Clinton Doesn’t Belong on This Playing Field

Major league baseball has no tie to public health, education or welfare. These are not commercial airline traffic controllers, police officers, postal workers or school teachers, affecting society’s well-being. These are grown men who hit balls with a stick.

Nevertheless, there stands President Clinton, bizarrely dividing his attention between a multibillion-dollar recreational activity and a recommendation that the minimum wage for American labor be raised to $5.15 an hour.

And, should “special mediator” W.J. Usery be unable to unfreeze the baseball impasse himself, there he is, Batter Up Bill, ready to step up and settle it himself. Clinton could ask Congress to force binding arbitration right down the throats of the owners, like Gerber’s to a baby.

(Next thing we know, the White House will also rule on the dispute over which team should be No. 1 in college football, Nebraska or Penn State.)

Of all the peculiar issues to find oneself siding with Newt Gingrich, who could have foreseen this one? As it happens, the Speaker of the House spoke for this sportswriter Tuesday when he said that Congress did not seem the proper place to organize a game. Or, to quote Gingrich verbatim, “I’m not sure what the national interest is.”

Base hit for Newt.

The federal government’s sole input into the day-to-day functions of the game of baseball should be in regard to the sport’s outdated and no longer justifiable antitrust exemption, which should be abolished forthwith. That, and occasionally tossing out a ceremonial first pitch.

So while the intervention--more like interference--of a federal mediator and the National Labor Relations Board might be useful, it is nonetheless thoroughly inappropriate. Washington, D.C., is not a baseball town anymore, yet one would never know this from the way the nation’s capital has haughtily insinuated itself back into the so-called national pastime.

All but over his shoulder, Clinton expressed a colorful and rather folksy opinion Monday on the state of the baseball union: “It’s just a few hundred folks trying to figure out how to divide nearly $2 billion. They ought to be able to figure that out.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah expressed much the same sentiment: “I believe this to be a matter the parties should be working out for themselves.”

Indeed they should.

Which is why Batter Up Bill and the Washington senators should simply keep out of it.

Federally imposed deadlines are unfair and uncalled for. Just because a sport-famished populace yearns for the Yankees to play the Red Sox is no reason for Usery to enforce his own brand of justice by choosing sides. Usery and the individual who appointed him have no justification in telling independent businessmen how to run their entertainment firms, any more than Clinton should be able to tell 20th Century Fox and Paramount how and when to make films.

The baseball strike needs no umpire. This is nothing more than a division of opinion between the proprietors and workers of an American industry, a business that somehow is improperly afforded preferential treatment and status. It is appalling enough that an “arbitrator” often decides salary increases for athletes without a “mediator” determining that the sky is the limit.

The White House had no call choosing sides. It would never have meddled in the Hormel meat packers’ strike in Minnesota or the newspaper truck drivers’ strike in New York. Binding arbitration might well have been imposed during a nationwide railway strike, but any comparison between public transportation and baseball is wildly inept.

“We would rather the law stay out of this,” was pitcher Tom Glavine’s take on the situation, even as he was dispatching a letter to Clinton, welcoming his help.

Clinton appears ready to use Usery’s advice and insist that the owners like it or lump it.

Making a suggestion is one thing, but asking legislators to act on it is another. Sen. Bob Dole’s gut reaction--”I’m not sure we should be looking to Congress for any magic solution”--could not address the fact of the matter any better.

The resumption of major league baseball has nothing whatever to do with the laws of this republic or the inalienable rights of anyone in it. Mr. President, members of Congress . . . butt out.