O’Connor Says Owners Didn’t Vote on Lockout

Raising what seemed to be a question of semantics, Charles O’Connor, general counsel of the owners’ Player Relations Committee, said Friday that the 26 baseball owners have never voted on a spring training lockout.

O’Connor added, however, that in both July and December the owners passed resolutions in support of the PRC’s collective bargaining procedures, which includes a lockout of the spring training camps if the Major League Players Assn. has not agreed to the PRC’s revenue sharing proposal by Feb. 15.

In other words, the owners voted lockout authorization, and another vote, O’Connor said, is not needed when the owners meet Feb. 9 in Chicago to receive an update on the negotiations.

“We have been given all the tools needed to affect an agreement,” O’Connor said of the July and December resolutions.

O’Connor made his comments in response to a story that appeared in Friday’s editions of The Times, in which Jerry Reinsdorf, co-owner of the Chicago White Sox, and Bill Giles, president of the Philadelphia Phillies, among other management officials, said the owners had voted unanimously in December to keep the spring camps closed if the union does not agree to revenue sharing by Feb. 15.

Union and PRC representatives met again in New York Friday, with the talks centering on health and pension issues. Revenue sharing will become the key topic again when the negotiations resume Monday in New York.

Don Fehr, the union’s executive director, said he will be in Los Angeles Thursday night to meet with players living in the Southern California area.