Baseball Pact Talks Recess; No Progress : Negotiations: Owners expected to stand by threat to not open training camps unless there is an agreement.

Negotiators for major league baseball and the players’ union recessed their contract talks today, with no progress reported in the 19th bargaining session between the two groups.

Talks could resume as early as Monday, but a specific date has not been determined.

Owners are scheduled to meet Friday in Chicago where it is expected they will refuse to open training camps until an agreement is reached.

“It’s fair to say players have been resigned to the notion that they’re going to shut the camps because that’s what they said they’re going to do,” Donald Fehr, executive director of the Major League Players Assn., said today. “If they do shut the camps down, it won’t have a positive effect on anything.”

Fehr, who will meet with players in Los Angeles and Phoenix on Thursday and Friday for updates, said the owners “can’t wait for a lockout” and again criticized management’s revenue-sharing plan, saying it was a disguised attempt to inhibit free agency.

Chuck O’Connor, the owners’ chief negotiator, defended the proposal and said management would not agree to a new contract without union acceptance of revenue sharing.

“As far as I know, nothing has changed,” O’Connor said of the management strategy. Asked if he saw any scenario in which owners might allow camps to open without an agreement, O’Connor said, “I do not. No.”

“I assume on Friday there’s going to be a lockout,” Fehr said. “We’re getting a lot of rhetoric, but not much substance.”

Tuesday’s three-hour session was devoted entirely to a discussion of revenue sharing. Fehr criticized management for an inability to say what the differences were between large and small markets.

On Monday, Pittsburgh Pirates President Carl Barger was quoted as saying free agency “is leading us in the direction of the heavy media-market teams--Los Angeles, New York, Chicago.”

“The rest of the league, in effect, becomes somewhat of a farm system to them in the free-agent arena,” he was quoted as saying in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “That bothers me a lot. . . . It is broken. It is flat-out broken. A lot of us believe it is broken and has to be fixed. If you start drawing a chart and continue the current system with this kind of salary escalation, we could have an average salary of $990,000 by 1992.”

Fehr said Barger’s remarks showed the revenue-sharing plan is intended as an attack on free agency.

“Their argument shifts,” Fehr said. “Maybe he spoke out of turn. Maybe he let the cat out of the bag.”