CHICAGO — Score this one, Error-commissioner.
Bud Selig and his management team blew it with their financial disclosures. The breach in trust caused by the perception that owners once again are crying poor while dining at Morton's will make it even more difficult to achieve the reasoned changes they want to make in baseball's economic system.
Selig's miscalculation doesn't lie in whether 21 teams operated at a loss last season, as the owners argue, or whether only 10 lost money, as Forbes magazine recently reported. It is in allowing the various methods of accounting to become a topic of discussion.
This time, unlike in previous labor negotiations, the owners aren't basing their case for economic reform on claims of industry-wide poverty. Their case is based on the disparity of revenues from team to team and the need to improve competitive balance.
It is a compelling case. But the owners' actual agenda seldom is discussed. Instead Selig has allowed sound-bite matters such as contraction, bridge loans, Paul Beeston's resignation and now the inevitable scrum over financial disclosures to obscure it.
Of course, Selig and Major League Baseball's labor team present the public with worst-case financial scenarios. Of course, others find different ways to look at the same data. Isn't this what always happens when accounting is involved?
But Selig reacted badly, making the MLB-Forbes discrepancy appear even worse. He did this one week after his staffers took great offense to an overreaction from players association leader Donald Fehr, who almost bit off the owners' hands when they extended a no-lockout pledge for the upcoming season.
Forbes reported that MLB operated at an overall profit of $75 million last season. Selig, at a congressional hearing in December, claimed losses of $232 million.
Selig termed the Forbes report "pure fiction." His spokesman, Rich Levin, acted outraged that the writer of the story, Mike Ozanian, hadn't accepted MLB's accounting methods after they were explained to him in a meeting at baseball's headquarters.
We may not have heard the last of this either. Selig, who insists three different groups audited these financial statements, threatens to have more to say about the discrepancy. That would be another mistake.
No matter how Selig spins it, he's going to wind up looking bad, if for no other reason than the inherent conflict of interest he faces as commissioner.
"Gee, should I believe a magazine that spends 365 days a year researching finances, or someone who has zero credibility?" asked Minnesota Twins player rep Denny Hocking.
Selig, lead negotiator Rob Manfred and the management lawyers would be served better if they tried to get attention focused on the issues. That is the need to take some of the broadcast revenue from the New York Yankees and other large-revenue teams and move it down the line to give more teams a realistic chance to compete.