On another sweltering afternoon of practice in training camp, in which a football player's career and paycheck could come to an end as quickly as a snapped bone, some Steelers wondered what is wrong with Major League Baseball.
Baseball players are the highest paid athletes in pro team sports with guaranteed contracts, and they might go on strike for the second time in eight years? That's hard to imagine for football players such as Wayne Gandy and Lee Flowers, who enter the final year of their contracts and won't even see that money if the Steelers were to cut them in camp.
Neither blames the baseball players for the sport's predicament, but like many fans, both wonder how baseball got there.
"When you start paying people $250 million in a sport that's not really as popular as it used to be, you're going to have some problems," Gandy said. "And the contract is guaranteed! Now you have a problem with drugs and owners want some type of testing to purify the game."
Many of the Steelers are baseball fans. Gandy is an unabashed fan of the game -- his favorite player is Barry Bonds -- and he often wears a navy blue New York Yankees cap or visor. Flowers wears jerseys from old Negro League teams and also sported a Yankees cap this week. Jerome Bettis wears a cap of his hometown Detroit Tigers.
But it's hard for them to understand how baseball players who average more than $2 million annually on guaranteed contracts could walk out in the middle of a season. They don't necessarily blame the players because they noted that even the owners can't agree on what to do. There hasn't been a work stoppage in the NFL in 15 years, and there won't be for at least another five because the collective bargaining agreement has been extended through 2007.
"If you look at all the other professional sports, somehow we always find a way to get along with the owners," Flowers said. "I don't know why baseball is different, being that they are the highest-paid athletes out there right now. It's guaranteed.
"Me being a professional football player and being a fan of their sport, I'm like a 9-to-5 cat right now, I don't understand what the argument is about. You already have guaranteed money. I just think it's unfortunate for the fans who struggle to make a living and having money to buy a ticket and take their little kids to see a game, and these guys can't work out their situations."
Steelers broadcaster Tunch Ilkin, the team's former union representative during the last football strike in 1987, had words of caution for baseball:
"Don't let greed kill the game."
"I think what the players and management of the NFL understand -- where I don't think baseball does -- is you have to be good stewards of the game," Ilkin said. "You have to understand, there's only so much money to go around and that [in the NFL] it's shared. I think it's a very equitable system in the National Football League. Some guys complain about the salary cap and understandably so. But the reality of it is, what that does is it ensures that if the owners make money, the players make money, and so I think it's equitable."
But it took that strike by the players in 1987 to eventually bring about the new system in the NFL. Players walked out, and, after a week without games, the NFL resumed its games with replacement players. Many veterans crossed the picket line. Hall of Fame center Mike Webster was the first to do so with the Steelers, playing all three strike games, and Hall of Fame receiver John Stallworth caught his 500th pass in a replacement game. The strike collapsed after the third strike game and the season resumed with the regular players.
"We fought for it and lost in '87," Ilkin said. "We got our tails handed to us."
The short-lived strike ultimately wrought sweeping changes in the NFL system after the NFL Players Association decertified and a Minnesota judge forced the owners to come up with a new collective bargaining agreement.
That CBA, forged in 1992, is the envy of all professional sports, a model agreement that incorporates revenue sharing that has been in the NFL since the early 1960s, a salary cap and guaranteed salary floor, free agency and other increased benefits.
No pro sports union and management get along as well as those in football. Gene Upshaw, a Hall of Fame guard with the Oakland Raiders, heads the union. Steelers President Dan Rooney has been the driving force on management council. The two consider themselves friends.
"Gene and Dan understand the importance to keep extending the agreement," Ilkin said. "And that's what you get. It's a good system, an equitable system, and they want it to continue. I think that's why you have labor peace in the NFL. There's not a lot of greed here."
Even though it happened 15 years ago, many current football players know what a strike could do to their sport -- and to them individually. They do not wield the power of baseball's union, and the 1987 strike showed that.
"There are just too many guys," Flowers said of the available supply of football players. "With [NFL Europe] right now, you have so many guys on the street. A number 41's going to be on the field. It might not say "FLOWERS" but there's going to be somebody else out there. There are too many guys who want to play the game and get their chance, so I don't see that happening here."
As the Steelers current players representative, tight end Mark Bruener doesn't begrudge the baseball players anything. Get what you can, boys, is how Bruener sees it. But he also believes football players have better retirement benefits, and they have Rooney to thank for the labor peace the NFL has enjoyed for so long.
"I personally think that one reason our labor agreement has maintained its consistency and durability over the years is that Mr. Rooney helped design the collective bargaining agreement and he's a very fair individual. His objective was to make a fair deal for the players and owners. They have seen that over the years, and both players and owners have continually agreed on that deal."
Ed Bouchette can be reached at ebouchette@post-gazette.com or 412-263-3878.
Baseball's problems illogical to Steelers 
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