Owner Suggests Ueberroth Forced a Settlement : But Chiles’ Claim, Based on Reports He Read, Is Disputed by O’Malley, Selig : STRIKE III THE AFTERMATH

Owner Eddie Chiles of the Texas Rangers was quoted Friday as suggesting that Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth ramrodded this week’s contract settlement without advising the four-owner negotiating council.

“As I understand it, the Player Relations Committee (the negotiators for the owners, plus the four owners who were present) had very little input into the structuring of the settlement,” Chiles told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He suggested that an “outside force,” apparently meaning Ueberroth, had ordered them to reach a settlement.

Chiles conceded, however, that he had no firsthand information and was judging from reports he had read.

Two members of the negotiating council--chairman Bud Selig of the Milwaukee Brewers and Peter O’Malley of the Dodgers--promptly denied they had been unaware of details of the settlement, or of last-day concessions their negotiating team was going to make.

O’Malley told The Times: “I’m very comfortable with the agreement. I knew what was being done and I was not surprised by the final terms.”

Selig said that the owners’ chief negotiator, Lee MacPhail, had been fully aware of what the owners felt and that he was not surprised by any of the concessions that MacPhail made at the end.

Chiles said that the way baseball now is run, with such high salaries for the players, it is “getting close to communism.” He said that the club owners had lost in the agreement.

“I think, damn it, that’s what I think,” he told the newspaper. “I think we lost. We lost position as a result of the settlement, which I think was ill-advised and improperly made.”

O’Malley said, however: “I think, obviously, both sides have things to be pleased about in the agreement. There is something in there for everybody, and not everybody got everything they wanted.”

Selig said he, too, was “very comfortable with everything that was done.”

As for Ueberroth’s role, Selig said: “Peter Ueberroth is an activist. I do not take umbrage at anything he did.”

O’Malley said that Ueberroth had been able to make some contributions to the process but added: “I, personally, could not be looking over my shoulder” all the time, wondering what Ueberroth was going to do. Neither owner seemed eager to discuss Ueberroth’s role in detail.

Chiles said that the owners should be in total control of their “financial destiny by being in control of their expenses. That’s the American system.”

With so much given away to the players’ union, he said, “I think we’ll see bankruptcy in baseball and losses for most teams, and there will be a downgrading of (what) baseball fans are used to seeing. It is unpatriotic.”

He said the owners’ negotiators should have held fast on their original terms and let the strike run its course.