Baseball Free Agency: Search for Balance in Uncharted Waters

The old baseball free agency is dead. But will a new form now be born?

That December day when George Steinbrenner did not sign Jack Morris, we could draw a line through the old system. Owners no longer were going to try to lure stars from competitors. Call it deliberately orchestrated collusion. Call it a gentleman’s agreement. Call it an epidemic of fiscal common sense.

Whatever, call it a fait accompli, a done deal, a new order.

So now we’ve sailed off the edge of baseball’s known world. What’s going to happen to players who severed their relationships with their old team? Will an owner sign a top player after he’s gotten a divorce from his old club?

Tim Raines, Rich Gedman, Lance Parrish, Andre Dawson, Ron Guidry and a dozen other big leaguers have been out on the open sea in their new free-agent dinghy for over a week now.

No land in sight. No passing ships. No search planes overhead. And nothing on the horizon.

Getting hungry, guys? Wondering about whether you should have jumped ship? Don’t those millions of dollars you turned down look better already?

At midnight on Jan. 8, these 17 intrepid souls decided to call the bluff of baseball’s owners. They decided to find out what, if anything, was left of what used to be called free agency.

The 17 turned down the rich, yet disappointing, contracts their teams offered. Now, they can’t go home again--not until May 1, at least. If they do go back, what a bedraggled, devalued sight they will be, returning, hat in hand, with the season under way.

What has happened so far?

Raines is the National League batting champion and one of the best leadoff men in history. Gedman and Parrish are the best catchers in the American League. Guidry, though 35, has the third best winning percentage of any pitcher ever. Dawson, a perennial all-star tapering off because of bad wheels, still is a quality outfielder.

Not one of these players has been offered so much as a dollar by any major league team other than the one for which he played last season. There have been preliminary discussions, including Guidry’s with the Baltimore Orioles. Talks about possible future talks. But no bucks on the table, probably none for a while. For some of the 17, maybe never.

“The owners would just as soon see all these players out of baseball entirely. . . . Make an example of them, teach them a lesson,” says Dick Moss, agent to Dawson. “If Montreal doesn’t care enough about Raines to keep him, if Boston doesn’t care about Gedman, if no team has made any offer after all this time, then why would you assume they’ll get any serious offers at all? Winning isn’t important to the owners anymore. Neither are business ethics or the labor agreements they’ve signed.”

Baseball’s management arm hardly can keep the feathers from showing at the corners of its mouth. Says Barry Rona, executive director of the Player Relations Committee, “I don’t think you’re going to see any signings unless these free agents greatly reduce their unrealistic appetites. . . . The days when an agent can sit by the phone and collect offers, pick one, then charge a player $250,000 for lending his expertise to the process, are over for good. . . . Tim Raines may even end up making the average salary.”

This last barb is a war cry. Raines already has turned down multimillion-dollar offers by Montreal. The average salary is a mere $420,000 a year. Is this a threat, barely veiled, or what?

Many around baseball made a big deal of Jan. 8, as though the owners who stood so solidly before that date suddenly would start salivating, full of auction fever, the day after.

A few union types still see good news in these recent doings. “The owners planning has taken a huge jolt,” says union leader Don Fehr. “The last thing they expected was for an entire all-star team of great players to take their dare. Now, they don’t know what to do.”

“The owners are in the ultimate trick bag now,” says a union source. “On one hand, if players this great get no realistic offers, then the owners are sure to lose our grievance case charging them with collusion. On the other hand, if they do get higher offers, then how do they explain why there were no offers before Jan. 8.”

It’s more likely that the owners don’t give a fig about the union’s vaunted grievance. If the union wins, the bosses figure the arbitrator will only have the guts to give back a fraction of the gains they’ve won. And if the arbitrator yawns, they win big.

The danger for baseball in the next couple of months is that the owners will overplay their strong hand. They may be too overjoyed at watching the 17 as they squirm in the dinghy.

After all, it’s doubtful that Guidry, Bob Horner or Bob Boone can come close to getting as much on the open market as they already had in hand and threw away. Guidry was almost as foolish in passing up $1.65 million for two years as the ludicrously mistaken Horner was for giving away over $4 million for three years. Even Parrish and Dawson are resistable commodities who probably will end up getting a few dollars less in their new towns.

But what about Gedman and, to a far greater degree, the spectacular Raines? What sort of sport refuses them large raises in a supposedly open market?

“For years, the union told us, ‘Whenever you want to stop giving these crazy salaries, it’s in your power to do so. Nobody has a gun at your head. If it’s bad busines, then don’t do it,’ ” says Rona, management negotiator. “Well, we finally listened to the rhetoric of the other side. As we sometimes enjoy reminding them.

“However, in the long run, the key for baseball is to maintain some balance. It’s not good for the game if the union has all the leverage. And it’s also not good if we hold all the cards. Right now, things are coming more into focus and finally more into balance.”

That may well be true. However, if Raines or Gedman comes limping back to Montreal or Boston in May, asking to be forgiven and reinstated, then the pendulum will have swung back too far. Much too far.