Ansky39
05-16-02, 12:22 PM
i like this guy...
http://chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/whitesox/cs-020513rogers.column?coll=cs%2Dwhitesox%2Dutility
Phil Rogers
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Baseball
'The game is healthy'
Union boss Fehr explains his firm stance on MLB's proposals
May 14, 2002
(first of two parts)
Most people don't read the fine print. Don Fehr writes it.
Because of all the moving parts involved in baseball's latest labor dispute, or "wheels within wheels," to use Fehr's term, you're not likely to find him making the union's case on sports-talk radio.
While Commissioner Bud Selig and other Major League Baseball executives have taken their pitch door to door, meeting with the editorial boards of newspapers around the country, Fehr, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, has generally been quoted in sound bites. Cameras usually find him threatening another season-ending strike or otherwise reacting to a move made by Selig and baseball's owners. Much is left unsaid.
"How in the world do you explain all this in sound bites?" Fehr said. "It's really hard to do. … You give me 90 minutes to explain things in front of an audience of people predisposed to listen, and not that everybody agrees with me, but I've never found anyone who doesn't come out saying, 'This is a perspective we never thought of before.'"
During a two-hour interview with the Tribune at the Major League Baseball Players Association office in Manhattan, the union head did his best to explain why he has dug in his heels over the owners' attempt to impose a 50 percent tax on payrolls over $98 million while also more than doubling the amount of money the Yankees and other high-revenue clubs share with less successful teams.
According to a union source, the Yankees' net local revenue has grown from $94 million in 1996 to $194 million in 2001, and the owners' current proposal would cause the Yankees to surrender about $80 million of that $100 million growth to additional revenue sharing and taxes.
Fehr characterized the proposals on the table as "taking a meat ax to various parts of the salary structure," but declined to comment on specific numbers, saying he did not want to be provocative. It was nevertheless clear that though baseball's average salary has grown to almost $2.4 million, Fehr maintains the vision of professional sports he acquired as an assistant to Marvin Miller, when the average was less than $100,000.
"Here you have a union that says nothing more than the core American values of how the economy works ought to work here," Fehr said. "And you have management running around saying, 'No, no, no, we have to be protected from capitalism.' Sociologically, it's just fascinating stuff."
Don Fehr, in his own words:
Q Is the game financially healthy?
A In the last six years, the game has had an incredible increase in overall revenue. Most clubs have had large increases in revenue, some greater than others, which is what you'd expect. It was a factor of how clubs have fared in their individual markets. Is the game healthy? Yes. Does that mean every individual club is in the best position? Again, the general doesn't always translate into the specific. If clubs want to raise such issues in collective bargaining, we'll have to get into it.
Q Do low-revenue clubs need help being competitive?
A Lower-revenue clubs obviously have to get more revenue sharing. I don't think it's any secret there will be more revenue sharing in this agreement. It's a question of how it's done and the magnitude. … That's what the bargaining process will be about. With each passing year since the last strike ended, we're seeing more and more low-revenue clubs have supposedly surprising seasons. I know it's still early, but we've had a number of indications of that again this year.
Q Are there low-revenue clubs that will go out of business with the current system?
A That's a judgment we hope isn't true. The commissioner and various club officials have clearly indicated they are bent on contraction, and we'll have to see how that plays out. … Where you have the possibility of contraction, there ought to be much more serious attention paid to relocation. But we'll have to see what happens.
Q Don't the Yankees have a huge advantage because of their broadcast contracts?
A The fact is performance does not correlate to market size. While it has correlated to New York in the period after the strike, you have to remember that the core of this Yankee team was not put together with free agency, and the Yankees went from '81 to '95 with the same relative advantage over everybody and it was completely irrelevant. They didn't do anything in that period. In Chicago, you have examples of how strong economic bases don't always produce winners.
Q Selig refers to the so-called Blue Ribbon Report of 2000 as his "road map" for a new labor deal. What do you think of that report?
