The Baseball Negotiations : After 7 Months of Stalemate, Settlement Came Quickly

Lee MacPhail walked into a blaze of camera lights and stepped up to a podium in the Presidential Suite at the Summit Hotel in Manhattan. He read from a prepared statement.

After a day without formal negotiations, he was, as it turned out, making his final public appearance for two days, during which baseball players would go on strike, agree to a settlement and prepare to return to work.

“I can’t say I’m optimistic at this point,” MacPhail, management’s chief negotiator, said after he read his statement. “But until there’s actually a strike, we’ll do everything reasonable to stop it.”

It was Monday night, Aug. 5, one day before a strike deadline imposed by the Major League Players Assn. It seemed unthinkable that negotiators would let that day pass without really negotiating. But they did, and there seemed little doubt there would be a strike.

Over and again, union chief Donald Fehr, red-faced and looking exasperated, accused owners of trying to quash the free-market rights of players.

On July 15, one day before the All-Star game, the executive board of the Major League Players Assn. met in Chicago to set the strike deadline. After eight months of slow-paced negotiations, the two sides had three weeks to reach a settlement.

The way things had gone, it seemed impossible, yet they almost pulled it off.

The two big issues were pensions and salary arbitration. The players wanted one-third of baseball’s $1.1 billion network TV contract for its pension and benefits fund. Players said the one-third figure was traditional. Owners, however, did not want to share that big a sum, about $60 million per year.

Owners were looking for some drastic changes in salary arbitration. Most of all, they wanted a 100% cap on arbitration awards, meaning a player could ask for no more than double his current salary. They also wanted to extend from two to three years the length of service needed to qualify for arbitration.

In the end, the pension issue was rather easily solved. It was, after all, only a matter of agreeing on numbers and, in collective bargaining, settling on numbers is generally easier than resolving ideological disputes. The philosophical differences arose over arbitration.

The week preceding settlement followed a rather unpredictable, twisting course, probably fitting for the improbable way in which the two-day strike came to an end on Wednesday.

“I know that it seems impossible to you all that you can go for seven months and you can’t get the job done and we have to have a suspension in our games,” MacPhail said when it was all over.

Facing a strike deadline that was less than a week away, the two sides held no formal negotiations on Thursday, Aug. 1, or Friday, Aug. 2.

Thursday was Commissioner Peter Ueberroth’s day. He had promised to prevent a strike. Now it was time to find out how he would do it.

Ueberroth, looking every bit the image of the polished U.S. senator that public opinion polls show he could be, took a ballroom at the St. Regis Hotel off Fifth Avenue to announce he would give the negotiators seven “potential solutions” in an effort to break the deadlock. Invoking the surreal images of invalids and shut-ins without baseball to watch on TV, Ueberroth urged negotiators to find common ground.

While the commissioner would get involved in a more meaningful way later, his grandstand play that Thursday may have only served to drive a wedge between the two sides. His mistakes, as others would say later, were twofold. One, he told owners to stop blaming players for the game’s financial problems and to stop asking them for help in solving them. Two, he revealed two of the seven proposals to the public before letting negotiators see them.

The next morning, the proposals were delivered to the two sides. For Fehr, it may have been one of the few humorous moments during negotiations; Ueberroth, a management employee, had given the union a way to disregard MacPhail’s primary arbitration demand.

“It did not surprise me, quite frankly, when somebody said (to the owners), ‘Look, you’re proceeding on an inappropriate premise. You can’t ask the players to do this,’ ” Fehr said.

Later in the day, MacPhail’s office hand-delivered his statement, in which he expressed “sharp disagreement” with Ueberroth. While MacPhail was containing his emotions publicly, he was outraged that the commissioner had, in a half-hour news conference the day before, undermined eight months of negotiations in which owners had demanded financial help from players.

Two days later, on Sunday, Ueberroth re-entered the scene, this time appearing on ABC’s “This Week with David Brinkley.”

Will there be a strike? Brinkley asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” Ueberroth said. “I think we can avoid this thing.” He called a strike “unconscionable” and said he had reason to be optimistic.

Neither the union office nor MacPhail’s office was air-conditioned on the weekends, so Saturday and Sunday, the two sides met at the offices of Willke, Farr and Gallagher, one of the richest law firms in the nation.

