Strike Certification Would Limit Baseball Replacements

Eugene Orza, associate general counsel of the Major League Baseball Players Assn., said Sunday that the Department of Labor has now certified the strike that began on Aug. 12, meaning that all foreign players will be prevented from receiving visas and entering the United States next spring to serve as replacement players if the owners attempt to open the camps amid the ongoing bargaining dispute.

That dispute seemed no closer to resolution Sunday, when the owners made a counter proposal they claimed was within the framework of the proposal made by the union on Saturday. They gave the players until tonight to respond, which prompted union leader Donald Fehr to say that if the “owners want to rush off to their meeting, they will. We can’t stop them.”

The reference was to Thursday’s scheduled meeting in Chicago, where the owners plan to declare an impasse and implement a salary cap if there is no settlement. Fehr said the proposal that the owners delivered Sunday contains “all of the elements of a cap.”

Boston Red Sox chief executive officer John Harrington, the owners chief negotiator, said he was confident an agreement could be reached on the non-economic aspects of the union proposal and that “we tried to adopt their framework in satisfying our cost control concerns.”

Sources indicated the owners are willing to accept the union’s 5% payroll tax--specifically 4.64% in the owners’ proposal--but with a trigger that would create an escalating tax similar to their high rate proposal of Nov. 17 if payrolls reached a certain threshhold. A union lawyer said the concept would particularly reward high-revenue clubs if they stayed below the threshhold, creating a deterrent to spend and a cap in disguise.

“There’s a fail-safe mechanism if revenues fail to grow at the level at which we would hope,” Colorado Rockies owner Jerry McMorris said.

The suspicion lingers among union officials that the owners are attempting to force the union to deliver the last rejection so that they can move on to Chicago.

The visa denial for foreign players is now automatic under Immigration and Naturalization Service policy and affects major and minor leaguers, Orza said. He added, however, that the union will seek an exemption for players who were on major league rosters and on strike from Aug. 12 to Oct. 3 so they are not treated differently from their striking U.S. colleagues. The owners have all but said they plan to open the camps with replacement players next spring. Some management people have speculated privately that they would expect many Latino players to cross picket lines, a contention strongly denied by many of them.

However, the visa restriction on foreign players--those with green cards are automatically exempted but Orza said he didn’t know how many were in that category--diminishes the pool of potential replacements.

“I don’t think it can be assumed that the owners will be or would be successful filling replacement rosters, but the suggestion that Latin players would cross the line represents the height of insensitivity and is an insult to the Hispanic culture,” Orza said.

Most agents believe the owners will focus on double A and single A players; older minor leaguers; striking young players vulnerable to financial pressure, and college players whose eligibility is up.

It is also noteworthy under baseball rules that the use of replacement players would have to be bargained to impasse--separate from the impasse that the owners seem certain to declare Thursday--before the owners could unilaterally use them.