Baseball Talks Center on Truth in Advertising

With baseball’s collective bargaining scheduled to resume Thursday and likely to produce little more than familiar rhetoric, the owners have turned to the fans for salary-cap support, angering the players’ union.

Management, in a full-page ad in today’s USA Today, says the game can remain “affordable, accessible and competitive” only with a change in the compensation system, and that long-term viability and competitiveness have been threatened by “skyrocketing costs.”

Donald Fehr, executive director of the union, said the ad is a cover for management’s plan to implement the cap unilaterally and is designed to “fool the public.”

“It’s regrettable but not surprising, given their motivation through all of this,” Fehr said. “The timing makes it crystal clear that their purpose is not to negotiate or reach an agreement but to conduct a public relations campaign aimed at the fans. They are hell-bent on imposing (the salary cap).”

Beginning Thursday at a resort in Rye Brook, N.Y., special mediator William J. Usery will preside over four days of negotiations. There have been only five negotiating sessions since the strike began on Aug. 12 and only one since the World Series was canceled on Sept. 14.

However, sources on both sides said there has been no change in the basic positions regarding the cap--nor any indication that Usery, despite his impressive success in other stalemates, will be able to keep the owners at the table when their calendar dictates it is time to implement the cap, probably within 30 days.

“These will be the first meetings of any substance and I’d like to believe something positive will happen, but we have no indication of that,” Fehr said. “I’m not optimistic.”

It is anticipated that at some point during the renewed talks, owners’ negotiator Richard Ravitch will reintroduce a reworked proposal, still based on a cap but without the $1-billion compensation guarantee for the players, the requisite last, best offer of sorts before implementation.

Acting commissioner Bud Selig, reached at the clubs’ marketing meeting in Phoenix, insisted again Tuesday that no decision had been made on implementation and that the ad in USA Today was not meant to be confrontational, having been written two weeks before this week’s negotiating sessions were scheduled.

“It’s important that fans, players and management understand that at this time in history, baseball needs some fine tuning,” Selig said in a statement released in conjunction with the ad. “That should be the context into which all parties seek answers and peace.”

But there has been no sign of peace.

Not only have the once-promising back-channel talks between some owners and the union dissolved--”The owners used Usery’s presence to shut off negotiations,” Fehr said--but in their tit-for-tat relationship, both sides have filed charges of unfair labor practice with the National Labor Relations Board, and there have been four other grievances relating to the labor situation filed with baseball arbitrator George Nicolau--three by the union and one by management.

In addition, a union attorney said the players are concerned about the absence of activity and the specter of collusion in the free-agent market and could be ready to discuss it next week.