Negotiations Dissolve Into Anger : Baseball: Owners reject players’ offer. Strike date expected to be set today.

A three-hour meeting between negotiators for baseball’s owners and players dissolved into hotter rhetoric and harder stances Wednesday, and the union is almost certain to set a strike deadline today when Executive Director Don Fehr confers with the 28 player representatives by phone.

“Nothing has changed our opinion that the owners are on a timetable, and there is nothing we can do or say that will make a difference,” Fehr said after the owners rejected a union proposal that would basically maintain the current compensation system.

The union proposal would increase the minimum salary from $109,000 to more than $175,000, lower the eligibility requirement for arbitration from three years of major league service to two (some two-year players already qualify) and increase termination pay, pensions and other benefits.

Richard Ravitch, the owners’ chief negotiator, said the four-year proposal would cost the clubs $700 million more than they are now paying and would exacerbate the small-market problems. He said the 58% of revenue now going to salaries would increase to 74% by 1998. Ravitch distributed a response to the union proposal at a New York news conference and headlined it: “Union Wants Just One More Thing: More.”

Fehr questioned those calculations and wondered how the owners could have arrived at them so quickly “when it took them 18 months to make their own proposal and it generally takes them several weeks or months to come up with answers for even our most basic questions.”

Ravitch said the calculations were based on the same percentages that the union used in successfully arguing its collusion case.

“We’ve made it abundantly clear to the union that the world is different, the game has changed, but the union has refused to respond to the problems,” Ravitch said. “The fact is, we’re quite far apart, and I’m disappointed that the players have failed to recognize the clubs’ need to control costs and to be able to predict costs.”

The union, fearing that the owners will ultimately declare an impasse and unilaterally implement the salary-cap proposal that the union rejected on July 18, is expected to set a mid-August strike date today, threatening the owners’ postseason revenue, which Ravitch estimated Wednesday at $140 million.

“We’re fighting for dollars,” Ravitch said of the difference in the two proposals.

Fehr called that a moral victory. “The owners have been talking about competitive balance and a lot of other things, but this has always been about money,” Fehr said. “Now Ravitch has admitted it. I mean, it’s been clear from the start that the only way the clubs will help themselves is if the players pay for it.”

Fehr referred to the fact that the clubs have agreed to broader revenue sharing among themselves, but only if the players approve a salary cap.

The union has received almost unanimous strike authorization. Only six players voted against a strike.