There was a touch of irony in the situation, since former commissioner Bowie Kuhn had his own law office two floors below. And, during the 1981 strike, these offices had provided the backdrop for an owners’ meeting during which one faction staged an open revolt against Kuhn and the management negotiator at the time, Ray Grebey.

On Sunday, Aug. 4, camera crews and reporters waited in the office lobby on the 49th floor for the participants. MacPhail came in, said nothing. Fehr came in with his entourage--Marvin Miller, the former union head, and legal counsel Gene Orza. The camera lights went on and the messengers of television pounced, nearly trampling Miller to get at Fehr, while union attorney Arthur Schack and Mark Belanger, former player turned union assistant, were trapped outside the door.

The commissioner says he has reason to be optimistic, someone said to Fehr.

“If he does, he must know something I don’t,” Fehr replied.

The meeting ended about three hours later, and the union had, for the first time, come off its one-third demand on the pension contribution. Though both sides voiced pessimism, it was the first real sign of progress. While the figures remained to be settled, it marked the end of this issue as a major stumbling block.

The next day, MacPhail made his statement at the Summit Hotel. The two sides had not met formally all day, and they had no plans to meet the next day, Tuesday, strike day. Ueberroth stepped in again. After meeting with both sides, he announced that he had talked them into meeting Tuesday morning because fans deserved “every last ounce of everyone’s energy.”

Supposedly, it was going to be an informal meeting, without full negotiating crews, and insiders on both ends of the table warned not to expect too much.

“Well, we probably would have gotten together anyway,” Barry Rona, legal counsel for MacPhail’s Player Relations Committee, said Monday night, “although it’s also a courtesy to the commissioner.”

The site of the meeting was never announced, but no one seemed particularly interested in figuring it out. Schack said it was somewhere so unusual “that nobody will be able to guess it.” It turned out that the next two days of meetings would be held at either Miller’s apartment or MacPhail’s, both in Manhattan.

The site turned out to be unimportant. It was the length of the Tuesday meeting that was so stunning. For nearly 11 hours, off and on, the two sides met. At noon, they reportedly were near agreement. In the afternoon, they were at loggerheads. Something was happening, but MacPhail never surfaced for a briefing, and Fehr never addressed the issues, except to say that the lone major disagreement “at this moment is salary arbitration/salary cap.”

Players would never accept the cap on arbitration awards. They would have struck for the rest of the season, and owners knew it because of some shuttle-type diplomacy that had taken place the day before, primarily through the conduit of player agent Tom Reich. Now, a settlement could be reached anytime the owners decided to drop that provision.

Realizing this, players actually took a ratification vote on Monday to see if they would accept a contract without the cap. “We took the vote (Monday) . . . and were unanimous that as long as there was no salary cap on the arbitration, we would allow the three-year provision,” said one player, who asked to remain anonymous.

By lunchtime Tuesday, the two sides reportedly were very close to agreeing. But, when the two sides came back from lunch, the scene obviously was different. It was speculation, but good speculation, that MacPhail had waffled on the cap before lunch but, after meeting that afternoon with his executive board, was told to hold firm. At about 4 p.m. EDT, the players struck. Or did they? Even that wasn’t clear right away.

Games were called off. Was the strike on?

“Ordinarily, you could conclude that,” Fehr said.

Ordinarily? Does that mean yes, you’re on strike?

“I can’t talk anymore,” he said.

Finally, Orza, after repeated hedging, made it official: “We are on strike.”

The next morning, the two sides met again at MacPhail’s apartment. MacPhail left the room, leaving Fehr and Rona together. At that time, Rona told Fehr the owners were willing to drop the cap. It must have been in a voice almost inaudible that Rona ended the strike. Running a fever and suffering from a strep throat, Rona could barely speak.

The two sides called Ueberroth to the apartment at 11 a.m., by which time a deal had been struck. He shook hands with the negotiators and within an hour announced a “tentative understanding,” for all intents and purposes putting to rest the game’s shortest strike after two days of lost games.

Still, there was waiting to be done.

Initially, Ueberroth said he, MacPhail and Fehr would hold a 5 p.m. news conference at the Sheraton Centre Hotel to make the formal announcement. Repeatedly, however, the announcement was pushed back, causing some concern that the deal was in peril.

Privately, a union worker said they were only trying to drive home one last jab at the commissioner, but most of the time probably was spent putting the contract into its final language.