Late Reversal on Hurst Crushing Blow to Padres

At 5 p.m. here Wednesday, less than 24 hours after being informed by sources that Bruce Hurst was going to join his baseball team, Dick Freeman, interim president of the San Diego Padres, was informed that Hurst wasn’t.

“This . . . is just awful,” Freeman said. An improved Padre team that is just one Bruce Hurst away from pennant contention today is just one pull from separating itself from its hair. And here’s why:

Their 3-year, $5.2-million offer was deemed acceptable by the Boston Red Sox left-hander Wednesday morning, and then unacceptable hours later. That’s when Freeman told Hurst’s agent, Nick Lampros, that he was being advised by club lawyers, under the direction of owner Joan Kroc, to change a clause involving payment to Hurst in the event of an owners’ lockout. Such a lockout could occur following the Dec. 31, 1989 expiration of the Basic Agreement between the owners and the Major League Players Assn.

Sources say that Lampros assumed the Padres would agree to pay Hurst in the event of a lockout. The Padres recently gave Eric Show a 2-year, $2.6-million deal that, sources say, would pay him during a lockout.

However, immediately after leaving the annual owners’ meeting here Wednesday afternoon and conferring with Kroc, Freeman informed Lampros that the Hurst contract would contain language that meant only an arbitrator could decide if Hurst would be paid during a lockout. A surprised Lampros rejected the offer immediately.

Said Lampros: “Let’s just say (Hurst) was very close to signing with one team based on one certain assumption . . . now it’s back to the decision-making process, if he wants to make one at all.”

The overall picture for the Padres became even more complicated late Wednesday when it was confirmed that the New York Yankees had offered Padre free-agent pitcher Andy Hawkins a 3-year, $3.6-million contract, nearly $1 million higher than the Padre offer to Hawkins. If the Padres couldn’t sign Hurst, they desperately needed to sign Hawkins, a fact they acknowledged Wednesday by offering him arbitration, which gives them until Jan. 8 to sign him.

The Padres are still in the running for Hurst, if only because their top competitor, the Boston Red Sox, also are offering a contract containing the same kind of ‘lockout’ language.

“I want people to know we aren’t out of this yet,” Freeman said late Wednesday, noting that he hoped to re-start negotiations with Lampros today. “Don’t think this is a bottomless pit.”

Yet what happened to the Padres Wednesday was just as dark and mysterious as one.

A chronology:

--Tuesday Night: The Padres learn through two sources close to Hurst that Boston’s 18-game winner has chosen the Padres over the Red Sox and the Angels.

“We had him,” one Padre employee says. “We all knew it.”

At the time, Freeman admits, “All we’re talking about now is the language.”

--Wednesday morning: Lampros tells reporters, “A decision has been made. We’re just waiting for the club representatives to leave the owners’ meeting to finalize things.”

--Early Wednesday afternoon: Freeman, who ran the Padres’ business operations before suddenly being named interim president at the end of the season upon the resignation of Chub Feeney, departs the owners’ meeting. He retires to his room and phones Lampros. They talk for 30 minutes.

Lampros is so upset with the discussion, he immediately phones the Red Sox, who have been waiting all day for this call. Red Sox sources say he asks them if they would change their lockout language, which is stricter than the Padres’. The Red Sox refuse.

Lampros then phones officials of the Angels, who assumed they were out of the running. He tells them, “I may get back to you later.”

--Late Wednesday afternoon: Hurst tells a Boston television station, “There has been a snag in the deal. Everybody is back in it.”

So what happened? That’s what Lampros would like to know.

“Bruce had based his decision (to join the Padres) on what he had been led to believe at that point,” Lampros said. “And then it all changed. Bruce is really baffled by the fact that he started all of this in October and got all the way through the last couple of weeks, and then it came to this--guys with contracts similar to his having language that is worded differently than his. Why should Bruce be made an example of?”

Freeman, admitting that Show’s contract was different, said he was just making Wednesday’s decision based on his lawyers.

“I don’t make the legal decisions, I get those from club attorneys, and this contract was heavily based on their advice,” he said. “I don’t feel like we misled them, I just feel there was a misunderstanding. They assumed one thing, we assumed another. They thought it would be easy, I thought it would be easy, but then we realized it wouldn’t be easy.”

And why not give Hurst the kind of contract he gave Show?

“Looking back, based on advice I have now, maybe we would have done Eric Show’s contract differently,” Freeman said.