Players Submit Compromise Proposal, but Owners Pessimistic

The bid to prevent a delay in the start of the 1990 baseball season seems to have failed.

Commissioner Fay Vincent, clearly weary after another marathon bargaining session that started at 2:30 Wednesday afternoon and ended after midnight, said as much while preparing to leave his Park Avenue office.

“It looks grim,” said Vincent. “If you were to say that the opening day of the season has been lost, I couldn’t dispute it.”

Neither could Charles O’Connor, general counsel of the owners’ Player Relations Committee, nor Don Fehr, executive director of the Major League Players Assn.

In the early morning hours of Day 22 of the owners’ spring training lockout, they expressed fear that a lockout of very long duration loomed, stemming from the inability to resolve the issue of salary arbitration.

Both sides made new proposals on the subject Tuesday night.

The union rejected the owners’ offer of a $4-million, industry-funded pool from which players with more than two years of service and less than three could qualify for season-ending bonuses based on their performances.

“The problem with bonus pools,” Fehr said, “is that they represent an artificial salary cap. Salaries are just not as high when a pool is involved.”

Then, during a three-hour recess in the negotiations, Fehr said it was decided to do something he never thought the union would do--compromise on the arbitration question in an effort to end the lockout and enable the season to open as scheduled April 2.

The players’ proposal, he said, was based on the belief that it would cost the owners $8 million to $12 million in salaries if all players with more than two years of major league service and less than three qualified for arbitration, as the union has sought.

Fehr said the decision--reached with his staff and about a dozen players on hand for the negotiations--was to split the financial difference, saying that was what the owners seemed to be doing with their $4 million pool.

The proposal: All players in the two-to-three-year group with one day of service in the previous year would be ranked on the basis of total major league service.

The top half would qualify for arbitration, the bottom half wouldn’t.

Tim Belcher of the Dodgers and Jeff Ballard of the Baltimore Orioles, two players with exactly two years of major league service and, thus, who would not qualify for arbitration under the plan, presented it to the owners when the negotiators re-convened at 9 p.m. Wednesday night.

The reaction of management?

“So what?” said the Dodgers’ Orel Hershiser, one of the players present.

Said Fehr later:

“This fairly and equitably splits the issue. If it’s not enough, Don Fehr is out of ideas and we’re in for a very long lockout. We’ve given it our best shot and urged the owners to think very hard and very long about it.

“We’re talking about a $4 million difference in an industry with earnings of $1.5 billion.”

O’Connor said he would take the proposal to a full PRC meeting this morning but that the chances of it being accepted were “slim and none.”

He said he based that opinion on the fact that it restored arbitration for a group of players who lost it in fair bargaining in 1985 and it based that arbitration on service time rather than performance, as the owners favored.

He agreed that if the proposal is rejected, “we’ll be moving inexorably toward a long lockout and a delay in the start of the season.”

Thus, today is D-Day in regard to the opening of the season. Both sides believe players would have to be in camp by March 12 to get three weeks of training and open as scheduled.

Fehr said that by squeezing the negotiations into these three or four days, by creating a crisis situation, a difficult process has been made more difficult. He said that in the spirit of ending a fight the players didn’t want and a lockout they had no part in creating, they made across-the-board compromises on all the remaining issues Wednesday.

Both Fehr and O’Connor said that when--and if--an agreement on arbitration is reached, all else should fall into place. But O’Connor acknowledged that it was difficult to get the six owners who are members of the PRC to accept his bonus pool attempt at a compromise, meaning he sees little hope that they will accept a restoration of arbitration--although only half of the players in that category would qualify.

“Our feeling today,” said Fehr, “was that if it’s not resolved in the next day or so, you’re not going to have opening day.”