Opening Day of Replacements Probable as Baseball Talks Fail

That window of opportunity slammed shut Sunday. The latest round of bargaining in baseball’s labor dispute ended without the settlement that owners and players deemed necessary if the season were going to open with regular players instead of replacements.

Said special mediator William J. Usery: “I’m very disappointed and distressed. Coming out of Milwaukee (and two days of procedural talks), I felt so good about the stage being set to get it done here, but there’s no use staying.”

Said management’s lead negotiator, Jerry McMorris, owner of the Colorado Rockies: “Without a miracle, we’ve missed an opportunity to have major league players on the field opening day. We’ve missed that big window we were all so excited about coming out of Milwaukee, and that’s a shame.”

Said union leader Donald Fehr: “It’s pretty clear to me that the owners have decided to blow off the start of the season. They’re already using replacements to play exhibitions and they’ve given no indication that they’ve lost their stomach for strikebreaker strategy even though the public response has been poor. You don’t make backward moves during negotiations unless you don’t want a settlement.”

Fehr referred to the owners’ Saturday proposal, calling it regressive. There were no negotiations Sunday as Fehr returned to his Rye, N.Y., home, and McMorris went to San Diego to visit his son, Mike, who is hospitalized because of cystic fibrosis.

Both sides left skeletal negotiating teams here, but it is unlikely talks will resume until after a three-day meeting of the owners that begins Tuesday in Palm Beach, Fla., where they are expected to approve 1998 expansion to Phoenix and St. Petersburg.

While the negotiations are in limbo again, both sides have payroll tax proposals on the table for the first time, and management lawyer Chuck O’Connor said:

“These breaks can be viewed as a cause for great alarm or a cause for reflection and opportunity. I tend to view it as a time where we say, ‘All right, we went to Arizona, we didn’t accomplish what we’d like to, but did we accomplish anything?’ My answer is yes. We got rid of a major impediment (with the union’s acceptance of the owners’ revenue-sharing plan) and we got back to all the interrelated issues (payroll tax, arbitration, free agency) of the Usery plan.”

O’Connor, however, said the negotiations are a matter of will as much as intellect, and suggested neither side has had the will to reach an agreement. He said the pace was comparable to water torture and implied that both sides, almost seven months into the process, continue to play what Fehr called “parlor games.”

“As the union moved in baby steps on the (issue of a payroll tax) threshold, we attempted to respond (in kind),” O’Connor said.

Where does that leave the talks? When will they resume?

“It really depends on whether the owners get to a stage where they want to play baseball,” Fehr said. “If they don’t, there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s not that we’re perfectly content to wait, but in fact that’s what we’re forced to do.”

In the meantime, the National Labor Relations Board soon could cite the owners for unfair labor practice and pursue an injunction that would force them to reinstate the old work rules, prompting the players to end the strike and return to the field. The owners might respond with a lockout, but they would confront significant legal and financial risks.

Asked if he thought the owners were intent on taking the stoppage into the season, hoping players will begin to cross the line, breaking the union in the process, Fehr said:

“That’s certainly consistent with their behavior. I don’t know whether they think it or all of them or some of them. I don’t know whether they’re testing it. I don’t know whether they don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t know whether they don’t have a position. I don’t know much of anything.

“All I know is that on repeated occasions when we’ve seen an opportunity to move forward, they have immediately stepped backward and then rushed out to proclaim their innocence.”

Fehr added that McMorris had told him he was in no hurry to make a deal, which McMorris denied, accusing Fehr of taking a conversation out of context.

The future of McMorris and O’Connor as management’s lead negotiator and counsel is expected to be discussed during the owners’ meetings, with some owners believed to favor a change to the hard-line Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of the Chicago White Sox, and lawyer Robert Ballow.

McMorris said it was an obvious disappointment to go to Florida without an agreement, but that an even more disturbing aspect was that the levels of “mistrust, animosity and hatred” had deepened since the strike began on Aug. 12 and that the longer it goes on, “the deeper and harder” those emotions seem to get.