O’Connor Heads Team for Owners : Baseball: Meetings aimed at new agreement with the players association open without Rona on management bargaining unit

Negotiations begin Tuesday on baseball’s new collective-bargaining agreement, just hours after Chuck O’Connor replaced Barry Rona as head of the owners’ negotiating team.

Rona, executive director and general counsel of the clubs’ Player Relations Committee since 1986, resigned Monday in a move that surprised some baseball officials. Neither Rona nor Commissioner Fay Vincent would comment on the resignation.

With O’Connor in charge as acting general counsel, management’s team met for two hours with officials of the Major League Baseball Players Association. The current collective-bargaining pact, agreed to in August 1985, expires at midnight Dec. 31. Both sides expect negotiations to be difficult and have amassed strike funds that will amount to more than $50 million each.

O’Connor called the meeting “constructive” and said, “It was typical of the opening meeting of negotiations.”

Milwaukee owner Bud Selig and New York Mets co-owner Fred Wilpon sat in on the talks, along with PRC lawyers John Westhoff and Lou Melendez, Bill Murray of the commissioner’s office and Robert Manfred, a lawyer at O’Connor’s firm. The union was represented by union head Donald Fehr, union lawyers Eugene Orza, Lauren Rich, and Michael Weiner, and Mark Belanger, Fehr’s assistant.

Fehr said the union wanted to discuss “iron-clad collusion protection,” negotiating rights of players with less than three years service, increasing roster sizes and increasing the money devoted to benefits.”

Selig, the PRC chairman, said Rona’s resignation was voluntary.

“He could have stayed on,” the Milwaukee owner said. “Was it forced? Absolutely not. It’s always interesting that people read things into things like this.”

One source said there was no indication of the move prior to Monday. Another source, who asked not to be identified, indicated that Rona’s relationship with Vincent was different from the relationship he had with Peter Ueberroth and A. Bartlett Giamatti, Vincent’s predecessors.