The owners don't understand why the players don't understand.
"It must have some impact to have 28 baseball owners and 26 hockey owners saying we have to change the system," said John McMullen, owner of the New Jersey Devils and former owner of the Houston Astros, discussing the mutual labor problems of both sports.
Howard Baldwin, owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins and possible future owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, made a similar point. "It's got to tell you something that all professional sports are going through this," he said. "It's got to tell you there has to be a better balance."
But obviously the owners in both baseball and hockey have not convinced their employees that a new, better-balanced economic system is needed. Otherwise baseball would not be in the 67th day of a strike and hockey in the 17th day of a lockout.
No end of either dispute is in sight. The National Basketball Association, Commissioner David Stern's cheery outlook notwithstanding, may join the fray before either is resolved. This is Sports Labor 1994, and no one has a clue how to restore the games to the field and to the ice.
The owners say the growth of salaries is increasingly outpacing the growth of revenues. So the owners propose a new economic system. The N.B.A. and the National Football League have a revenue-participation system that places a cap on payrolls, and that's what major league baseball wants. The N.H.L. ideally would like a cap, too, but its players won't even talk about the idea, so the hockey strategists substitute a luxury tax on payrolls.
The players on both fronts want no part of a cap or a tax; let the market dictate salaries, they say. That won't work any longer, the owners counter, especially because they don't trust some of their own to maintain a semblance of a sane market. So the players, asked again to save the owners from themselves, reluctantly dip their big toe into the tax game.
Not nearly enough, the owners respond. At a news conference where he labeled the players' latest proposal a step backward, Gary Bettman, the N.H.L. commissioner, was asked last week whether the owners considered the players' willingness to accept a payroll tax a meaningful hurdle they had leaped.
"If it were a meaningful tax, one that accomplishes the goal we're seeking, I would consider it a meaningful hurdle they've passed," Bettman said. "But we haven't reached that point."
In other words, the owners keep insisting that the players understand their problems while declining to acknowledge that the players have legitimate concerns of their own. The mentality is the same in baseball.
In baseball, where the owners have offered 50 percent of their revenue for the salary cap plan, Richard Ravitch, the owners' chief labor executive, has said: "If the players don't like 50 percent, what percentage would they like? Let them tell us; give us another figure."
In hockey, where the owners' proposed luxury tax has a rate of greater than 100 percent on the final increment of payroll, Jeffrey Pash, Bettman's chief aide in negotiations, has said: "Why doesn't the union come back with a proposal that tries to negotiate these rates? You don't like 125, you don't like 122, tell us what you like."
Pash and Ravitch understand very well why the players don't respond that way. If they did what the negotiators would like, the players would be buying into the concept of a salary cap or a heavy luxury tax, and they're not about to do that. The disputes will not be settled on that basis.
Nor does it seem very likely that the disputes will be resolved by one side's outwaiting the other and accepting an unconditional surrender.
The baseball players always have been solid; the hockey players, perhaps emboldened by the stand of their baseball brethren, appear to be unflinching. The owners in both sports, who have indeed folded in previous stoppages, are congratulating one another for their unity and solidarity. All they have won is the shutdown of their businesses, but they'll take victory where they can find it.
But Baldwin, the Penguins' owner, offered a sensible approach in a recent discussion of the hockey shutdown.
"No one's winning," he said. "Let's go for a tie. In hockey, that's acceptable."
In this instance, a tie would be beneficial for baseball, too. The game already has been called on account of darkness.
Perhaps the biggest problem in the narrow, partisan positions of both sides in both sports is the absence of creativity. Instead of seeking a compromise solution, the management and labor factions have adhered to what each wants or the maximum each is willing to give up. They need to be creative and design a flexible formula that would benefit each side when the economics call for one side or the other to be favored.
"There's a need for a mechanism that is adjustable to whether salaries are outpacing revenues or whether revenues are outpacing salaries," said Tom Reich, a veteran agent who represents players in both sports. "It should allow for flip-flops that occur from year to year or every couple of years. What's fair at one moment might not be fair at another unless you have a mechanism that treats that spread."
The clubs' primary concern, Reich noted, is the rate at which salaries rise compared to the rate at which revenues rise. That's why the owners want to retard the rate of salary escalation, if not reduce salaries altogether, with a cap or a luxury tax.
But, Reich said, "If revenue percentage increases are outpacing salary percentage increases, that should be reflected."
If the negotiators and economists used their imaginations as well as their computers, the two sides in both sports could work out a system by which the owners would get a tax under one circumstance but lose it under another, depending on revenues and payrolls.
Without that kind of creativity, owners and players most likely will wage their disputes endlessly.
Last week it was obvious President Clinton did not want to be associated with the baseball dispute. The baseball principals were at his house to welcome a mediator into their talks, but Clinton remained out of public view. He has been associated with enough negative developments, and he preferred to greet Bud Selig and Don Fehr privately.
In a very public way, on the other hand, hockey people were finding out what their dispute was costing them.
Two weekly television series, "N.Y.P.D. Blue" and "Friends," last week featured scenes involving Rangers' games. The script writers obviously were taking advantage of a sport suddenly more popular, in part because of the Stanley Cup playoffs last season.
The prime-time television exposure was one way in which hockey was going to benefit from the absence of post-season baseball. But now hockey joins baseball in enduring labor pains that persist because no one can figure out how to give birth to a solution.
