This Owner Seeks More Than Fistful of Dollars : Baseball: The Orioles’ Angelos rides alone among his peers after verbal shootout with Ravitch.

Peek into a ballroom at the next meeting of major league baseball owners. Scan the crowd of millionaire bankers, cable-television executives and pizza-delivery moguls in their wingtips and tailored suits. Then look for Peter G. Angelos, Baltimore lawyer and Oriole owner.

He is the one other owners are working feverishly to avoid.

It’s true that Angelos joined the exclusive fraternity of baseball owners less than a year ago, hardly time enough to have forged close ties with the investors who run the 27 other major league teams. But the isolation that shrouds him these days has less to do with his tenure than with something else about Angelos:

He makes trouble for the owners and, worse, makes it publicly.

“I didn’t sign on to be silent, to be acquiescent,” Angelos said. “I am no schoolboy, and I’m not a Boy Scout who just joined the troop. If I have something to say, I’ll say it.”

And he hasn’t been without success. A union lawyer said Tuesday that it is likely talks in the dispute with striking players will resume next week thanks partly to a plan Angelos presented Donald Fehr, the union’s executive director, during a controversial meeting. But the hard feelings, caused by Angelos’ frequent sniping at management’s handling of negotiations, will likely be lasting.

“I don’t mind people voicing opinions, but I don’t think the things he has said have been helpful,” said Bill Giles, president of the Philadelphia Phillies, who complains that Angelos’ comments give the false impression that the owners are ready to retreat from their hard-line bargaining position.

Can the owners rein in Angelos?

Giles doesn’t seem concerned.

“We’ve had these problems before with different people,” he said. “You just live with it. You don’t put them on (influential) committees.”

Many of the owners’ decisions are shaped by baseball’s Player Relations Committee and Executive Council, powerful groups from which Angelos has been excluded.

Angelos rejects suggestions that he has picked a lousy time--in the midst of collective bargaining--to become the owners’ answer to the Lone Ranger. And he does this with more than a hint of irritation.

“When is the appropriate time to speak one’s mind?” he said, his deep voice rising. “At the three (owners) meetings they have each year? When they get their little PRC together and their little Executive Council together, to the exclusion of the Lone Ranger and Tonto and all the rest of the Indians? Who are they kidding?

“You mean when I bought this ballclub for the purpose of having Maryland ownership that I signed on to some organization in which what I have to say is to be heard one year from now? Oh, no.”

Without a doubt, Angelos has been viewed as management’s loose cannon during these labor problems, Tuesday’s developments notwithstanding.

In August, shortly before the strike began, he was sharply critical of the owners’ tactical move to withhold a $7.8-million payment to the players’ pension plan, warning that the action “sets the stage for further recriminations.”

Last month, Angelos was one of two owners--with the Cincinnati Reds’ Marge Schott--who refused to sign a management declaration announcing the cancellation of the World Series. He took issue with a section that blamed the players for refusing to negotiate in good faith.

And on Sept. 24, Angelos took what might have been the most defiant step of all, meeting with Fehr in Baltimore. Angelos arranged the meeting without notifying management negotiators, including acting commissioner Bud Selig.

How did Angelos get into this position?

It probably was inevitable, given his take-charge personality and his deep reservations about management’s negotiating team, led by Selig and negotiator Richard Ravitch.

Angelos, a veteran labor lawyer, says he likes both men, while making clear that he believes the owners’ strategists are misguided.

Of Selig, for example, the Oriole owner said, “He is a very successful automobile dealer. What makes him think he has the abilities to do what he is attempting to do here is beyond my comprehension.”

Angelos began to part company with baseball’s negotiators at an owners meeting--one of the first he attended. Ravitch was making a presentation that showed mounting losses for baseball owners during the 1994 and 1995 seasons. As Angelos recalls, it was a “most impressive presentation” that had him thoroughly convinced the owners were right to be pursuing a hard line in their talks with the players.

When Ravitch finished, Angelos asked whether the same speech might be made to the players representatives.

As Angelos recalls, Ravitch replied, “ ‘We can’t do that.’

“One word led to another, and that’s when (Ravitch) said, ‘Rational persuasion will have no place in these negotiations.’ ”

Angelos says he was shocked to hear that.

“He was passing himself off as a negotiator, but if he believes that, he’s (an) idiot,” he said. “If anyone believes you can walk into a meeting and say to the other side, ‘I need so-and-so because of this particular condition,’ and get it without proving the condition exists . . . That’s so illogical. It sounds like the position of a child.”

As Ravitch and Angelos argued, others in the meeting room looked on in stunned silence.

Giles remembered the exchange coming “like a flash of lightning.”

“We were all in a subdued, reasonable conversation. All of a sudden, (Angelos) started speaking loudly, saying things that kind of shocked everybody,” Giles recalled. “He was saying, ‘Why don’t you do it this way?’--telling Ravitch how to negotiate.”

Another official likened Angelos’ aggressive, close questioning of Ravitch to “a cross-examination,” no stretch considering the owner’s long career as a trial lawyer.

Angelos seemed amused by that.

“I didn’t stand up,” he said. “I never left my chair. If they thought that was a cross-examination, they ought to come to a courtroom. I know there is a certain way I say things if I am doing them in lawyer’s context. But I didn’t attack the guy.”

Ravitch declined to speak about the incident, except to say that Angelos “has said some inaccurate things about it.”

Added Ravitch: “I represent all 28 owners. I have no personal disagreement with Angelos.”

For many owners, the incident was their introduction to Angelos, and quickly cast him as an outsider. But Angelos says he has no regrets.

“Am I sorry for taking on (Ravitch)?” he said, repeating the question. “I’m sorry I didn’t totally demolish him.”

Angelos’ reward for such outbursts has been a deafening silence. Although he says nine or more owners congratulated him for taking on Ravitch, few are close to him now. He also has been shut out of any official role in negotiations with the striking players.

Angelos has yet to be appointed to any of the committees monitoring the negotiations.

“They were stacked,” he said.

Angelos was passed over when Selig, among others, appointed 12 club executives to a group that met several times with union negotiators.

Last week, Angelos lost again when he was left off an “operations committee” that will help the owners plot their moves in the dispute.

Even getting strike information has been a chore. Selig has regular conference calls for about 18 teams, most of whom have representatives on the numerous owners’ labor committees. The Orioles don’t, so Angelos is forced to rely on sporadic, informal updates, he says.

In small ways, Angelos has exacted his revenge. When Selig urged him to join a group of owners going to Washington to put down a congressional movement to revoke baseball’s antitrust exemption, Angelos declined, saying he was busy at his law office.

Not too busy, though, to hold his clandestine meeting with Fehr two days later.

Selig said none of these skirmishes affects his thinking about Angelos. The two have “a nice relationship,” Selig said.

“He’s opinionated, feisty,” Selig said. “I happen to like him because I am not exactly a shrinking violet myself.”

Even Angelos’ performance at the owners meeting did not irritate Selig.

“At least I know where he stands,” Selig said.