BASEBALL / ROSS NEWHAN : Season Ends Early, but There Still Are Fireworks to Come

The most exciting baseball season in recent history is gone. The debut of the new playoff format is gone. The World Series, sadly, is gone.

Where do they go from here? Who can tell, but with major league owners locked into the salary cap or an equivalent mechanism designed to depress salaries and deny mobility, this much seems certain:

There is no area of compromise, no halfway point, in the collective bargaining negotiations still confronting owners and players.

It still seems likely that the owners will go for blood, that before Nov. 1 they will declare an impasse and unilaterally implement the win-at-all-costs salary-cap proposal, threatening the 1995 season.

That would be no surprise to union leader Donald Fehr, who has insisted from the start of the 35-day strike that the owners were intent on implementing and have never deviated from a proposal and plan aimed at breaking the union.

Fehr picked up a new believer in the final hours before acting--acting, indeed--commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season.

San Diego attorney and longtime player agent Tony Attanasio, encouraged by three owners he would not identify, called Selig Tuesday night to offer a concept that seemed to draw some interest from Selig, Attanasio said.

Selig was summoned to a conference call and had his daughter, Wendy Selig-Prieb, the Milwaukee Brewers’ general counsel and a member of the owners’ negotiating committee, call Attanasio back for a fuller explanation.

Attanasio suggested that the sides adopt the payroll and revenue tax plan, with an increase in the tax, that the union had proposed five days earlier and which had been rejected so quickly, Fehr said at the time, that it was “almost insulting.”

Attanasio also suggested that a model of the owners’ salary-cap proposal be run alongside the tax plan to try to prove to the union that the cap isn’t such a bad idea. He suggested a five-year trial, during which either side could reopen after two or three years.

He also proposed that the owners and players initiate joint ventures in marketing and international baseball and that a union representative sit on the committee that selects the next commissioner.

Attanasio had been one of several agents--Randy Hendricks, Ron Shapiro and Tom Reich prominent among the others--who had been talking to owners and club executives in an effort to keep the process alive.

Selig-Prieb told him they would weigh his proposal overnight. She didn’t tell him her father was preparing a draft of his cancellation announcement at the same time. Attanasio said he got the call the next morning: Thanks, but no thanks.

“What I gathered from her is that it didn’t deliver the pound of flesh that the owners are determined to take from the players,” Attanasio said. “I was terribly disappointed to have the idea rejected out of hand, but it made me realize that the whole thing was predetermined, as the union had tried to tell me. The owners never had a Plan B, never made a counterproposal.

“Before I explained my concept to him, Selig told me how disappointed he was that the union had been totally inflexible. I said they gave you a tax plan and some revenue-sharing ideas and the only thing they’re saying no to is the salary cap, and that it’s been the owners who are inflexible.

“I told him that if the Series goes down, he’ll be the one remembered for taking it down, not Don Fehr or Dick Ravitch. I also told him that he seemed to have four choices. He could take the players’ tax plan. He could jam the cap down the players’ throats, which wouldn’t work. He could take a combination of the two, or he could choose the fourth, absolute disaster. I hoped sanity would prevail, but he chose the fourth.”

Absolute disaster in the form of an implemented system that the union will employ every legal option to fight, including resumption of the strike next spring, when owners may try to lure minor league players across the picket line.

Absolute disaster in the form of owners trying to promote, market and sell tickets for a season that may never be played.

Absolute disaster in the form of widening mistrust that, in Fehr’s view, stems basically from the owners’ freedom to do anything they want under their antitrust exemption.

Fehr and Selig are expected to be in Washington on Sept. 22 to appear at another House hearing on the exemption. Fehr will also begin a series of regional meetings with players next week. There are no negotiations on the immediate docket, but the owners’ Player Relations Committee is considering asking the union for a 30-day moratorium on legal action by either side while negotiations continue.

“It’s as if they want to drop bombs and then do lunch,” Attanasio said. “Some owners to this day won’t admit they were part of collusion.”

Can they get beyond the dislike and mistrust, a level of animosity that Jerry McMorris, owner of the Colorado Rockies, says is the most disheartening aspect of his first two years in baseball?

At this point, with the World Series gone and nothing to save except 1995, that animosity seems to have been a unifying aspect among owners, whose solidarity continues to survive the probe of skeptics.

An American League owner recently reflected on the owners’ tendency to capitulate in seven previous negotiations and said, “I’m afraid that some of my colleagues became intoxicated this time with the concept of winning, of drawing blood. I would have to admit that some owners do sense a chance to break the union.”

Selig denies that, says it has never come up, and confines union busting to another time and place. The mistrust, however, is real, the anger among owners as strong as when he first encountered it as a freshman owner in 1970.

“Through many commissioners, through many different heads of the Player Relations Committee, through Marvin Miller and now Don Fehr . . . unfortunately, we’re still in the same boat, and that’s what’s really frustrating,” he said in his Wednesday news conference.

“What it really proves is a sad and tragic sense that both sides have failed. We can’t even seem to establish a common ground on the most elementary of issues.”

The weight of that failure, contributing to his decision to cancel the World Series, is already eating at Selig. Owners tried to tell him that the media’s “Bud Bashing” represented institutional hits, but Selig was on the phone Thursday, calling a reporter here and there to wonder why he is being blamed for canceling the Series when it is the players who have been on strike for 35 days. A partnership is one thing, but let’s put the blame where it belongs, Selig seemed to be saying.

Or, as Fehr said:

“When people think back to what the final image of the 1994 season will be, it may be Bud Selig at a press conference in Milwaukee protesting pain and gnashing teeth but nevertheless going ahead and dashing the hopes and dreams of many people.

“It was their decision to make, and they decided their circumstances were more important.”