Baseball Talks Starting to Heat Up

The tone sharpened in the baseball contract talks Thursday, with each side accusing the other of stalling.

With 12 days remaining until the union’s strike deadline of Aug. 6, Commissioner Peter Ueberroth said he was encouraging both sides to work very hard at their jobs.

One union negotiator, Marvin Miller, said pessimistically that he has concluded that either the owners are willing to accept a strike or are so divided that they are unable to come up with a comprehensive offer to make to the union.

Both Miller and union leader Donald Fehr characterized as “provocative” a new pitch by the owners’ negotiators to get the union to accept their proposal requiring three years of player service before salary arbitration, rather than the current two. The union has proposed that only one year of regular service be required.

Fehr said that the owners’ proposal would adversely affect 40% of the 650 major league players by diminishing their ability to increase their salary in their early years.

Owners’ negotiator Barry Rona said that during the meeting, Fehr had become “more upset and more outraged than any rational analysis would lead us to believe he would. . . . Don was off the wall. I can’t figure it out.”

Rona said that the owners’ salary-arbitration stand was not new.

Miller, in response, called that “an outright, bald-faced lie.”

The language by both sides was far stronger than it has been.

Neither of the apparent crucial issues--a possible salary cap and an increase in player pension benefits--apparently came up. The owners continued to say that there is no point in making a specific pension proposal until the union indicates some give on salaries.

Both sides have indicated in recent days that they expect Ueberroth to make some move of his own to get the talks off dead center.

Ueberroth, who has appeared to be in a relaxed mood in recent days, has given no hint of what such a move might be, but he has said he may meet sometime this weekend with the four owners on the negotiating council--Bud Selig of the Milwaukee Brewers, Peter O’Malley of the Dodgers, John McMullen of the Houston Astros and Edward Bennett Williams of the Baltimore Orioles.