Owners, Players Dig In Bargaining Heels : Baseball: Talks resume Monday in New York, but neither side is willing to compromise on arbitration eligibility issue.

Don Fehr, executive director of the Major League Players Assn., completed his unity tour in Tampa, Fla., Friday night and said collective bargaining talks would resume in New York Monday.

Fehr said there had been no change in the union’s position on arbitration eligibility. He added that he couldn’t predict whether the resumption of talks would produce a breakthrough.

He said he has been in daily contact with deputy commissioner Steve Greenberg and arranged Monday’s meeting in a late afternoon call to Charles O’Connor, general counsel of the owners’ Player Relations Committee.

All of that represents something of a surprise in that Fehr has said it would serve no purpose to resume talks unless the owners were willing to compromise on the arbitration issue, and Commissioner Fay Vincent, on Friday, said the same in regard to the union.

In a phone interview before Monday’s meeting was scheduled, Vincent said:

“Enough is enough. The only reason to negotiate is if there’s a basis for settlement, and I don’t think anything can be done because the union won’t compromise. I see a very serious and bad confrontation despite my efforts.”

Vincent was en route to a family weekend on Cape Cod, Mass., and could not be reached regarding the Monday meeting. Neither could O’Connor, who left his New York office early Friday to spend the weekend in Boston. Greenberg, in Los Angeles for the weekend, said he did not know a meeting had been scheduled.

Asked about Vincent’s comments that it would serve no purpose to meet unless there was a change in position by the union, Fehr said: “If they don’t want to meet, there’s nothing we can do about it. They’re big boys. But I expect there’ll be a meeting in some fashion Monday.”

Friday, Day 16 of the owners’ spring training lockout, contributed to what has seemed to be an ongoing hardening of positions and increasingly personal rhetoric.

In response to Vincent’s contention that the ball is in the players’ court, that it would be a “waste of time” to meet unless the union guaranteed a new proposal, Fehr’s associate, Gene Orza, said the owners aren’t in a position to dictate terms and conditions, and that the players aren’t fooled or intimidated by the clubs’ bravado tactics.

“The ball is in their court, not ours,” Orza said. “They have yet to respond to our proposal on pension and minimum salary.”

If a settlement is not reached by March 12, three weeks before the April 2 openers, the start of the season will be delayed.

If the meetings collapse again and there is no agreement through Tuesday, another week will have been lost because management moves to Dallas for a PRC meeting Wednesday and an owners meeting Thursday.

Vincent said the events of the last week have left the owners more unified than ever.

Among those events were his bold but failed attempt to gain a compromise proposal from Fehr on the arbitration issue, the union’s portrayal of the negotiations as a win-lose proposition after the executive board meeting in Phoenix Tuesday and remarks by Fehr in which he said Vincent had replaced O’Connor as the clubs’ chief negotiator.

Now, Vincent said, he isn’t sure that he will return to the bargaining table--if, indeed, the talks resume Monday.

Clearly miffed, Vincent said he had put his credibility on the line and felt he had made a “hell of an effort” to find a middle ground on the arbitration issue, and isn’t sure Fehr recognized it as an “opportunity lost,” a compromise possibility that might not be offered again.

The owners want the eligibility requirement to remain at three years. The players want it rolled back to two, as it was before 1985.

Vincent, in a series of conversations with Fehr Sunday and Monday, asked him for a proposal that would create a service and performance scale by which players with more than two and less than three years in the majors might qualify for arbitration.

At one point, according to a source, Vincent even offered two years and 140 days, the equivalent of about 2 3/4 years based on a 172-day season.

Fehr rejected the overtures, confounding Vincent, who thought he was responding to a union suggestion that the PRC take a hard look at the contributions of players with two-plus years--such as Ellis Burks, Joe Magrane and Bobby Thigpen.

Vincent said Friday that the union’s quest for a rollback to a flat two years is simply “not going to happen.”

Vincent said that the principal issue for the union seems to be saving face, that he doesn’t understand how any negotiation can revolve on winning and losing. He said that Orza told him the union won’t concede or compromise on arbitration because it then would appear to have lost.

Orza, of course, had a different interpretation. He said that what he pointed out to the commissioner was that since the PRC, in response to a union query, couldn’t quantify why it was economically prudent to keep arbitration eligibility at three years, the only conclusion was that the PRC must look on it as victory or defeat.

“It’s their pennant, and I was trying to help the commissioner get a better perspective on that, but he’s obviously turned it around on me,” Orza said.

Orza also said that the union wasn’t seeking a compromise on the arbitration question when it asked the PRC to look at the contributions of players in the two-plus category.

It was an attempt, he said, to have them identified and to prove that the two-year player should be entitled to arbitration.

Unfortunately, Orza said in reference to the union suggestion, “the commissioner and his henchmen distorted that, too.”