Baseball Lurches Toward New Strike : Salary Arbitration and Pensions Remain Major Unsolved Issues

Another baseball strike appeared imminent Monday night after owner and union negotiators had reached an apparent impasse on salary arbitration and pension benefits.

Each side made a statement justifying its unwillingness to compromise and lay the blame for a strike on the other.

Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth--who just eight days ago had said that he would not allow a strike--called late Monday night for new talks “at the earliest possible times” to resolve the dispute.

“The fans deserve the last ounce of everyone’s energy to resolve the current impasse,” the commissioner said. He said he was asking Lee MacPhail, the owner’s chief negotiator, to contact the union to seek the resumption of the talks. Ueberroth also called union leader Donald Fehr.

An hour later, a spokesperson for the union said that Fehr would meet with MacPhail this morning.

As Ueberroth was leaving his office, he was asked about today’s meeting. “I think it will be successful,” he said. “I hope it will be.”

A strike, which would go into effect with tonight’s games, would be the first in organized baseball since the 50-day walkout in 1981.

The rhetoric on both sides Monday was much sharper than it has been. Over the weekend, members of both negotiating teams had privately indicated that settlement was close. To hear Fehr and MacPhail talk, a great chasm now separates them.

Asked at a news conference why, if both sides do not want a strike, as has frequently been stated, a strike seems about to occur, MacPhail responded, “I don’t quite understand it either.”

But Fehr said that after Monday’s negotiating session it had become apparent to him that the difference between the owners and the players is “not now, nor has it ever been, about money.

“This is about putting the players in their place,” he said. He charged that in advancing a salary arbitration plan that would involve setting a 100% cap on arbitrators’ awards of salary increases for individual players over their previous years salaries, the owners were trying to radically alter the salary structure of the game and keep all players, except a few free agents, from receiving fair market value for their services.

MacPhail, for his part, said the union had been “alarmingly destructive” in what he termed its unwillingness to accept the owner’s claim that organized baseball is in deep financial trouble.

“We have been talking to the (union) for many months about the financial problems in baseball,” he said. “We have told them that we were sincerely concerned about the future health and viability of the game, that our concern was not just about 1985, but that the trends showed losses increasing markedly in the future.”

Instead of accepting that, MacPhail charged, the players asked Monday for a $25 million increase in annual pension benefits--$152 million over six years--and opposed any restraint on rising players salaries that have doubled in the last four years. This, he said, “obviously cannot be accepted by the clubs.”

It appears that the pension benefits issue might be less important than the one over salary arbitration. On pensions, only $17 million a year separated the sides and the benefits do not affect individual players soon. By contrast, with the salary arbitration issue, many more millions of dollars are potentially involved and players could be affected next year.

The owners, under terms of the expired past contract, have been contributing $15.5 million a year out of their national television money to the players’ pension fund.

But since the last contract was signed in 1981, baseball’s national television contract has increased to $186 million a year and the union, up until the weekend, was asking for an increase to $60 million a year.

The players said they would be willing to take $42 million a year. The owners have offered as high as $25 million a year.

In salary arbitration, however, the change could be more far reaching.

By extending eligibility for arbitration from two years of service to three years and putting a cap of 100% on the awards, the owners are indirectly trying for broad salary control. The union rejects that idea.

Although only 13 players went through salary arbitration this year, the 100% cap would have great affect, particularly on such talented players as Joaquin Andujar and Fernando Valenzuela, who have in the past tripled or quadrupled their salaries in a given year.

If a club realized that no arbitrator could award a salary more than double what the players received the previous year, there would be no incentive for a club to offer any player more than a 100% salary increase. That would keep some players--even according to MacPhail--from earning more than $480,000 a year before becoming a free agent in his seventh year.

In short, the days of young players like Valenzuela earning more than $1 million a year could well be over if such a cap were put in place.

Ueberroth has opposed a salary cap. The owners, in response, dropped their idea for a straight salary cap in the negotiations.

But Fehr said Monday that, in effect, the 100% cap in arbitration would be just as effective a cap.

“You have a commissioner (Ueberroth) who supposedly works for them who has told everybody as loudly as he can . . . that that’s an unfair thing to do,” he said.

“It’s incredible to me that we would be asked to accept anything like that in the face of his comments. After all, he’s the guy who was hired to straighten out the club’s finances.”

MacPhail, however, responded that the owners have the “modest aim” of moving the clubs toward a break-even position by the end of the 1988 season and “certainly that is not an unreasonable goal.

“Salary arbitration is extremely important to us,” he said. “We just feel that we have to start bringing some kind of change in the system or baseball’s going to go down the drain . . . or at least we will lose the financial stability of the game.”

The union challenges the owners’ position that the clubs, overall, are losing money. Based on financial data submitted by the clubs, the owners’ side, for instance, says that the clubs as a whole lost $28 million last year. The union’s analysis however is that they made a profit of $9 million.

Meanwhile, Ueberroth’s position was obscure. After appearing on a morning television news show, he made no more public statements until his cryptic call for new negotiations after 10 p.m. When some reporters encountered him in the foyer of his office building in the afternoon, he brusquely said he had no time to chat.

His press spokesman, Rich Levin, said, however, that Ueberroth was not in a position to enter the talks directly unless he was asked to, and that neither side had asked him to. Levin said that Ueberroth had met with members of the owners’ negotiating council and that he was seeking to get them to moderate their position.

MacPhail was asked at his news conference whether Ueberroth could do anything at this point to avert a strike.

“The commissioner is the commissioner,” he responded. “He has his own responsibilities. He has the responsibility to the game and the public. He does not want to see a strike any more than anyone else. . . . He’s doing whatever he can.”