Players Make Offer They Hope Owners Can’t Refuse : Baseball: Proposed tax on wealthier clubs’ payrolls and revenues is aimed at eliminating the demand for a salary cap.

With the clock ticking on the 1994 season, the Major League Players Assn. delivered a proposal that it hopes will make time stand still long enough to resolve its collective bargaining dispute with the owners and salvage the rest of the schedule.

“I don’t know whether to be optimistic or not to be optimistic,” Donald Fehr, the union’s executive director, said Thursday. “I’ve adopted the posture that I’ll be optimistic when I know an agreement will show up in the next hour.”

The only thing Fehr expects to show up for sure this morning is a response to the proposal aimed at driving the owners off their salary-cap demands by substituting a derivative concept. Although this may not fully satisfy the owners in their pursuit of cost certainty, it was described by a management lawyer as a “small step in the right direction.”

The owners’ negotiating committee said it would study the proposal overnight. If rejected, it’s uncertain whether the door to further give-and-take on the proposed framework would remain open.

It’s also uncertain whether acting commissioner Bud Selig would enforce today’s announced deadline and cancel the rest of the season if an agreement is not reached. “We’re still on very tenuous ground, but common sense always prevails,” Selig said. “We’ll see what happens tomorrow.”

The union has said it will ignore the deadline and continue to seek an agreement. Fehr reiterated that a settlement could be reached as late as Sept. 17.

While some members of the owners’ negotiating team were said to have reacted negatively to the union proposal, it is believed the union would not have pursued the concept if it had not received positive feedback during a series of behind-the-scenes meetings with members of the committee, including Colorado Rockies owner Jerry McMorris, Atlanta Brave President Stan Kasten and Boston Red Sox CEO John Harrington.

“I hope this is something we can build on, but it’s too early to characterize,” Harrington said of the proposal.

Fehr would not discuss specifics of the proposal but sources said it:

--Calls for about 16 of the highest-revenue clubs to pay a tax of 2% on their respective payrolls and of an unspecified amount on their respective revenues. The Toronto Blue Jays, for example, would pay about $800,000 as a tax on their payroll alone (based on 1993 figures), a management lawyer said of his initial review. The collected taxes would go into baseball’s central fund and be redistributed to the smaller markets as revenue sharing.

--Establishes a 75-25 split of gate receipts in both the American and National leagues. Visiting clubs in the American League now get 20% of gate receipts, while visiting clubs in the National get the equivalent of less than 5%.

The union contends that the proposal responds to two of the owners’ most frequently mentioned concerns:

--It helps balance the revenue disparity among the 28 clubs through a fair distribution of (1) gate receipts and (2) the larger levy that high-revenue teams would be paying on their payrolls and revenues.

--And while failing to establish a fixed ceiling on salaries, as a salary cap would, it produces a measure of cost containment by discouraging high payrolls because of the tax.

“I don’t know what we’d do if we were starting over in a perfect world, but this directs money to the clubs they have designated as disadvantaged, while allowing us to live with it,” Fehr said, referring to the absence of a salary cap.

He added that the owners presented new financial data to the union Saturday, putting the players on the same revenue-sharing page with the owners and prompting re-evaluation of the numbers, leading to the new proposal.

There were no bargaining sessions on Day 28 of the strike. However, there was additional telephone communication between the sides, and 11 players, all members of the union’s negotiating committee, participated in talks with union economists before the still rough proposal was delivered to the owners by three union lawyers and four players, including Orel Hershiser of the Dodgers.

Hershiser said: “I’m excited that we’re talking again, but that excitement wanes when you look at the amount of work we have to do. We’re at a pressure point. Time is running out.”

Teammate Brett Butler said: “It would be devastating to have to cancel the postseason. Nobody wins, and nobody is winning now.”

Do the nine or 10 small-market clubs that continue to support the salary-cap concept believe that, or do they believe unilateral implementation of their proposal would represent a long-sought victory over the union? How the negotiating committee responds to the union proposal may provide one clue, and how Selig, ruler of the small-market coalition, responds to his deadline, may provide another.

Said Toronto’s Paul Molitor, reflecting on the tentative deadline: “Whether it’s tomorrow or three or four days from now, everyone realizes that to get the postseason in, we’re down to the last stages.”

On the Table

Key elements of the proposal made Thursday by baseball players:

PAYROLL/REVENUE TAXES

The top 16 clubs by revenue would pay a 2% tax on their payrolls and an uspecified tax on their revenues, which would be redistributed to the other 12 clubs.

GATE RECEIPTS

Home teams would share 25% of their gate receipts with the visiting teams. Currently, AL teams share 20% and NL teams share 43 cents per ticket, about 5%.

SALARY CAP

Not mentioned.

FREE AGENCY

Basically unchanged.

SALARY ARBITRATION

Basically unchanged.