Baseball strike 1994-5 - 10 February 1995

This time last year, we – we being New Yorkers – were in the middle of the fifth of the winter's 17 blizzards. Ten days ago we watched January fade away while we marvelled at an extraordinary, perhaps a unique situation.

Throughout November, December and January, not one flake of snow. We'd been threatened with a winter as awful as last year's but a month ago the big weather boys changed their tune. Something very odd and puzzling happened. El Niño, that's what. El what? El Niño, which I'm ashamed to say, I don't find in the Oxford Dictionary – or three others – only in the latest edition of the alert American Heritage College Dictionary, which boasts and produced over two hundred thousand new definitions. Many of them, as you might guess, from the new language of computers, which to my grandsons, now out of their teens, has been their ABC since they were tots.

So, El Niño: a sudden warming of the ocean surface off the west coast of South America, sometimes called Central Pacific waters, occurring every four to 12 years, affecting the weather over much of the Pacific Ocean and beyond. Why El Niño? It means "the Christ child" because the onset of the warming usually happens round Christmas time. So it does and did, which caused the weather boys, as I say, to predict here in the East, a winter much milder than ever. And then, bam, last weekend, out of nowhere – or rather our of Canada and the North-west the old familiar pattern – came the first whopper, 31 inches on my daughter in Vermont, even 17 across the river in inland New Jersey. And this city – which close to the salt ocean tends, as all such places do, to get less snow than most neighbouring counties – New York City, had 11 inches, followed by petrifying cold and innocent blue, blue skies. Hold on Grandpa. I tell you, I stayed in, looking at the red nosed television weather boys, swaying in their anoraks, telling us through an icy gale how awful things were outdoors.

So, something like 50 million Americans were housebound, probably by choice, undergoing slow hypnosis by the OJ Simpson trial in Los Angeles, which drags its slow length along at a pace that makes it thoroughly understandable, for the first time, why it's likely to last four, five or six months. Last Wednesday for instance, the prosecuting counsel – a small, neat lady, who spells out everything four or five times with excruciating precision – wanted to fix the time when a neighbour of the murdered woman took his dog for a walk, on the evening of the crime and got back to his house at 10.50 or maybe just before 11. Was it earlier than 10.50? No. Later than 11? No. In between? Well, I had work to do and I switched back two hours later. They were still at it. His wrist watch. Not digital? No, just ordinary.

Well, we're told there are about 500 journalists from all over the world covering the trial, which means they are staying in a motel in Los Angeles and are glued to one of the two channels that play the whole court scene, gavel to gavel. However there must be some Americans cosying up from the ice and snow who keep turning the telly on and off for another obsessive reason. To watch, from time to time, as in a trance, filmed scenes of large, bare, empty baseball stadiums. Of course at this time of year that's the way they would look anyway, but this time they are shown as a warning, or omen, of a dreadful, unimagined summer to come.

Now I've not talked about the baseball strike since it started in August and went on long enough to cancel the World Series – the annual championship matches. At that time, I talked to a friend, an old labour mediator and a veteran, and I asked him how long he thought it would take to settle the row between the owners and the players. He said thoughtfully: "Well there could be no baseball next year." "Next year? 1995?" "Correct." To a layman that seemed preposterous. It now seems very likely, and the stalemate, gridlock, whatever you care to call it, has suddenly engrossed people who take no interest in the greatly touted national game.

Seeing it as a political problem – or if you like, a puzzle in labour management relations – as such it goes far beyond the game into, well, American history. This week we've seen heated little exchanges in the Congress between politicians who say the last place to settle it is here, and one or two others who say the only part we should play is to repeal the owners' exemption from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. That could well be the root of the trouble. And it derives from a contention of the owners – which is also, I suppose, has always been, a popular prejudice – that baseball is too homely, too decent, too all-American, just a healthy game, to be considered an industry subject to anti-monopoly laws.

First let me tell you about the Sherman Act, one of the first acts of congress I ever heard about, an act that picked up the ancient English distrust of monopolies in business, and culminated in a federal law that was enforced with ruthless vigour by President Theodore, Teddy Roosevelt. It was provoked by the so-called robber barons, after they got together and began to form trusts, syndicates, cartels, pools if you like, of businesses, eventually forming an oil trust: Rockefeller, steel trust: J P Morgan, the railroad trust: Harriman, so on. Men who formed a single huge company to monopolise all the transportation, or the oil, or the copper, or the steel, or whatever, throughout the United States. In 1890 Congress passed the Sherman Act which specified – with, for an American Act, remarkable clarity and brevity – every contract, combination, in the form of trust or otherwise or conspiracy, in restraint to trade, or commerce, among the several states, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal. The key phrases are monopoly, in restraint of trade of other people's trading, and it has been invoked a thousand times in the past century to put down monopolies.

Well, now, the baseball strike is according to a government labour mediator – who sat in for a month or so with the contending parties – he says, that in 30 years' experience of mediation, this conflict was the most intractable. At the heart of it is the great pressing urge of the team owners to set a limit, to put a cap as they say, on players' salaries. Is that an attempt to grind down the faces or biceps of the honest working man? Hardly. In the past 20 years, players' salaries have gone strutting through the stratosphere. Whereas 20 years ago a star player on any big team – and we're talking, of course, about the major leagues – earned about a 100,000 dollars a year and the average member of a team got 15,000. Today the stars regularly sign contracts of say, 20,000,000 dollars over five years. The average lowly player earns 150,000 a year. The owners have been saying for some time that they're losing money, heavily. Television sponsors are beginning to prefer other sports. Basketball is, by and large, more popular than baseball, American football certainly.

Of course the baseball players don't believe the owners. The players have, since August, refused even to consider a cap on present salaries and will go on refusing, they say, as the phrase goes, till hell freezes over. They've been meeting and quarrelling on and off, mostly on, for six months. Finally, it began to come out in the papers and on the tube, that very many thousands of ordinary citizens are about to lose their jobs or go bankrupt. A week from now, spring training begins. This is the annual ritual whereby all the big teams assemble in Florida or Arizona, and work off the wintry rust by way of exhibition matches, which draw big crowds of winter visitors, paying customers. So what you have in 15 cities in Florida, and three or four in Arizona, is the social and economic scene of summer in miniature, with snack bars, hot dogs, beer, cushions, parking, buses, barkers, programmes etc.

Once the word came out that if there was no spring training, there might be no summer baseball at all, and once the average baseball fan was enraged by the owners' decision to scout around and recruit players from the minor leagues as replacements – come and see not Babe Ruth but Babe Smith from Kalamazoo, Michigan – then Congress and the White House began to take notice.

Mind you, the general public has not declared allegiance to either side. The popular prejudice says that both sides are greedy egotists and a disgrace to the game. But ordinary people began to say too, you mean these people can paralyse the whole sport, can't the government do something? First then, President Clinton came bounding in to save us all. A day of talks with both sides and the patient long-suffering mediator was there, who, note, has no power to dictate a settlement, neither does the President, neither does the Congress, unless it passes a bill to impose a settlement.

Well nothing came of the White House talks and the President sent a bill up simply to appoint a panel, a tribunal, that could write a settlement and then, if agreeable to Congress, Congress could impose it as the law of the land. As I talk, nobody in Congress has the slightest relish for moving the government into any labour dispute that, as House Speaker Newt Gingrich says, does not imperil national security. The strike only imperils the national love of the boys of summer. So the owners and the players are adamant and sulky, the President is powerless, the Congress shirks taking any part or blame, the fans seethe, the stadiums are empty, the prospect for one healthy part of the economy of scores of big cities is bleak. Stay tuned.

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