ANALYSIS : Baseball Goes Back to the Bargaining Table : Labor: Owners’ tax plan might be viewed by union as a disguised salary cap.

Make no mistake: The tax plan that baseball’s major league owners will propose to the players’ union today will probably be construed as a salary cap by another name.

Make no mistake: The same owners who refused to come off the cap to save the World Series aren’t suddenly going to capitulate and agree to any labor contract that does not include a payroll ceiling and salary constraints.

“Those are still the overriding considerations,” acting Commissioner Bud Selig said Wednesday. “The basic parameters haven’t changed. We’re not trying to fool anyone.

“If the thought of a salary cap bothers people, let’s try it a different way.”

The union has a good sense of what’s coming when talks resume under special mediator William J. Usery in Washington today, and probably will reject it as the equivalent of a cap.

The questions then become:

--Does the tax plan have flexibility that the cap didn’t have?

--Can Usery keep owners and players at the table, working toward a negotiated middle ground?

Usery can’t dictate a settlement despite his impressive credentials and obvious clout as an appointee of the President.

He emerged from the three days of renewed bargaining in Rye Brook, N.Y., last week to indicate that he hoped to keep owners and players talking until they reached a settlement in Washington.

There is no indication a settlement is imminent, but Usery has clearly had a persuasive impact, urging both sides to rethink their positions.

“He has been tenacious about that, and that’s good,” Selig said.

Usery has also created a more civil and communicative atmosphere in which union leader Donald Fehr--for the time being, at least--is refraining from verbal assaults on the owners, and Fehr’s sparring partner, Richard Ravitch, has been replaced--at Usery’s request--as the owners’ spokesman and chief negotiator by the more conciliatory John Harrington, chief executive officer of the Boston Red Sox.

Whether all of that will contribute to a settlement isn’t certain, but today’s proposal--even if only a cap in disguise--still represents the first shift in concept or substance by the owners since they presented their salary-cap proposal June 14.

The union remains wary.

“Some tax plans are better than a cap and some are worse,” union lawyer Eugene Orza said. “Some are the same thing. We can’t be optimistic or pessimistic until we see it.”

Although the tax plan has been an owners’ option for several months, their negotiating committee was still working on the details Wednesday. The tax--expected to be sizable--would be applied to all clubs over a specified ceiling, with the money going to the smaller-revenue clubs, supplementing the same revenue-sharing formula the owners agreed to in January if linked to a salary cap.

An American League owner referred to the Florida meeting at which the clubs reached a revenue-sharing agreement and said: “There is a strong feeling that the Ft. Lauderdale plan should remain the centerpiece (of the new proposal), with the tax plan serving as the salary cap.

“It would be ridiculous to have lost all of this money (an estimated $600 million because of the strike) and all of those games and not come out with an agreement that puts strong controls on our labor costs.”

The significance of the proposal will hinge on the size of the tax, the level of the expected ceiling and the willingness of both sides to negotiate from there. The owners quickly rejected a cap-less proposal by the union in September that would have applied a 1.6% tax on clubs with the 16 largest payrolls and 16 largest revenues. That money would have been shared with the smaller-revenue clubs.

The new proposal does not prevent the owners from ultimately implementing their salary-cap proposal, still technically on the table.

Harrington told the union last week that, barring an agreement, the owners will feel pressured to implement their cap in early to mid-December. The Washington meetings could represent one of the last opportunities for a negotiated settlement.