Report Disputes Owners : Talks: Stanford professor claims teams underestimated revenue. Ravitch says it avoids the central issue.

An economic report prepared for the baseball players union by Stanford professor Roger Noll disputes many of the owners’ financial claims. Noll prepared a similar study for the union in 1985 with similar conclusions.

The union, as reported by The Times on Wednesday, mailed copies of the study to the 28 clubs earlier this week. It was distributed to the media here Wednesday, but the confidential figures were edited out. This much was learned:

Noll claims the owners have underestimated their 1994 revenue by $50 million to $140 million. He claims that their reported profits of $50 million in 1993 were at least $50 million more than that. He claims that every owner realized, on average, $10 million in cash between 1991 and ’93.

“Noll concludes that total compensation is not increasing faster than revenue, as the owners have maintained,” said Donald Fehr, the union’s executive director. “According to his finding, the industry’s overall health is better than it was in the mid-’80s.”

Said owners negotiator Richard Ravitch: “You can argue numbers until you’re blue in the face, but that’s not the issue (in the collective bargaining talks). The owners don’t have to prove poverty to have the right to know what their labor costs are going to be and to establish a relationship between those costs and revenue.”

John Harrington, CEO of the Boston Red Sox and spokesman for the 12 owners and club executives who have joined the bargaining talks, said Noll simply reached the conclusions “the union paid him to reach.”

Harrington charged Noll with a biased product that is strictly “a sideshow to the central issues” of the talks and said the 28 accountants who prepared the clubs’ books and whose reports Noll has “recharacterized” would all disagree with Noll’s findings.

“Since I’m also a CPA, that makes 29 who disagree,” Harrington said.