Last Thursday the 28 major-league-baseball club owners gathered at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in the Chicago suburb of Rosemont, Ill., to cast an 18-9 vote of no confidence in Vincent, an outspoken figure who has become a lightning rod for their dissatisfaction. They issued a resolution citing Vincent for a lack of vision and failure to build consensus and charged that “under his direction it is impossible for baseball to move forward effectively.” Vincent has vowed to stay to the end of his term in 1994. “I will not resign–ever,” he said in a letter last month to owners. The owners reconvene Wednesday in St. Louis and might vote to dismiss Vincent-if he hasn’t quit by then.
But the Vincent vendetta is only a symptom of baseball’s deeper problems. At the very least the game, like General Motors, seems to be facing the end of a golden era of seemingly limitless growth. But some see an even deeper crisis: a sport that is “Slowly committing suicide” with crass commercialism, growing disregard for fans and bad business sense, as New York Post sportswriter Phil Mushnick proclaimed last week. “There is a squeeze,” says Gerald Scully, author of “The Business of Major League Baseball.” “And the situation isn’t as bad now as it’s going to be over the next two or three years.”
Nobody’s predicting the majors are going down the tubes, of course. Scully, for one, thinks baseball remains generally healthy. The Orioles and Blue Jays are setting attendance records at their sleek stadiums; the dowdy Seattle Mariners recently sold for $ 100 million ($23 million more than Jeff Smulyan paid for the team in 1989). Owners barely check their swings as they sign superstars to eight-figure contracts: Cubs second baseman Ryne Sandberg became baseball’s first $7 million man in 1992. And two new club owners forked over $95 million apiece for two National League expansion franchises in 1993.
Yet owners seem to be predicting an economic Armageddon. Some gripe that frenetic bidding (their own) for free agents and salary arbitration are bankrupting them; the average player’s income rose from $245,000 in 1982 to $1.1 million this year. Many clubs say they’re losing money or are barely breaking even, although most refuse to open their books. The hurting San Francisco Giants, frustrated by the city’s refusal to support a new stadium, may move to St. Petersburg, Fla., next year. Fan loyalty, already eroded by freeagent mania, is weakening further as more teams dump their multimillionaire big draws. In August the Mets traded ace pitcher David Cone to Toronto and the Oakland A’s got rid of slugger-Porschewrecker Jose Canseco, who was in the middle of a five-year, $23.5 million contract. Attendance is down in many ballparks, too. The Mets drew 3 million fans to Shea Stadium in 1988, but disgust with the team’s big payroll and poor performance dropped that figure to 2.3 million last year. In addition, the majors’ four-year CBS and ESPN contracts, totaling $1.46 billion, expire after the 1993 season. Ratings have proved so disappointing that any new deal could bring baseball as little as two thirds as much cash. (That translates into $9 million per club per year, compared with $14.4 million now.)
The growing disparity between haves and haves-a-little-less is also plaguing the sport. Big-market teams like the Yankees, who rake in $42 million a year from their local-TV contract, bask in wealth (if not in wins). Compared with the Yankees, the Mariners are lost at sea: they earned just $1.5 million from local-TV rights, the lousiest deal in baseball. Despite robust attendance and a World Series victory, the Minnesota Twins claim they barely broke even last year and are in danger of losing the Metrodome’s biggest draw, Kirby Puckett, who now earns $2.96 million a year but is certainly worth Sandberg’s $7 million. Even the players’union acknowledges that there are long-term economic questions facing the game, though they belittle owner complaints as the whining of spoiled tycoons. “People buy teams for fortunes, they run them, they win pennants, they draw fans, and no matter how well they’re doing, they’re bitching and moaning every other minute,” says Donald Fehr, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association.
Despite the moaning from both sides, it’s been-until recently-a nice long ride for baseball. The Brave New Era began in the mid-19708 under Marvin Miller, head of the players’ union from 1966 to 1983. Miller successfully challenged the so-called “reserve system” that bound players to their teams in perpetuity. After a historic decision by an arbitrator in 1975, players were able to jump ship and sign with the highest bidder. That right, in conjunction with salary arbitration, produced a mind-boggling escalation in pay. The late 1980s were golden years for both players and owners, as attendance swelled and TV revenue poured in.
Still, prosperity didn’t buy peace. In each collective-bargaining round, owners have tried unsuccessfully to cut back on player rights and impose limits on salaries. In the mid-1980s, the owners were able to rein in pay simply by not bidding on players. Trouble was, that kind of collusion violated the collective-bargaining agreement, and the union recovered $280 million in damages from the clubs. This winter again, the owners are likely to play hardball with the union. A spring-training lockout could be the result. In 1990 it was just that tactic that led Vincent-ironically, at the owners’ request-to intervene. He did, leading to a compromise, for which some owners now castigate him.
Vincent has become the owners’ latest and most visible scapegoat for baseball’s troubles, including labor-management strife, fan discontent and rough economic times. In many ways, the commissioner resembles his antagonists: a former chairman of Columbia Pictures and vice president of Coca-Cola, he personifies corporate America. Indeed, his friend Bart Giamatti brought in Vincent in 1989 to be the business brains of the game and the man who knew the art of backroom maneuvering. Yet Vincent has reigned with a particularly strong arm and an independent mind. Invoking his unbridled powersgranted to commissioners under a written agreement with owners-he ordered re-alignment of the divisions in the National League, divvied up the $190 million expansion pie in a way that dissatisfied both leagues and opposed “superstation” dominance of the airwaves. He also intimidated team representatives who questioned his suspension of cocaine-abusing Yankee Steve Howe. That boldness, sometimes wise, sometimes rash, infuriated owners used to tending their own fields.
