O’Malley Still on the Outside Looking In : Baseball: Dodger president’s absence from a pivotal role in negotiations has left some observers befuddled.

It is not a new aspect of the baseball bargaining dispute, only one of the most mystifying. A headline on a baseball column in The Times on Sept. 4 read: “O’Malley on Outside Looking In, Thanks to Selig.”

It is Christmas Eve, more than three months later, and the president of the Dodgers, one of baseball’s most influential and respected franchises, has seemed to remain on the outside looking in as negotiations with the players collapsed, the owners implemented their salary cap and the industry headed for legal and financial chaos.

“I don’t get it,” a union official said Friday, not for the first time. “Where’s Peter O’Malley been? What’s he saying? What’s he doing?”

It’s not just O’Malley. The union has found it strange from the start that none of the big-market owners except for Peter Angelos of the Baltimore Orioles has consistently questioned the owners’ direction and strategy or put a coalition together to challenge the leadership of the acting commissioner, Bud Selig, and his silent partner, Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf.

Where has George Steinbrenner been? Ted Turner? Fred Wilpon and Nelson Doubleday?

It is O’Malley, however, with a name conjuring images of power and influence in baseball’s highest circles, whose absence from a central and pivotal role during one of the most important six months in baseball history seems to have befuddled people the most.

O’Malley talked about it some in September and talked about it some Friday.

“Do I regret it?” he said, repeating a question pertaining to his lack of assignment. “Yes, I regret it, but it was not my choice. It was Bud Selig’s choice and he hasn’t seen a place for me, a role for me.

“He’s surrounded himself with people he’s comfortable with, as I’ve said before. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been on the phone or haven’t been involved on a daily basis, but when people are named to a negotiating committee or a TV committee, I think you have to let those people do their jobs without giving the appearance of interfering or interfering, period.”

Does he agree with Selig’s leadership?

“I’m sure a lot of us will have a lot to say about that in time, but I’m not going to get into it today,” O’Malley said. “We still have to get a bargaining agreement and a partnership with the players, that should be the goal, and Buddy is still in charge. The only thing I’ll say is that I would have liked to have seen Jerry McMorris (of the Colorado Rockies) active earlier and John Harrington (of the Boston Red Sox) active earlier.”

There are certain hard truths.

--Peter O’Malley was co-chairman of the committee that restructured the still vacant commissioner’s office and chairman of the committee that selected Leonard Coleman as National League president, but the power he inherited from his father, Walter, and which was still in place under Bowie Kuhn, has eroded under Peter Ueberroth, Fay Vincent and now Selig, fading like the mystique of National League superiority.

--O’Malley believes baseball should have hired a full-time, independent commissioner and that Selig, as a Brewer stockholder, chairman of the Player Relations Committee and acting commissioner, has attempted to wear too many hats, is too often caught in a conflicting position, and has been too closely tied--this comes from others--to Reinsdorf and a small-market clique of Carl Pohlad of the Minnesota Twins, Doug Danforth of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Tom Werner, who bowed out on Tuesday as owner of the San Diego Padres.

Both O’Malley and Selig describe their relationship as professional. They had a respectful meeting in October when O’Malley flew to Milwaukee to urge Selig to reach out to the players and involve them in ongoing industry business even amid the ongoing negotiations. Did it happen? The owners and players are no closer to a partnership than they are to a bargaining agreement, and if you want to know what O’Malley really thinks about Selig, consider this:

--At the Three Tenors concert at Dodger Stadium this summer, O’Malley apologized to Vincent for joining Selig and Reinsdorf in the push that led to Vincent’s resignation, saying, in effect, that if he knew then what he knows now he wouldn’t have participated in that effort.

--In discussing the new revenue-sharing format in an interview with The Times the other day, O’Malley cited Werner’s Padres and Selig’s Brewers and said that given the professionalism with which the Dodgers are operated he didn’t like the idea of sharing money with clubs such as San Diego and Milwaukee, “where there has been no evidence of good management.”

Selig certainly had to feel the bite of that, but then O’Malley voted for the revenue-sharing plan. He voted for implementation, although he considers it the opposite of the partnership he preaches and says it doesn’t make sense that common sense hasn’t prevailed in these negotiations.

“Hopefully the negotiations will continue, but we had to implement,” he said. “There was no alternative. We couldn’t keep putting it off. We had to set the rules under which we’re going to operate so we can prepare for next season.”

A season with replacement players?

O’Malley said he didn’t want to discuss that. “My focus is on resolving the differences with the players,” he said. “We still have time.”

His focus? How strange. It still appears to be from a distance, on the outside looking in.