A There are a lot of things we'd take issue with. They never ask the 'why' question. They say so-and-so didn't do as well as someone else, but they don't say why so-and-so didn't do as well. That matters, OK? Baseball revenue is generated 84 to 85 percent locally. You're trying to sell 162 games for broadcast; 81 at the gate, not just one on a Sunday afternoon. That means the quality of what you do matters more than football … it's about the only thing that does matter. They [also] neglected to mention that the dominant factor in the period of time they studied was the strike [of 1994-95]. … Having said that, their proposals are way to the right of the Blue Ribbon Report. The Blue Ribbon Report did not call for contraction [or] 50 percent revenue sharing.
Q The Blue Ribbon Report was authored by respected economists—Yale President Richard Levin, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, former Sen. George Mitchell, Pulitzer Prize winner George Will.
A They all had longstanding relationships with baseball. … Not to impugn anyone's integrity, but these are not disinterested outsiders."
Q The Blue Ribbon Report seems to conclude that with a major increase in revenue sharing, accompanied by a payroll tax and a minimum payroll, essentially the same amount would be spent on salaries, but the spending would be done differently. While it would be tougher for teams at the top to spend money, teams at bottom would have to spend more money and teams in the middle would be more motivated to spend money.
A Why would they assume that? Player markets are competitive marketplaces, all right? If you have Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles and Chevrolets, and the price of Cadillacs falls because the people who buy Cadillacs aren't buying, is that likely to increase the price of Oldsmobiles? No serious economist or businessman thinks that's true. So the question is why would you believe the spending would increase in the middle, especially if you believe Bud Selig's numbers that everybody's going broke?
Q One of the reasons salaries have grown through the years is that clubs, no matter how much they cry poor, are still competitive. They spend money to try to win.
A There's only one thing that correlates to aggregate salaries. Only one thing—aggregate revenue. It's the only thing that changes at the same time and in the same direction as player salaries, up and down.
Q It seems there's always a Tom Hicks, a Peter Angelos in the equation. Aggressive.
A That's correct, but when in America did we get to the point that we want to discourage development? Discourage trying to get better, make a better product? And the second part is critical: There's this notion that nothing changes. If you say that in 1990 you'd have six teams doing well and six teams doing terribly, and in 2000 you'd have six teams doing well and six teams doing terribly, and they're the same teams, that may mean one thing. But I guarantee you that in 1990 four of the top seven revenue producers were not Seattle, San Francisco, Cleveland and Atlanta. Those were what we would now call contraction candidates. So what does that suggest? It suggests that the management of the team really matters, and it's not just the stadium. The second thing it suggests is that the patterns they complain about, if they're static for a given team on the bottom, it probably suggests more about management of the team than anything else.
Q If salaries are tied directly to revenue, why not get in line with other professional sports and have a salary-cap mechanism?
A A couple of reasons. First of all, the aggregate salaries tell you very little about where they go individually. We've always felt how they are split individually, based on an individual player and club's negotiating choices, the player's skill, health and all the rest of it, is probably a more efficient way to allocate those resources than Bud Selig and I sitting in a room and deciding if you deserve $10 or $12. Second, if you have this, if you have a free market, I do not have to know what all the revenues are. If you switch to anything else, I have to know everything, including the value of related party transactions, and how they do things. You'll have fights over everything, because what you create is an incentive to hide revenues.
Q Instead of fighting over hidden revenues, now twice a decade players and owners engage in contentious contract negotiations.
A And that is because? Step back. You're looking down at the American economy and you've got a union, and the union says we're not interested in seniority, we're not protecting anyone from layoffs just because they've been there a long time—if you can't play, you can't play. We have a minimum salary, which is an almost infinitesimal amount of the aggregate salary, so it's not relevant. We negotiate things you have to negotiate, like schedules, pensions. We say, 'Pay anybody what you want to pay them, and all we ask is that you don't conspire about it.' And management says that's not good enough. Where does that inferential trail take you as to what they're trying to do? There's only one place it can take you, which is, 'We want a salary structure which is a measurable increment below what we would pay in a free market.'
Next: The union's view of revenue sharing.
