Players, Owners Not Moving Near Accord : Baseball: Negotiator for clubs doesn’t expect talks over weekend. Both sides taking their case to the public.

The players’ union, which dismissed Commissioner Fay Vincent’s offer to open training camps in exchange for a no-strike pledge, and team owners appear headed in different directions with the scheduled opening day of the season just 24 days away.

“I don’t expect we’ll get together this weekend, “ Chuck O’Connor, the club owners chief negotiator said today at a briefing.

“It probably won’t be until the beginning of next week.”

Baseball club owners, accused by the players of concentrating more on public relations than ending the lockout of major league camps, today held a news briefing to explain their latest proposal.

The Player Relations Committee said the owners’ latest proposal would raise the salary of players with more than two and less than three years’ service an average of $60,000 per year.

The key issue in the labor dispute has been salary arbitration. The union wants players with two years of service eligible for arbitration, while the owners want to keep the current system that makes players wait for three seasons before they can seek arbitration.

The Players Assn. scheduled an afternoon news conference to discuss the dispute that has resulted in a 23-day spring training lockout.

Commissioner Fay Vincent failed in a bid Thursday to bring the sides together. The owners agreed to his plan but the union dismissed it as a “staged media event.”

Trying to salvage Opening Day on April 2, Vincent asked the 26 club owners to open the camps in Florida and Arizona if the players would pledge not to strike during the season.

Owners agreed within moments, but union chief Don Fehr refused to even dignify the idea. Without explicitly rejecting the overture, Fehr complained that owners failed to formally notify him. He said if they ever did, he would respond.

“It is unfortunate we are at this place,” Fehr said, blistering his foes with sarcastic references to press releases and their “terrificly successful lockout.”

“This isn’t a proposal,” he said. “If it was a proposal, they would have told us about it first. They didn’t bother to tell us about it first, ‘cause they know the answer.”

Added union official Gene Orza, “No self-respecting union gives away the right to strike.”

The union’s response darkened the outlook for playing Opening Day as scheduled. Bud Selig, Milwaukee Brewers owner and chairman of management’s labor committee, said the lockout would remain in place unless the union offered a no-strike pledge.

Fehr gave no such pledge, but he refused to rule out further talks.

Eric Yaverbaum of New York, co-founder of Strike Back, an organization founded in the 1985 labor dispute, said his group has received 9,200 letters from “very aggravated baseball fans.”