STRIKE III : THE AFTERMATH : MacPhail Says Owners Pleased With Accord

Lee MacPhail, the owners’ chief negotiator in the baseball contract talks, said Thursday that only one of the 26 owners has complained to him about the terms of the strike settlement with the players.

MacPhail said that Commissioner Peter Ueberroth happened to be sitting right by his desk when the call from the owner, whom he would not name, came in.

Ueberroth, he said, promptly took the phone and informed the owner that he was a lucky man because the strike had not continued.

MacPhail, who had seemed a trifle disappointed with the agreement Wednesday night because it does little to alleviate the financial problems of the clubs, said Thursday that he nonetheless thought it was a good compromise. “We could not afford another 50-day strike,” he said.

The 68-year-old former American League president, rounding out a long and varied career in organized baseball, said he had heard from a number of owners expressing satisfaction with the results.

One of them was Edward Bennett Williams of the Baltimore Orioles, who said that under the circumstances he was well pleased with the outcome.

MacPhail said that not all the owners had been informed in advance of the negotiating team’s decision to give way to the players and abandon the push for a cap on salary arbitration awards. But he said that the executive negotiating council of owners, headed by Bud Selig of the Milwaukee Brewers, had been fully informed.

MacPhail said that the negotiations, spread over nine months, were made particularly difficult by three factors:

--It was hard for the players to accept that, for the first time, they were going to have to take less than their traditional one-third share of baseball’s national television package for their pension fund. In the agreement, their share dropped to 18%, although their annual take will increase from $15.5 to $32.7 million.

--The clubs’ poor financial situation kept them pushing for a player salary cap until it became utterly certain that the union would rather strike than accept it.

--Since this was the first contract negotiation with Donald Fehr as head of the union, Fehr felt under great pressure not to be too accommodating, especially since the acclaimed, retired union leader, Marvin Miller, was sitting right next to him at the negotiating table.

Given all this, MacPhail said he thought it was great that the two sides had managed to agree, with some prodding from Ueberroth, without acrimony. It is certainly an agreement both sides can live with, he said.

He also expressed hope that the players and owners will be able to deal cordially with one another in the years ahead on such difficult issues as drugs.

As for reports that his own relationship with Ueberroth was stormy, MacPhail said he considered it satisfactory. When he disagrees with Ueberroth, as he did over the commissioner’s opposition to the salary cap, he tells him so, he said.

MacPhail was interviewed just after attending a mid-afternoon party of champagne and roasted peanuts thrown by Ueberroth for his staff to celebrate the settlement to the strike.