Both Sides Say Baseball Opening Day Imperiled : Baseball: Owners switch meeting from Dallas to be available to union. No movement is made on arbitration issue.

Acknowledging that the start of the baseball season would have to be delayed if a collective bargaining agreement isn’t reached this week, the owners’ Player Relations Committee altered its itinerary Monday to provide more negotiating time.

That appeared to be the only key development on Day 19 of the owners’ spring training lockout.

Don Fehr, executive director of the Major League Players Assn., met for two hours with deputy commissioner Steve Greenberg, talked briefly by phone with Commissioner Fay Vincent and said there was no progress on any of the remaining issues, including arbitration eligibility.

Both sides believe players will have to be in camp by March 12 to have any chance of opening the season April 2 as scheduled.

“The fighter is down. He may not be counted out, but it’s getting close,” Fehr said of opening day. “Something will have to happen for sure in the next few days to have any chance at it.”

Said Vincent: “This is a week that once and for all relates to whether the start of the season will be affected. I believe a baseball season is different from other commodities. If it’s impaired something precious has been impaired.”

Charles O’Connor, the PRC’s general counsel, had been scheduled to leave New York this afternoon to conduct a full-scale PRC meeting in Dallas Wednesday and report to a quarterly meeting of the 26 owners there Thursday.

Now, in case continuing conversations with the union prove productive, O’Connor is not scheduled to leave until Wednesday night. On Monday, he asked the PRC to report to New York today so that the negotiating continuity wouldn’t be disrupted.

The PRC consists of the St. Louis Cardinal president, Fred Kuhlmann, and the owners of the Milwaukee Brewers, New York Mets, Minnesota Twins, Houston Astros and Chicago White Sox.

Vincent said that convening the “decision makers” did not reflect progress in the negotiations but was a measure of the week’s importance and the problems of trying to operate by phone.

“There’s no way we can work out an agreement if the PRC isn’t going to approve it,” Vincent said. “My sense is that we’re going to make a determined effort to get this done, and we would have been wasting two days by going to Dallas tomorrow.”

Vincent reiterated, however, that he believes there is increased inflexibility among the owners and said it would be more difficult now to get PRC support for an arbitration compromise such as the one he attempted to reach with Fehr last weekend.

In the meantime, Fehr and associate general counsel Gene Orza continued to talk Monday of the owners’ “economic betrayal” of 1985 when the union gave up a year of arbitration eligibility in concession to owner claims of financial distress.

Orza said that a rollback to two years would cost the owners only about $8 million in salaries a year, so that the issue, he said, isn’t economic but winning and losing.

“Three years is their pennant,” Orza said of the owners.

In the difficult bid to bridge the impasse, the owners are now relying on Greenberg’s long relationship with Fehr. A former player agent who testified on behalf of the union in the collusion hearings, Greenberg said he has an open relationship with Fehr but that it hasn’t led to any solutions.

Or as Fehr said: “This comes down to issues, not personalities. The object here is an agreement. It isn’t who asks who to dance.”