At Last, Big Teams Agree to Share Revenue : Baseball: Owners vote unanimously for system and prepare to send salary-cap plan to players.

After a long and divisive process, baseball’s owners agreed unanimously to a revenue-sharing formula Tuesday, but it is only the end of the beginning.

The agreement will be implemented only if the players’ union accepts a salary cap in negotiations that have been delayed while owners haggled over revenue sharing for almost a year.

Will the union accept a cap? The possibility seems remote. Even Richard Ravitch, exasperated at times over his inability to get the owners to agree to a revenue-sharing formula in his role as president of their Player Relations Committee, said his toughest task is ahead.

“It won’t be easy, but we can finally move on to the main event,” he said after a 12-hour meeting that was interrupted by frequent caucuses of the big-, middle- and small-revenue clubs.

They will meet again today to vote, perhaps, on restructuring the commissioner’s office and, perhaps, elect someone to fill it.

Harvey Schiller, executive director of the U.S. Olympic Committee; and Arnold Weber, president of Northwestern, are believed to be the finalists, but owners are lobbying Bud Selig to remain in his interim role indefinitely. He probably will stay through the labor negotiations, at least. Selig insisted that the revenue-sharing agreement was historic. “Twelve months ago the clubs wouldn’t even trade financial reports,” he said.

The St. Louis Cardinals presented the plan approved Tuesday. Details were not offered, but it is believed to call for a big-market pool of about $55 million for the most needy of their brethren.

The list of clubs paying and receiving could change annually, based on their “economic profiles,” Ravitch said, and they would not all pay nor receive the same amounts.

“In each year,” he said, “about a third (of the clubs) would be paying and a third receiving.”

The Dodgers were one of eight big-market clubs won over by the plan. If implemented today, the Angels, Pittsburgh Pirates, Minnesota Twins, Montreal Expos, Milwaukee Brewers, San Diego Padres and Seattle Mariners would be among receiving clubs.

Angel executive Jackie Autry said the plan, coupled to the “right (stadium) lease would enable them to ameliorate their problems.

She also responded to remarks here by Yankee owner George Steinbrenner that he was mystified that the Angels were a small-market team (“my geography teacher must not have taught me very well”) by saying the Angels have the seventh-smallest revenue in baseball and the second-worst lease.

“George believes we’re an L.A. team, but we’ve never drawn from the L.A. basin and there are no major TV or radio stations in Orange County,” she said.

Ravitch said the unanimous vote was critical in that it reflects the owners’ determination to enhance the competitive balance and gain cost controls through a salary cap.

The cap, Ravitch said, is being formulated. He also said that with the bloom off the TV rose, with 10% of the players now making 50% of the compensation and with many veterans being squeezed out, he is hopeful the union will also see the need for a new system.

Executive director Don Fehr, reached at his New York home, wasn’t optimistic. “We’ve never cared how the owners distributed their money as long as it didn’t adversely affect the free market, but now they want the union’s help in restricting the market,” he said. “I mean, that’s what a salary cap is.”