Clock Strikes 4 on Joyner Offer : Angels: Deadline passes without first baseman agreeing to four-year, $16-million contract.

Is Anaheim still on the map of Wally’s world?

Or has Wally Joyner’s six-year career with the Angels ended?

The answers were not clear Friday.

On one hand, the Angels pulled a four-year contract offer estimated at $16 million off the table when the free-agent first baseman did not accept it before the club’s 4 p.m. PST deadline.

On the other, a statement by club president Richard Brown said only that negotiations have ceased, and that Joyner remained among the Angel alternatives on the eve of the winter baseball meetings.

If that left the door ajar, senior vice president Whitey Herzog opened it a bit more when he said the club planned to offer Joyner arbitration before the midnight deadline tonight.

Without that offer, the Angels would forfeit negotiating rights until May 1 and lose compensation rights--two draft choices, because Joyner is a Class-A free agent based on statistics--if he was signed by another team.

The offer would extend the Angels’ negotiating rights until Jan. 8 and give Joyner until Dec. 19 to decide if he wants to accept, in which case he would be considered signed for 1992, with his salary determined by arbitration or continued negotiation with the club.

Barry Axelrod, the attorney who represents Joyner in association with Michael Watkins, said the arbitration offer would be a “good sign” in that it would indicate a willingness to keep talking.

However, the two sides let the deadline come and go without communication.

“The assumption as stated by Richard Brown the other day that Wally doesn’t want to be with the Angels if he doesn’t accept the offer is erroneous,” Axelrod said. “You can’t derive the one from the other.

“I mean, we didn’t impose the deadline. We’re willing to sit down and talk tomorrow. Put us in a room with Whitey and we probably can get it done in five minutes.

“I don’t like to speak for Wally, but he’s definitely frustrated because he didn’t understand the deadline. This should come from him, but if it was his desire to stay, that’s eroding.”

Axelrod said three other clubs offer viable alternatives for Joyner, but he would not identify them. Neither he nor Herzog would comment on the perception that Herzog has been handcuffed and frustrated by his inability to get approval from owners Gene and Jackie Autry on a contract for Joyner that has been virtually completed for two weeks.

Money and length are not the issue, Axelrod said. Distribution is.

The Angels are insisting on a clause that would withhold his pay in event of lockout or strike.

Joyner is willing to accept it, Axelrod said, but he wants the yearly salaries arranged so that he is paid less in 1994--when there is the greatest risk of a work stoppage because the collective bargaining contract expires during the previous winter--and paid more in the other three years.

As an example, Axelrod used the Detroit Tigers recent signing of Mickey Tettleton to a three-year, $8.5-million contract. Tettleton will receive a $1-million signing bonus, $3 million in both 1992 and ‘93, but only $1.5 million in ’94.

“It’s been done that way in dozens of contracts,” Axelrod said.

“And it’s a practice the Angels have often followed.”

Why not now?

“I don’t know,” Axelrod said, “but to let it block a deal seems silly.”

As the Joyner offer left the table, representatives of pitcher Chuck Finley were presenting Herzog with the outline of a multiyear proposal in a five-hour meeting in Houston Friday.

Finley is eligible for free agency after the 1992 season and Herzog said: “If I feel I can’t sign him now, I’m going to have to trade him. I don’t want to get in the situation we’re in with Joyner.”