Baseball Talks Snagged Over Salary Arbitration

The issues were distinctly narrowed in the baseball talks here Sunday, and the main sticking point holding up a settlement appeared to be salary arbitration.

With the strike deadline just two days away, the club owners dropped their insistence on a cap on player salaries. But they continued to demand a rollback of players’ eligibility for salary arbitration from two years’ service to three, and they asked to limit arbitration awards to no more than a 100% increase over the previous year.

The players’ union, meanwhile, said that if the owners would accept a continuation of present arbitration procedures, they would drop their insistence on receiving $60 million in annual contributions to their pension fund and offer to take a considerably lower amount. Joe Price, Reds player representative, said in Cincinnati that the figure was $45 million.

Union leader Donald Fehr said that under the union’s plan, the difference between the lower amount and the $60 million would be paid under a revenue-sharing plan to major league clubs that are under financial pressure. He said this would represent recognition by the players that some clubs indeed are in financial difficulty and a gesture to help them get out of it. The funds used would be from baseball’s $180 million-a-year national television contract.

However, at the end of two-and-a-half hours of talks at a law firm in midtown Manhattan, the owners were not prepared to drop their demands for the salary arbitration changes, and the union in response would not proceed with specifying the figures in its pension offer until they did.

No new negotiating session was immediately scheduled, although it appeared certain there will be at least informal talks before the strike deadline Tuesday.

Sunday’s movement, after weeks of fruitless bargaining, indicated that the talks may have reached their closing stages. In fact, a spokesman for the owners said he was making arrangements to rent a hotel ballroom to announce a settlement.

But a strike remains a definite possibility.

Lee MacPhail, the owners’ chief negotiator, said that the owners’ main goal in the talks for a new, five-year contract continues to be “to get the clubs back somewhere near a break-even point” financially, and that changes in salary arbitration are now the only means to that end.

Fehr, on the other hand, said that the union will not compromise on salary arbitration because it regards it as crucial to maintaining the present high major league salary structure.

Average player salaries have doubled from $185,000 to $363,000 in the four years since the last general contract was signed.

Salary arbitration has been integral to the steady rise, because the mere threat of it has often been sufficient to get the clubs to offer players sharp salary increases.

While only 13 players actually underwent arbitration last year, 84 filed for it, thus using it to get their clubs to come across with more money.

The owners have complained that many of the arbitrators have proved overly friendly to the players in making their awards. MacPhail said Sunday that, in some cases, young players have been wrongfully compared by the arbitrators to older, much more valuable free agents and that inflated New York and Los Angeles player values have been assigned to players in smaller markets such as Seattle and Oakland.

He said the owners also are pressing to create panels of three arbitrators rather than just one and to put limits on how long an arbitrator is allowed to serve.

Just before Sunday’s talks began, Commissioner Peter Ueberroth hinted in an appearance on ABC’s David Brinkley show that he might take drastic action to avert a strike, if one appeared imminent. But he gave no indication what such action might be.

When Ueberroth was asked whether he might try to invoke the rights of baseball fans not to have a strike to deprive the players of their right to strike, he responded:

“The answer to your question is most likely probably yes. . . . The fan cannot go unrepresented. Maybe the laws of the country are very strict. . . . But if you tell me the laws of this country, between 650 (major league players) and the 26 owners, can ignore 30 million (fans), then I don’t think the laws in this case should apply.”

It was not at all clear what Ueberroth meant by these remarks, and he declined later to elaborate on them.

Meanwhile, negotiators on both sides said that at present Ueberroth is not a major factor in the actual talks themselves.

In fact, Fehr said that a lesser issue had cropped up Sunday in which Ueberroth might actually prove to be an impediment to a settlement.

The union leader said the owners, after weeks of indicating they were willing to rewrite language to restrict the commissioner’s power to intervene in the grievance procedure and make his own rulings to preserve “the integrity of the game,” have now refused to agree to any change.

He said the players want a change, even though they have the right to strike if they do not like a commissioner’s ruling under this contract provision.

The procedure has never been used by a commissioner, but the union reportedly fears that it might somehow be used in Ueberroth’s present efforts to stem drug use by players. The union has resisted all suggestions that it agree to mandatory testing of players.

Although Fehr said the union takes the matter seriously, it did not appear to be the kind of issue that by itself would bring on a strike.

Fehr announced with a flourish the union’s willingness to reduce its pension benefits’ demand, opening a briefing for reporters by saying, “there is something significant that happened today.”

The offer, he said, “constitutes what is our best shot to try to make an agreement. . . . It would involve leaving the existing salary arbitration system intact, with no changes designed to drive down salaries of disadvantaged younger players. . . . Or future players.”

But, he said, when he put this condition on it, the owners’ negotiating team declined to even ask him how much he was willing to give up in pension benefits.

MacPhail responded: “Once they made it clear their proposal was linked to no changes in the system, there wasn’t much sense in our asking what the number was.”

Nonetheless, MacPhail expressed optimism about the talks in the two days remaining before a strike would begin with the Tuesday night games.

“I think we’re down to one fine point here,” he said, that being salary arbitration.

He also said the union would willingly delay the strike if real progress was being made in the negotiations over that issue by Tuesday.

Fehr, however, said that as things now stand, the players will be advised by the union not to travel to their new playing sites after tonight’s games unless a settlement has been reached.

MacPhail, in alluding to the dropping of the salary cap proposal by the owners, gave no explanation. But Ueberroth had strongly opposed the salary cap suggestion and in recent weeks it had seemed more and more untenable.

A minor agreement that was reached Sunday was that there will be no change in current contract language on expanding the number of major league clubs.

The union had asked the clubs to commit to expansion, which the clubs were unwilling to do. The clubs asked the union to give them the right to six-team expansion without further bargaining, which the union refused to do. So the present language will remain, allowing a two-team expansion within the National League only, without further bargaining with the union.