Baseball Negotiations Hit Slight Snag

Major league baseball owners will not totally reverse their labor defeats of the past in the proposed settlement with the players union, but they would emerge with what seem to be significant and beneficial changes in the economic system.

Among them:

--A payroll tax to help curtail spending by the high-revenue clubs, slowing salary growth.

--A revenue-sharing formula by which the high revenue clubs will contribute to the economic viability of the low-revenue clubs, improving competitive balance.

--A tax on player salaries in the first two years of the plan, raising about $50 million for their revenue-sharing pool.

--The use of a three-man panel to decide arbitration cases, rather than the often bizarre whims of a single arbitrator.

--A possible reduction in the union’s share of the divisional playoffs from 80% to 60%.

With all of that and more, it was apparently still not enough for some hard-line owners on Monday.

Two issues kept a potential settlement on hold.

--Barring a major tradeoff in return, owners remained reluctant to restore service time to the players for the 75 regular-season days they were on strike at the end of the 1994 season and beginning of the 1995 season.

--The refusal of the union to waive damages and all litigation filed against the owners during the strike as a tradeoff for service time. A management negotiator said he didn’t think this would prove to be a deal-breaker, but it did produce what he called a “cooling off” in talks.

Randy Levine, management’s lead negotiator, spent three hours updating the owners’ labor policy committee and several more hours in calls to recalcitrant owners. He met with union leader Donald Fehr for only an hour Monday night, but Fehr said it would be a mistake to read anything into that.

“From time to time you need to pause for reflection and planning and to meet with your own people,” he said. “We’ll talk to Randy by phone tomorrow morning and get together again tomorrow afternoon.”

Levine said the sides remained “within striking distance” of a settlement but “there are still issues to be compromised, and if you rush them or are not precise, both sides can suffer.”

The union has said there won’t be a deal unless service time is restored, as it has been in previous stoppages.

It’s important, Fehr said, “because players have short careers, and service time relates to eligibility for free agency, arbitration, the pension and certain trade requirements. If you want peace, you put people at the level they would have been [if it hadn’t been for the strike].”

With the addition of the 75 lost days, 20 more players would be eligible for free agency at the end of this season, including Chuck Knoblauch, Bernard Gilkey, Moises Alou and Alex Fernandez.

This, however, was the longest and costliest stoppage yet, and many owners--21 are needed to ratify an agreement--oppose returning service time without a significant tradeoff.

That tradeoff, in this case, takes the form of owners asking the union to drop all damage and litigation claims that stemmed from the National Labor Relations Board citing the owners with unfair labor practice for illegally declaring an impasse and changing work rules in the winter of 1994, during the heart of the 234-day strike.

A union lawyer said the players can’t waive those damage claims “because people were wronged. Some of them were young. Some of them are out of baseball now.”

Is there a compromise in the two positions? Probably. “It’s true some owners don’t want to give up service time, but I think it’s something we can talk about [with the union],” said John Harrington, CEO of the Boston Red Sox and a member of the labor policy committee.

“It’s a major issue, but it should not be a deal-breaker.”