Baseball’s Labor Talks Are Almost Concluded

Union leader Donald Fehr and management negotiator Randy Levine essentially reached closure on a five-year labor agreement Thursday.

There are technical issues remaining, sources said, but the agreement is expected to go for ratification next week to the full ownership, which remains a potential roadblock to the peace that has eluded negotiators for three years.

Said Fehr, “We made considerable progress today and I feel better [about the possibility of a deal] than I have in some time.”

Said Levine, “It’s been a week of extraordinary negotiations and a day of special progress.”

With all of that, the agreement that is expected to go to the owners is essentially the one that Fehr and Levine negotiated to near completion in early August.

In trying to resolve two issues of concern to a dissident group of owners, sources said:

--Players will be credited with service time for the 75 regular-season days they were on strike in 1994-95, but a club losing a free agent through restoration of service time will receive a compensatory pick in the amateur draft.

--The union will still hold an option on a second, tax-free year in 2001, the last year of the agreement, but the price for exercising that option has been increased. The union was to give up 60% of its receipts from the division series if it exercised the option. The new percentage could not be ascertained but “the disincentive is now greater,” a source said.

Negotiators will try to iron out the technicalities in New York this weekend. The free-agent filing period begins five days after the World Series and would complicate matters if the agreement has not been signed.

The potential deal requires the approval of 21 owners. It is believed that acting Commissioner Bud Selig can produce that many if he endorses the agreement, but he said Thursday that each club will have to make its own decision because “it’s too important for me to put any pressure on them.”

Said a source familiar with the status of the opposition, “I don’t think the agreement will be approved unless Bud comes out in favor of it.”