreed to a $72 million contract with the Atlanta Falcons, but that doesn't mean the two top football headlines of the week were unrelated. Quite the contrary, management has cited out-of-control rookie compensation as one of the main rationales for abandoning the current CBA in 2011, and Ryan's new deal - which guarantees him at least $34.75 million before he plays his first NFL game - conveniently illustrated the point.

Leave it to the Lords of Baseball to ruin even their best intentioned acts.The owners last week adopted proposals from former American League umpire Steve Palermo to cut down on the interminable length of games, and many of them, like authorizing the umpires to call a pitch thrown over the plate above the waist a strike and to keep hitters in the batter's box, are good.However, the edict to cut the length of breaks between innings from 2 minutes and 25 seconds to 1 minute and 45 seconds, starting after the All-Star break, has drawn fire from a number of quarters, not to mention radio and television broadcasters who bring baseball into your homes.

IF YOU read the weepy testimonials in the sporting press, you probably think that the sacking of Commissioner Fay Vincent by the owners of the major league teams has severely weakened the once powerful office of the commissioner to the extreme detriment of baseball fans, who were supposedly protected by the commissioner's benevolent rule "in the best interests of baseball."Baseball writers see the owners' plans to turn the commissioner into a CEO as the end of baseball as we know it.The next commissioner will simply be a slave to the owners' whimsy, the reasoning goes.

Major League Baseball's confusing on-again, off-again contraction proposal may not succeed in solving the industry's financial problems, but it already has had one unintended consequence. It has allowed baseball fans in Washington and Northern Virginia to dream again. The uncertainty surrounding the plan, which is on hold pending legal proceedings, grievance hearings and congressional decisions, has created such an information vacuum that almost anything seems possible. The Washington Post reported yesterday that baseball owners are considering moving the Montreal Expos to RFK Stadium for the 2002 season - that speculation based on a reported inquiry to stadium officials about the possible availability of the facility.

The baseball owners wanted this, understand.They wanted to stick together for a change and not let those smug, so-and-so players beat them.They wanted the world to listen to their cry that baseball has serious problems.Incredibly, they're going to cancel the season and kill the World Series to make their points.They're really going to do it.Let's hope the blood on their hands never washes off.Let's hope that history gets it right and their names become synonymous with the greed and stubborn stupidity that has so diminished the game.

ATLANTA -- The issue is hope. "We have a system that works for all teams, no matter where they're located, no matter what size market they're in," NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said yesterday at his Super Bowl news conference. "Our system gives every team the same chance, and it gives fans serious hope that their teams can make the playoffs and make a run at the Super Bowl championship." The issue is hope. "The average fan in the average city has two things going for him -- hope and faith, hope and faith that his team can be a contender," Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig said this week from his Milwaukee office.

Has it really been 15 years since the baseball work stoppage to end all baseball work stoppages caused the cancellation of the 1994 World Series and threatened the sport's reverential status as the national pastime? The reason I ask that question is that we're in the midst of another postseason in which the chasm between the small-revenue and big-revenue teams is very much on display. The New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies, who appear destined to face each other in the World Series next week, represent the hugely populated Northeast corridor that generates more media-related revenue than any other section of the country.

SCHOOL PRAYER and the baseball strike remind me of daytime television. In all three departments Americans are confessing something they ought to be ashamed of.This is, that they are incapable of self-control.Worse, that they want government to step in and control their behavior for them. "Pass a law," is the plea being heard even from Republicans whose usual complaint is that there are too many laws already.Yet now they are saying, "Pass a law that will make us stop our rotten behavior."In short, call in the government.