Owners Taking Hard Look at Players’ ‘Taxation’ Plan : Baseball: Response expected this morning on proposal aimed at solving salary-cap quandary.

With the season just a day away from being canceled, striking baseball players delivered a “taxation” plan to owners Thursday and hoped it would be accepted in place of a salary cap.

Players presented their idea to owners during a 30-minute meeting in the early evening.

“We’ve received a proposal from the union,” owners negotiator Richard Ravitch said. “We’ll be in touch with the union (Friday) morning.”

Boston Red Sox chief executive office John Harrington said he hopes the proposal “will lead to more progress. I hope.”

“Other than to say we’re studying it, I don’t think it would be fair for me to characterize it,” Harrington said.

The players indicated the proposal could move Friday’s deadline for canceling the rest of the season.

“If there’s a settlement within reach, or a possibility of that coming, I don’t think there’s a time frame on this,” Dodger outfielder Brett Butler said, referring to the deadline.

Added Butler: “To go without a postseason would be devastating to the game. Nobody is going to win and nobody is winning right now.”

Acting commissioner Bud Selig said in Milwaukee that the deadline, which he set last week, “still applies.”

“Everything is as it’s been all along,” he said.

Both sides had said they expected a formal bargaining session to take place Thursday, but it never developed.

Players met with their attorneys and economists for most of the day at the union office in Manhattan. They then walked three blocks to the commissioner’s office where three union attorneys delivered the “concept” along with Dodger pitcher Orel Hershiser, Pittsburgh shortstop Jay Bell, Texas pitcher Kevin Brown and Oakland catcher Terry Steinbach.

The proposal, according to the union, is based on a framework similar to the revenue-sharing agreement owners adopted last January. Instead of a salary cap, however, it includes a taxation concept in which clubs could have any payroll they wanted, but would be forced to share a larger amount of locally generated revenue as their payrolls increased.

“They’ve got to have a chance to look it over,” Brown said.

Negotiations have taken on a sense of urgency since Selig announced the deadline last Friday. The strike, which began Aug. 12 and enters its fifth week Friday, threatens to prevent the World Series from being played for the first time since 1904. It is baseball’s eighth work stoppage since 1972.

A group of three team officials met with union attorneys late Wednesday night to discuss the concepts the union was considering. Union head Donald Fehr said the ideas came about from additional information owners provided to players at the start of the Labor Day weekend.

After that meeting ended about midnight, Colorado Rockies owner Jerry McMorris and Boston Red Sox chief executive officer John Harrington expressed hope that perhaps the season could be saved.

The full owners’ group, which also includes Chicago White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, Atlanta Braves president Stan Kasten, former St. Louis Cardinals CEO Stuart Meyer and Milwaukee Brewers vice president Wendy Selig-Prieb, spent Thursday at the commissioner’s office awaiting word from the union.

Around the country, teams wondered what would happen.

“I’m sitting here anxiously awaiting,” Philadelphia Phillies owner Bill Giles said from his office in Veterans Stadium.

Eugene Orza, the union’s No. 2 official, said players didn’t present a formal plan because “we’re still trying to get accurate numbers.”

Fehr did not attend Thursday evening’s meeting, and the role of Ravitch was unclear. In recent days, Ravitch’s role appears to have waned as McMorris and Harrington’s involvement increased.

Owners presented their salary cap proposal on June 14, but the union has said it never will accept the idea. Owners repeatedly have insisted that they need cost certainty, but players have said they like the free-market system of free agency and salary arbitration that has increased the average salary from $51,501 in 1976 to $1,188,679 on opening day this year.

Five more games were wiped out Thursday, increasing the total to 357, more than 15 percent of the season. A settlement today, which appears unlikely, probably would allow players to return to the field on Sept. 16 or Sept. 19, depending on how many days of workouts the sides agree to.