Vincent’s most powerful enemy has been the Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Cubs. This summer the commissioner ordered the Cubs and Cardinals to move to the National League West and the Reds and the Braves to the East. Most owners supported the realignment, but Tribune owner of the lucrative superstation WGNTV, which broadcasts Cubs games across America-fought the switch. (The Tribune Co. fears losing revenue because more of its games would begin late at night.) Vincent believes superstation dominance hurts the little guys, and he’s even lobbied on Capitol Hill to black out superstation broadcasts when the local team is on TV.
But Vincent isn’t really the point. With or without him, baseball faces a reckoning: the belligerence of the owners, the intransigence of the players, the insolence of spoiled-rotten stars-all these hardly bode well for the game. By next spring there may not even be a game. Management threatens a lockout; the union promises it won’t bend. This is baseball in the modern era. Until owners and players learn to coexist, until owners realize that theirs is a joint enterprise in which they will ultimately all succeed or all fail, then September will be dominated not by the poetry of pennant races but by the clamor of commerce.
title: “Paradise Lost” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-04” author: “Florence Jones”
He could be in for a long and painful wait. In the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack since 9-11, some relatives of the more than 140 still-missing have descended here in hopes of finding them alive in local hospitals. But as the days pass from Saturday night’s attack, they are slowly being forced to accept the reality that their missing loved ones are likely dead. And as the stench from Kuta’s overstretched morgue permeates the center of the Bali resort, it is becoming clear that some will never be identified. It’s likely, too, that the death toll will rise from an estimated 180 to as high as 230.
Many bodies are charred beyond recognition. Others–like so many victims of the World Trade Center attack–have been incinerated without a trace. Survivors like Weingard are searching frantically for the missing, posting signs describing their loved ones on the walls of Bali’s largest hospital and making heartbreaking visits to the morgue where corpses are rotting in spite of the arrival of refrigerated trucks from Australia. To add to the pain, they may not even be able to bring the bodies home. “It’s quite likely there will be victims who will be unable to be identified,” Ross Tysoe, the Australian consul-general on Bali told journalists.
About 100 seriously injured victims have already been evacuated to Australia for further treatment. Some 300 others from more than 15 countries have been treated and released. And while recovery efforts at the blast site have ended, police are still looking for traces of the car that held a bomb powerful enough to destroy windows and roofs in buildings more than a mile away.
Forensic experts from Australia, which may have lost as many as 200 of its citizens in the fiery blasts, are working to identify the charred remains, but Tysoe said even DNA samples and dental records may be useless in most cases.
Although no organization has claimed responsibility for the blast, many government leaders believe the bombers were either members or sympathizers of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, is home to Jemaah Islamiah, a radical Islamic group that many believe may be behind the attack. “The Bali bomb blast is linked to Al Qaeda with the cooperation of local terrorists,” Indonesian Defense Minister Matori Abdul Djalil said in the capital of Jakarta. “I am not afraid to say, though many have refused to say, that an Al Qaeda network exists in Indonesia.” Abu Bakar Bashir, the reputed spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiah, has denied that his group was involved in the blast.
President George W. Bush has also blamed Al Qaeda for the blast, saying Monday that it was part of a pattern that included recent attacks in Kuwait and Yemen. Bush, indicating a lack of patience with the Indonesian government for its failure to act earlier against Islamic militants, said that he expected Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri to crack down on radical groups in her country. “I’m going to make it clear to her that we need to work together to find those who murdered all those innocent people and bring them to justice,” Bush told reporters in Washington.
The sense of shock, horror and sorrow seems to have engulfed the entire island, which for decades has been known only as an oasis of peace, harmony and beauty. Local Balinese are going about their daily lives, and those tourists who have opted to remain continue to shop and visit the local beaches. But the brave faces being put on cannot mask the overpowering and visible sense of dread. “Why Bali?” asked Feisol H. Hashim of the Indonesian Tourism Council.
Why, indeed? I have visited Bali more than 15 times in the past seven years, always leaving refreshed, relaxed and with a tan. The Balinese, who are mainly Hindus, have mastered the art of hospitality and racial harmony. I had encouraged friends and family to visit, saying it would be the experience of a lifetime. In March, I even guided two vacationing friends around the island. At my suggestion, we went to dance one night at the Sari Club, which was destroyed in the weekend fireball by a car bomb containing plastic explosives.
After walking through the rubble of the blast site this week, and realizing we had been at that very spot a few months before, my memories of that happy evening out will always be tainted by the horror of the carnage that took place there.
Previous visitors who are safely thousands of miles away are also sharing my dread and shock–and searching for answers. Kirsten Hatherley, a traveling Briton whom I met earlier this year in northern Bali, sent me an e-mail that sadly sounded like an obituary for the country’s tourism industry. “I have such wonderful memories of my time in Bali,” she wrote. “It’s such a shame that so many people will not have the same experience, and now the country will suffer greatly.”
There’s no doubt of that. Thousands of hotel reservations will be cancelled, charter flights scrapped and throngs of would-be tourists will undoubtedly stay away in the coming months or years. The bombings will have major security implications for Indonesia, the world’s fourth-largest nation with 220 million people. Surviving friends and relatives of the victims, who come from five continents, will be wracked by grief for years.
But what about the Balinese? Tourism is their security and livelihood. The island survives on the 1.4 million visitors who come each year, spending nearly $2 billion annually. The jobs of most Balinese are directly linked to the tourism industry, whether it is a mom-and-pop restaurant or a farmer whose vegetables are bought by the local hotel resorts. During my travels on Bali, I’ve eaten at the roadside stands and driven past farmers tending their fields. Some of them won’t make it. Indeed, entire villages will face economic hardship, even collapse. For them too, the pain of terror will longer on.
