Taking a Tiny Step Forward : Baseball: Vincent pessimistic about quick settlement. Arbitration remains a primary stumbling block.

With revenue sharing no longer the pivotal factor, baseball’s collective bargaining talks focused Thursday on arbitration, long a thorn in the owners’ pockets.

“We talked about a number of important issues, but arbitration is, as it has been in all the previous negotiations, a major stumbling block,” said Don Fehr, executive director of the Major League Players Assn.

A five-hour meeting in Commissioner Fay Vincent’s New York office touched on several other traditional areas but boiled down to a discussion of arbitration and pensions, according to Fehr.

Was there progress?

Not according to Vincent, who said he was “extremely pessimistic” regarding a quick settlement. “We’re talking, but we’re not making much progress,” he said.

Charles O’Connor, general counsel of the owners’ Player Relations Committee, said he would measure Thursday’s results in inches rather than miles.

And Fehr agreed, saying: “I wouldn’t categorize it as immeasurable, affirmative progress, but I wouldn’t say there wasn’t any. I think we’ll know more tomorrow.”

Thursday marked Day 1 of the owners’ spring training lockout, and O’Connor reiterated that the camps will not open without a bargaining agreement.

The union and the PRC had met separately Wednesday to review Vincent’s nine-point proposal, which the union later called regressive because of a 75% restriction on arbitration raises, a series of minimum salaries for younger players that the union believes would become the standard wage for all players in those categories, and the lack of an increase in the owners’ pension contribution.

The nine points formed the basis of Thursday’s negotiations. Was there an agreement on any of the points? “We consider it a package,” O’Connor said. “When we resolve them, we’ll resolve them all.”

Perhaps, but it is unlikely that any agreement will include arbitration or salary restrictions that the union has fought in previous negotiations.

“You know how we feel about caps,” said Mark Belanger, a Fehr assistant.

In lieu of the cost certainty that the PRC believed was inherent in revenue sharing, a 75% limit on arbitration raises would provide considerable club savings at a time when many arbitration filings are producing salary increases of 300%.

The union, in fact, is asking that the eligibility requirement for arbitration be rolled back from three years of major league service to two, as it was before the 1985 negotiations.

At that time, as a concession to the owners’ claim of financial distress, the union agreed to raise the eligibility requirement by a year. Now, insisting that baseball has never been healthier, Fehr believes he should get that year back.

“It’s fair to say that most of our discussion today focused on the eligibility issue and the question of players who were eligible before but aren’t under the current plan,” he said. “We accepted their claims of poverty in ‘85, but they can’t sell it to us now.”

Arbitration would have been eliminated by revenue sharing and replaced by a pay-for-performance system, which also included a payroll cap that put restrictions on free-agent mobility. Now all of that is off the board.

Revenue sharing, O’Connor said, is an issue only in the context that the PRC seeks a joint study leading to the possibility of eventual implementation.

Of its removal after seven weeks of impasse, O’Connor said, “We have an immediate need to reach an agreement, and that need overrides adherence to any particular method of getting there.”

He predicted that within 10 years all sports will employ some variant of revenue sharing and said the problem the PRC faced in attempting to implement it now was one of education--attempting to convince the union and “some of the clubs” that the timing was right.

Now, he said, the union and the PRC are left to discuss more traditional issues “laden with a negotiating history” that may make modifications difficult.

Dodger pitcher Orel Hershiser, one of seven players who attended Thursday’s meeting, said by phone: “There are still times when I think the owners want an agreement that will help protect them from themselves, but at least we’re talking cordially, and I’m glad to have Fay involved because he strikes me as an honest man. And as Don (Fehr) says, without revenue sharing we’re back in the same ocean.”