Copyright © 2002, The Chicago Tribune
http://chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/whitesox/cs-020513rogers.column?coll=cs%2Dwhitesox%2Dutility
Phil Rogers
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Baseball
'The game is healthy'
Union boss Fehr explains his firm stance on MLB's proposals
May 14, 2002
(first of two parts)
Most people don't read the fine print. Don Fehr writes it.
Because of all the moving parts involved in baseball's latest labor dispute, or "wheels within wheels," to use Fehr's term, you're not likely to find him making the union's case on sports-talk radio.
While Commissioner Bud Selig and other Major League Baseball executives have taken their pitch door to door, meeting with the editorial boards of newspapers around the country, Fehr, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, has generally been quoted in sound bites. Cameras usually find him threatening another season-ending strike or otherwise reacting to a move made by Selig and baseball's owners. Much is left unsaid.
"How in the world do you explain all this in sound bites?" Fehr said. "It's really hard to do. … You give me 90 minutes to explain things in front of an audience of people predisposed to listen, and not that everybody agrees with me, but I've never found anyone who doesn't come out saying, 'This is a perspective we never thought of before.'"
During a two-hour interview with the Tribune at the Major League Baseball Players Association office in Manhattan, the union head did his best to explain why he has dug in his heels over the owners' attempt to impose a 50 percent tax on payrolls over $98 million while also more than doubling the amount of money the Yankees and other high-revenue clubs share with less successful teams.
According to a union source, the Yankees' net local revenue has grown from $94 million in 1996 to $194 million in 2001, and the owners' current proposal would cause the Yankees to surrender about $80 million of that $100 million growth to additional revenue sharing and taxes.
Fehr characterized the proposals on the table as "taking a meat ax to various parts of the salary structure," but declined to comment on specific numbers, saying he did not want to be provocative. It was nevertheless clear that though baseball's average salary has grown to almost $2.4 million, Fehr maintains the vision of professional sports he acquired as an assistant to Marvin Miller, when the average was less than $100,000.
"Here you have a union that says nothing more than the core American values of how the economy works ought to work here," Fehr said. "And you have management running around saying, 'No, no, no, we have to be protected from capitalism.' Sociologically, it's just fascinating stuff."
Don Fehr, in his own words:
Q Is the game financially healthy?
A In the last six years, the game has had an incredible increase in overall revenue. Most clubs have had large increases in revenue, some greater than others, which is what you'd expect. It was a factor of how clubs have fared in their individual markets. Is the game healthy? Yes. Does that mean every individual club is in the best position? Again, the general doesn't always translate into the specific. If clubs want to raise such issues in collective bargaining, we'll have to get into it.
Q Do low-revenue clubs need help being competitive?
A Lower-revenue clubs obviously have to get more revenue sharing. I don't think it's any secret there will be more revenue sharing in this agreement. It's a question of how it's done and the magnitude. … That's what the bargaining process will be about. With each passing year since the last strike ended, we're seeing more and more low-revenue clubs have supposedly surprising seasons. I know it's still early, but we've had a number of indications of that again this year.
Q Are there low-revenue clubs that will go out of business with the current system?
A That's a judgment we hope isn't true. The commissioner and various club officials have clearly indicated they are bent on contraction, and we'll have to see how that plays out. … Where you have the possibility of contraction, there ought to be much more serious attention paid to relocation. But we'll have to see what happens.
Q Don't the Yankees have a huge advantage because of their broadcast contracts?
A The fact is performance does not correlate to market size. While it has correlated to New York in the period after the strike, you have to remember that the core of this Yankee team was not put together with free agency, and the Yankees went from '81 to '95 with the same relative advantage over everybody and it was completely irrelevant. They didn't do anything in that period. In Chicago, you have examples of how strong economic bases don't always produce winners.
Q Selig refers to the so-called Blue Ribbon Report of 2000 as his "road map" for a new labor deal. What do you think of that report?
