Baseball Talks Extensive, but Bear No Fruit : Labor: Sides meet until 2:15 a.m. after players reject tax plan, but they are expected to present new proposal today.

It had to be the strangest scene yet in baseball’s four-month-old labor dispute.

At 12:45 EST this morning, an amateur piano player named Donald Fehr took a practice break at a keyboard in the executive center where the final attempt to reach a negotiated settlement before the owners declare an impasse and implement their salary-cap proposal is taking place.

Remarkably, Fehr wasn’t playing “Taps” on the talks.

With the owners’ negotiating committee still scheduled to leave today for Thursday’s implementation meeting in Chicago, the two sides went past midnight for a second night in a row before finishing at 2:15 a.m. They indicated they would resume talks this morning, when the players have asked for an opportunity to present another proposal.

Before adjournment for the night, union leader Fehr preached caution as he sat on the piano bench and said, “I don’t know if this is going somewhere or if it is where it’s going. Ideas sometimes come as the result of concentrated effort, and that’s what we’re attempting. We’re analyzing, re-analyzing and re-analyzing, trying to see if there’s a magic bullet there, some idea that will let the parties get through this. So far we haven’t found it.”

That they were still at it seemed amazing considering that the union had responded to the owners’ deadline and fundamentally rejected their escalating tax plan during a joint meeting Tuesday morning. At that point, the talks seemed dead. Jerry McMorris, the moderate Colorado Rockies owner, said there was no sign of encouragement.

Special mediator William J. Usery, however, launched a campaign of shuttle diplomacy, moving between the groups at opposite ends of the center here, and by late afternoon coaxed them together in smaller units.

The owners were represented by chief negotiator John Harrington, the Boston Red Sox chief executive officer; Philadelphia Phillie vice president David Montgomery, and two counsels, Chuck O’Connor and Rob Mansford.

The union reduced its team to Fehr, his brother Steve, a Kansas City attorney who has been working with the union since the strike began on Aug. 12; associate counsel Eugene Orza, and players David Cone, Tom Glavine and Jay Bell.

They met for about four hours before dinner--during which Usery told a reporter that there had definitely been a development--and for about two more hours before Fehr’s piano break. After that they resumed talks, which some portrayed strictly as a show-and-tell performance on behalf of Usery and/or a demonstration of good-faith bargaining by both sides, knowing if the owners implement, the players will file a good-faith complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.

“We’re simply trying to exhaust all avenues,” insisted Fehr, who at one point during the night, according to sources, brought up the possibility of eliminating salary arbitration in exchange for unrestricted free agency after two or three years of major league service, an idea rejected by owners.

Implementation will usher in a salary-cap system dramatically changing the way clubs do business, generate a series of legal challenges by the union, prompt the clubs to try to open spring camps with replacement players, reawaken Congressional interest in baseball’s antitrust exemption and leave the union on strike this spring.

If Tuesday was D-Day in the crisis, the first salvo was fired in September 1992 when the owners forced commissioner Fay Vincent out of office and opted not to replace him until a new agreement was reached to remove the threat of intervention by the industry’s chief executive officer, as they felt Vincent had intervened to end the 1991 lockout.

They hired Richard Ravitch to analyze the industry’s economic problems and design a new compensation system; voted to re-open bargaining talks a year early in December 1992; took 14 months to agree among themselves on a new revenue-sharing formula provided it was linked to a cap; voted to require three-fourths approval of a bargaining agreement rather than a majority, which made it more difficult for any one coalition to push through a settlement; unveiled their salary cap proposal on June 14; canceled the World Series for the first time in 90 years in mid-September (“the short-term pain is worth the long-term gain,” acting Commissioner Bud Selig kept saying) and basically never strayed from their demand for cost certainty in a system that would reduce the players’ share of the industry’s $1.7 billion revenue from 58% to 50%.

The system owners are expected to implement, the union has said repeatedly, will wipe out 25 years of negotiating gains, transfer millions from the players to owners by placing an artificial ceiling on the free market and virtually eliminate free agency.

It will be phased in over four years, with no team allowed to have a payroll--tabulated on the basis of many other expenses besides salaries--more than 100% above the 1994 average of about $34.8 million and all teams required to be within 88% of it.

Stan Kasten, president of the Atlanta Braves and Hawks, referred to his NBA experience with a salary cap and said: “It won’t take long for the general managers to figure how it works and the owners to get comfortable with it, but implementation doesn’t really solve our problems . . . . We need a negotiated settlement. Until then we won’t have baseball like we know it.”