Owners Seem Willing to Give Slightly in Talks : Baseball: New math in figuring arbitration eligibility offers enough hope to bring two sides together in negotiations.

Players and owners met Sunday to try to derive a formula to settle the salary arbitration eligibility issue and end the 32-day lockout.

Negotiators met for 90 minutes early Sunday and, after a lunch break, resumed in the afternoon at Commissioner Fay Vincent’s Park Avenue office. Talks continued into the early evening, with several caucuses ongoing in an effort to find a solution.

A proposal was made by the owners Sunday that would make additional players eligible for salary arbitration by their third year, New York Yankees player representative Dave Winfield said.

Owners, while unwilling to reduce the threshold below three years, seem willing to make slight changes in the definition of what a year of service time is.

“They’re still talking and whenever they’re talking it’s encouraging,” Dale Murphy of the Atlanta Braves said.

The players had proposed the top half of all two-year players to be eligible for arbitration, but have told management they would settle for something less. Owners have refused to reduce the three years currently required to file.

But owners negotiator Chuck O’Connor said there might be room for movement on service time.

O’Connor said the union’s claim on this “was a legitimate argument.” That led to a proposal to redefine a full year of service.

A source close to the negotiations, who asked not to be identified, said the parties also were discussing making a small group of players just short of three years’ service eligible.

All of the other issues are nearly settled.

The sides have been looking for common ground on arbitration, and O’Connor said he hoped the issue of what the union claims are players deliberately deprived of service time might be “a narrow piece of turf” on which the sides could agree.

Currently, players sent to the minor leagues on option for up to 20 days in a season get credit for a full year, but players sent down for 21 days do not. A year consists of 172 service days even though a season actually is 182 days long.

If the sides agreed to let players get a full year of service despite a greater number of days in the minors, additional players would be able to have their salaries decided by an arbitrator.

Owners won back the year of arbitration eligibility in 1985 when they claimed the game was losing money.

There was no formal announcement that opening day would be postponed from April 2. On Saturday, Vincent said preserving the original starting date had become “a pipe dream.”

O’Connor said he believed that a full 162-game schedule could be played by each team if an agreement were reached quickly, even if games would not start on April 2.

On Sunday, Oakland manager Tony La Russa said he feared there would be injuries if players had less than three weeks of spring training.

“But if they said we had to get it done, we would have to,” said La Russa , who has suggested that teams play split-squad games once the exhibition schedule starts.

The union’s executive board met for nearly five hours Saturday and turned down the proposal owners made on Friday.

That plan calls for a $100,000 minimum salary, $5,000 less than the union wants, and a $55 million yearly contribution to the pension plan, which players say is basically acceptable.

The union’s executive board voted unanimously Saturday to support its negotiating committee and instructed it to “make the best effort to reach an agreement.”

“The players, to a man, have two views,” union head Don Fehr said, “that they want to play baseball as soon as they can, but they want to play under an appropriate collective bargaining agreement.”

After Friday’s session, the first in nine days, Fehr announced the idea of submitting the single issue of eligibility to an arbitrator.

“If we are really down to a single issue, maybe what we ought to do is submit it to binding arbitration,” Fehr said. “I would like them to seriously consider it.”

Under binding arbitration, a third party would select either the players’ position, the owners’ position or something in between.

“I think it will be a very difficult sell,” O’Connor said. “That is an economic issue which, in effect, the clubs have possession. The arbitrator has only one way to go, which is to go someways toward the players’ position.”

Previously, players have said they will not accept a proposal that doesn’t make some movement on arbitration eligibility.