A There are a lot of things we'd take issue with. They never ask the 'why' question. They say so-and-so didn't do as well as someone else, but they don't say why so-and-so didn't do as well. That matters, OK? Baseball revenue is generated 84 to 85 percent locally. You're trying to sell 162 games for broadcast; 81 at the gate, not just one on a Sunday afternoon. That means the quality of what you do matters more than football … it's about the only thing that does matter. They [also] neglected to mention that the dominant factor in the period of time they studied was the strike [of 1994-95]. … Having said that, their proposals are way to the right of the Blue Ribbon Report. The Blue Ribbon Report did not call for contraction [or] 50 percent revenue sharing.
Q The Blue Ribbon Report was authored by respected economists—Yale President Richard Levin, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, former Sen. George Mitchell, Pulitzer Prize winner George Will.
A They all had longstanding relationships with baseball. … Not to impugn anyone's integrity, but these are not disinterested outsiders."
Q The Blue Ribbon Report seems to conclude that with a major increase in revenue sharing, accompanied by a payroll tax and a minimum payroll, essentially the same amount would be spent on salaries, but the spending would be done differently. While it would be tougher for teams at the top to spend money, teams at bottom would have to spend more money and teams in the middle would be more motivated to spend money.
A Why would they assume that? Player markets are competitive marketplaces, all right? If you have Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles and Chevrolets, and the price of Cadillacs falls because the people who buy Cadillacs aren't buying, is that likely to increase the price of Oldsmobiles? No serious economist or businessman thinks that's true. So the question is why would you believe the spending would increase in the middle, especially if you believe Bud Selig's numbers that everybody's going broke?
Q One of the reasons salaries have grown through the years is that clubs, no matter how much they cry poor, are still competitive. They spend money to try to win.
A There's only one thing that correlates to aggregate salaries. Only one thing—aggregate revenue. It's the only thing that changes at the same time and in the same direction as player salaries, up and down.
Q It seems there's always a Tom Hicks, a Peter Angelos in the equation. Aggressive.
A That's correct, but when in America did we get to the point that we want to discourage development? Discourage trying to get better, make a better product? And the second part is critical: There's this notion that nothing changes. If you say that in 1990 you'd have six teams doing well and six teams doing terribly, and in 2000 you'd have six teams doing well and six teams doing terribly, and they're the same teams, that may mean one thing. But I guarantee you that in 1990 four of the top seven revenue producers were not Seattle, San Francisco, Cleveland and Atlanta. Those were what we would now call contraction candidates. So what does that suggest? It suggests that the management of the team really matters, and it's not just the stadium. The second thing it suggests is that the patterns they complain about, if they're static for a given team on the bottom, it probably suggests more about management of the team than anything else.
Q If salaries are tied directly to revenue, why not get in line with other professional sports and have a salary-cap mechanism?
A A couple of reasons. First of all, the aggregate salaries tell you very little about where they go individually. We've always felt how they are split individually, based on an individual player and club's negotiating choices, the player's skill, health and all the rest of it, is probably a more efficient way to allocate those resources than Bud Selig and I sitting in a room and deciding if you deserve $10 or $12. Second, if you have this, if you have a free market, I do not have to know what all the revenues are. If you switch to anything else, I have to know everything, including the value of related party transactions, and how they do things. You'll have fights over everything, because what you create is an incentive to hide revenues.
Q Instead of fighting over hidden revenues, now twice a decade players and owners engage in contentious contract negotiations.
A And that is because? Step back. You're looking down at the American economy and you've got a union, and the union says we're not interested in seniority, we're not protecting anyone from layoffs just because they've been there a long time—if you can't play, you can't play. We have a minimum salary, which is an almost infinitesimal amount of the aggregate salary, so it's not relevant. We negotiate things you have to negotiate, like schedules, pensions. We say, 'Pay anybody what you want to pay them, and all we ask is that you don't conspire about it.' And management says that's not good enough. Where does that inferential trail take you as to what they're trying to do? There's only one place it can take you, which is, 'We want a salary structure which is a measurable increment below what we would pay in a free market.'
Next: The union's view of revenue sharing.
Copyright © 2002, The Chicago Tribune