Owners Delay Implementation : Baseball: Mediator gets them to delay decision on salary cap proposal until mid-December.

Major league baseball owners, bowing to pressure from special mediator William J. Usery, agreed Wednesday to cancel a Monday meeting in Chicago at which they were expected to declare an impasse in the collective bargaining and approve unilateral implementation of their salary cap proposal.

“I asked the owners to withdraw their threat of implementation and they agreed to do that,” Usery said after recessing three days of contentious talks in Leesburg, Va. The decision did not herald a breakthrough, but it frees the union from the threat of implementation while it conducts a three-day executive board meeting in Atlanta starting Monday and formulates a counterproposal to the tax plan submitted by the owners Nov. 17.

Usery, according to sources, came down hard on the union for failing to make that proposal in Leesburg, but union officials said they required more information on how the tax works and wanted their constituency to approve the response in Atlanta.

“It’s our intention to take everything we’ve learned and hopefully produce the framework for a settlement,” union leader Donald Fehr said.

“It would have been a very bad sign if in the face of our expressed desire to discuss it at the board meetings next week (the owners) would have taken action to cut that off.”

Bargaining talks will resume Dec. 9 in Rye Brook, N.Y. The owners’ vote on implementation has been rescheduled for Dec. 15 or 16. The Dec. 7 deadline for clubs to offer arbitration to their own free agents, a process that would be eliminated by the salary cap system, has been moved to Dec. 17, with responses to the arbitration offer due Dec. 23 instead of Dec. 19. The Dec. 20 deadline for tendering 1995 contracts remains in place.

It is problematical whether the sides can resolve their significant differences before the owners’ calendar on flexibility runs out in mid-December. The union considers management’s tax proposal a cap in disguise. It places a ceiling on payrolls with a tax escalating to more than 100%. A union proposal submitted on Sept. 8 called for a tax of 1.6% with no ceiling.

Said acting commissioner Bud Selig, who approved the implementation delay from his Milwaukee office: “I’ve said often that the place to solve this is not in the courts or Congress but at the bargaining table. We have to be hopeful this contributes to the process. Time will tell.”

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Chances for congressional intervention in the baseball strike decreased Wednesday when the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee said the government shouldn’t get involved.

Henry Hyde, an Illinois Republican, stated his view as part of the dissenting report filed with the House of Representatives on the final day of this session.