Columnist Dean Juipe: Is bankruptcy baseball’s best solution?

Dean Juipe

Friday, July 19, 2002 | 9:57 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

It's a discussion being held and overheard at any number of sites these days, as befits a topic that gets a baseball fan's blood boiling.

Whether it's in bars or sports books or, I suppose, on talk radio, there is a faction that believes baseball could get itself out from under its widespread financial troubles simply by declaring and filing for bankruptcy. The action, the argument goes, can be done collectively, as if the sport were a singular entity.

It makes for good conversation because it's just intriguing enough to tantalize those who would favor it, while being just fanciful enough to outrage its opponents.

Whether it's a solution or pure folly may be in the eyes of the beholder. Yet both sides would agree that the legal ramifications are many, and, perhaps, too diverse to be fully understood from a layman's limited perspective.

Baseball, of course, is facing a possible players' strike yet this year, one that would not only jeopardize the World Series but would add to the widespread view that greed has overrun the sport. With the average salary in excess of $2.3 million annually, public sympathy is in short supply.

Team owners, who allowed if not encouraged a salary structure laden with guarantees and long-term commitments, routinely wail about their plight. Yet they have cried wolf before, which does their cause no good and reduces the effectiveness of this round of bellyaching.

But just this week rumors surfaced that at least one team -- believed to be Detroit or Tampa Bay -- might not be able to meet its payroll demands, though those concerns apparently have been put to rest. Still applicable, however, is the belief that Major League Baseball needs to contract and eliminate at least two and maybe four teams, one of which almost certainly would be Montreal.

Yet contraction in any form may serve no great purpose in the long run, say those who are enamored of this parallel notion of a collective bankruptcy. What they advocate is a legal measure that would achieve one of two purposes: either eliminate all debts charged to every team; or, at its most scintillating, void every player's contract with a single action on a specific day.

Attorneys could haggle into perpetuity on the latter and whether such a sweeping move is even remotely within the guidelines of the law, and I personally suspect it isn't. But if it were, the argument goes, those teams left standing would start with a blank roster and sign players accordingly (and presumably, at far lesser salaries than they are currently receiving).

That's a pretty wild proposition, but having listened in to a couple of these impromptu (and alcohol-fed) verbal spats this week I can tell you it makes for some spirited give and take. Imagine, for one day at least, that every player would be a free agent and none would be bound to his present team.

"Too good to be true," is the general disclaimer, no matter what side of the fence the debater falls on.

But the lesser proposition, that filing for bankruptcy would take every team out of debt without affecting player contracts, is likely to be drawing some consideration even within the MLB boardroom. And that alone legitimizes any and all battle plans, no matter how farfetched, that might be concocted by the man on the street.