Baseball’s Tranquility Is About to Strike Out : Contract: The quake-delayed World Series had a unifying effect. Coming talks may have a shattering one.

The tranquility Fay Vincent detected between management and players during the earthquake-interrupted World Series is not likely to continue for long, to the commissioner’s chagrin.

Bargaining toward a basic agreement to replace the one that expires Dec. 31 will begin here this week with preliminary meetings between the owners’ negotiating team, the Player Relations Committee and the players’ union, the Major League Players Assn.

Talks are not expected to intensify until the week of Dec. 10, after management finishes conducting its business at the winter meetings Dec. 2 to 7 in Nashville, Tenn., and the Players Assn. holds its convention at about the same time in Arizona.

This week, however, Player Relations Committee director Barry Rona will officially present to Players Assn. director Donald Fehr an outline of a proposed revenue sharing plan, the major thrust in the owners’ negotiating stance. Already, there are rumblings of skepticism about the plan in the union’s hall. The sides that seldom agree on anything seem to have another item upon which to disagree.

At the general managers meetings last week in Palm Springs, Rona outlined the preliminary proposal, which calls for what he termed “a working partnership.”

Rona’s proposal was for management to divide players into two categories: those with experience of six seasons or more and those with experience of fewer than six seasons.

For players in the second group, a pay-for-performance scale would determine salaries. Money for that would come from a revenue sharing fund of all 26 clubs. The percentage of the clubs’ revenues to be shared would be negotiated. Signing of free agents in the first group would be determined by some form of salary cap, although Rona prefers not to use that phrase.

“There would be no cap on any player’s salary, and there would be no cap on a club’s payroll,” he said. “A club may drive the payroll up to any level, but once it reaches a certain plateau it cannot sign other clubs’ free agents. Clubs must reach the minimum payroll either by doing it on their own or by signing free agents, their own players or their own free agents. If not, the money must be turned over to the players in a lump sum.”

The pay-for-performance scale for players with between zero and six seasons’ experience would be based on a formula using statistics over two years, similar to the Elias Sports Bureau’s ranking system to determine compensation for clubs losing players to free agency.

The union is critical of management’s proposal because it is designed to eliminate salary arbitration, a system the Players Assn. wants to continue; the association intends to negotiate toward making the system applicable to more players.

In 1985 labor talks, the union agreed to limit salary arbitration to players with three or more but fewer than six seasons’ experience (players with six or more seasons can become free agents).