Season Could Be Declared Over in Two Weeks

With no negotiating sessions scheduled for the Labor Day weekend, baseball’s acting commissioner, Bud Selig, said Thursday he will spend the holiday taking a closer look at a possible shutdown date for the rest of the season.

“It’s a tragic situation, but sooner or later you reach the point of diminishing return,” Selig said. “We’re not there yet, but it is September on my calendar.”

It is believed the owners have tentatively set Sept. 15 as the date by which a decision must be made.

However, with TV advertisers turning away from the uncertainty of the playoffs and World Series to put their money elsewhere, the owners no longer have $140 million in TV revenue at stake in postseason play. They may not feel compelled to wait until mid-month to write off the 1994 season and formulate plans to unilaterally implement their salary-cap proposal. The season could go down as early as Sept. 10.

Neither Selig nor chief negotiator Richard Ravitch would estimate what postseason play is now worth in terms of TV revenue, but the 21-day strike by major league players has delivered a significant financial hit.

“We were off to a wonderful start, but the advertisers stopped investing in early August,” Selig said, a reference to the start of the strike Aug. 12.

The loss of potentially $5 million a club in postseason TV revenue compounds a significant regular-season setback. During the four-year, $1.06-billion contract with CBS, each team received about $14 million a year in national TV revenue. In the first half-year of the partnership with ABC and NBC, each club has received about $1.5 million, an American League executive said.

Ravitch maintains that the salary-cap proposal addressed the TV falloff among other critical revenue issues. It continues to generate unprecedented unanimity among the owners despite possible loss of the World Series and pressure from some high-revenue clubs favoring compromise and resumption of the season.

Seven to nine of the big-market clubs, among them the Dodgers, have been keeping the phone lines busy, according to sources, but have been unable to muster breakthrough support. Twenty-one of the 28 clubs have to approve a settlement.

“The problem is that even some of those high-revenue clubs, as unhappy as they are with the prospect of the season going down, are more excited with the prospect of winning a negotiation and coming out with a new system,” a source close to the situation said, alluding to unilateral implementation of the proposal.

Is that winning, considering the union would challenge it through the National Labor Relations Board and resume the strike next spring?

“We’re jumping off the bridge hand in hand,” a management source said of the owners and players.