Baseball Owners Put a New Plan on the Table

Major league baseball owners presented the players’ union with a new bargaining proposal Thursday designed around a payroll tax plan similar to that rejected by the locked-out hockey players as the equivalent of a salary cap.

“I guess we feel good that they came in with a proposal on the taxation wavelength, but we have to look at it and see if it is something we can live with,” Milwaukee Brewer pitcher Bob Scanlan said after a four-hour meeting in Herndon, Va. “It’s tough to tell where the middle ground is.”

Special mediator William J. Usery asked the two sides not to discuss the 102-page document that union economists went to work on Thursday night, but sources said it calls for an accelerating tax above a specified payroll ceiling, eliminates salary arbitration, as the owners’ salary-cap proposal did, and provides for earlier free agency under the right of first-refusal restriction.

The tax concept puts the owners and players on the same philosophical footing, but the severity of the tax--believed to climb above 100%--works in the same manner as a cap and might make a compromise difficult.

“The clubs have a greater entitlement to tax payrolls and revenues than they do to ask for a salary cap,” union lawyer Eugene Orza said. “ . . . (But) there are obviously features of the proposal we don’t like. It’s not much different from the (rejected) hockey proposal in terms of rates.”

The owners have indicated they will implement the salary-cap proposal in early to mid-December unless an agreement is reached. The new proposal incorporates the revenue-sharing formula that the owners linked to a cap and technically, in management’s view, keeps the cap on the table.

“They gave us a revised salary-cap proposal that contains certain provisions necessary to understand their tax proposal,” Orza said. “The clubs’ strategy is to put both on the table, but what we discussed today was the taxation proposal.”

Now that there is a second proposal, the union does not believe the attempt to implement the cap will withstand scrutiny by the National Labor Relations Board, but sources said it did not raise that issue in Thursday’s meeting.