All Quiet on Lockout Front : Baseball: No collective bargaining talks are held Friday, and none are scheduled for the weekend.

There was no baseball again Friday, only a waiting game with some of the key players missing.

Commissioner Fay Vincent, who had not been feeling well for several days, saw a doctor in Greenwich, Conn., and was told to rest over the weekend.

Deputy Commissioner Steve Greenberg left for Los Angeles to spend the weekend with his family. Bud Selig, chairman of the owners’ Player Relations Committee and owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, returned to Wisconsin.

Don Fehr, executive director of the Major League Players Assn., held a news briefing at his office, then left to receive treatment for a sore throat and planned to spend the weekend at his home in Ryebrook, N.Y.

Thus, on Day 23 of the owners’ spring training lockout, there were no collective bargaining sessions and none are scheduled over a weekend once viewed as critical if the season is to start as scheduled on April 2.

Charles O’Connor, general counsel of the PRC, also held a news briefing, saying that the weekend respite may relieve some of the negotiating pressure that had built up this week during the long and late sessions aimed at preventing a delay in the start of the season.

O’Connor said that no decision would be made regarding the openers before Monday--three weeks shy of April 2--but it is generally assumed now that games will be lost.

“If it’s not gone, it’s the next thing to it,” Fehr said of opening day, adding that he would rather a game isn’t played than risk injury to a pitcher’s arm.

Fehr also said that if more than a few games are not played, they will not be made up, because the union, in some measure, would then be condoning the lockout and allowing clubs to waive rules governing the schedule.

In response to Vincent’s announcement Thursday that he had asked the clubs to lift the lockout in exchange for a pledge from the union that it would not strike during the 1990 season, Fehr said he had sent a letter to Vincent Friday, indicating that the union was not interested in the proposition.

The PRC had earlier announced that the collective agreement--whenever that agreement is reached--would be made retroactive, but Fehr reiterated that no self-respecting union would waive its strike right and risk another lockout by the owners next spring.

Fehr also said he was still puzzled about the owners’ dismissal of the compromise proposal he made Wednesday night, including the arbitration offer that would have eliminated half of the players with more than two but fewer than three years of service and left only those in the top half of a service list eligible for arbitration.

Although willing to provide a bonus pool for players in that category, the owners still seem adamantly against restoring arbitration to that class, although Fred Wilpon, co-owner of the New York Mets, was asked at the PRC briefing if there was any way the owners would consider arbitration for any members of that group, and he surprisingly said yes, that the issue is economic and not ideological.

“The money is there,” he said. “It’s a question of mechanism, how to get it to the players.”

Fehr, told about Wilpon’s comments later, said the PRC has never given him any indication that the owners would approve arbitration for the under three-year players.