Players, Owners Battle Again

Baseball’s labor war flared anew Thursday, with owners and players blaming each other for the collapse of a deal that would have ensured no teams folded this winter.

After several days of negotiations, talks broke off abruptly, with owners vowing to pursue their plan to eliminate two teams and the players’ union resuming its challenge to that plan.

With the conclusion of the winter meetings, and the player signings and trades surrounding them, baseball’s focus returns to lawyers, courtrooms and grievance hearings.

And, with 11 days until Christmas, fans might think twice before buying tickets to major league games as holiday gifts--not only in Montreal and Minnesota, home to the teams targeted for elimination this winter, but in every major league city, amid an increasingly chilly climate for negotiating the new labor agreement that would ensure next season starts on time.

The union contends owners cannot fold teams without union approval. After the first two days of hearings to resolve that issue, the sides discussed a deal in which the union would withdraw that objection and owners would not fold any teams this winter. Those hearings resumed Thursday, after talks collapsed over the issue of how owners might eliminate teams in the future.

“They just kept narrowing the circumstances,” said Rob Manfred, executive vice president of major league baseball.

“We finally decided we were better off litigating.”

Union chief Donald Fehr said players objected when owners demanded the right to identify two teams to be folded next year and, if those teams could not be dissolved in time, to target other teams to be folded in two years.

Manfred said owners wanted protection “in the event we tried [to dissolve teams] in 2003 and got hung up in litigation.” He also said owners refused to allow the union to “limit our ability to decide which teams would go.”

There were dueling statements of fault issued Thursday. Paul Beeston, baseball’s chief operating officer, blamed the breakdown of talks on the union’s “refusal to acknowledge major league baseball’s basic right” to eliminate teams. Fehr blamed the breakdown on owners introducing new demands late Wednesday night and blasted owners for publicly discussing the substance of negotiations after asking the union not to do so, an action he called “plainly inappropriate.”

Said agent Barry Axelrod: “Now we’re back to trading barbs publicly. I just don’t understand what benefit that is to anyone.”

In an apparent attempt to display solidarity, Beeston issued the statement on behalf of management. Beeston reportedly was disenchanted with the owners’ strategy after he negotiated the framework of a new labor agreement with union lawyers this summer, then was told to stop by Commissioner Bud Selig.

Beeston also reportedly told union officials in September that owners would not try to eliminate teams this year.

With the collapse of talks, the hearing resumed over the union grievance that owners violated the expired labor agreement by unilaterally deciding to eliminate teams.

The owners also are fighting a Minnesota court ruling that requires the Twins to play at the Metrodome next season, proposed Congressional legislation that would repeal baseball’s cherished antitrust exemption, and a set of Florida subpoenas that demand a public accounting of the vote to eliminate teams as well as all documents relating to revenue sharing, profits and losses, and the economic impact of teams upon their communities.

Although Selig testified before Congress last week that the elimination of two money-losing teams would help ease financial woes in a year in which he said 25 of 30 teams lost money, he faces enormous skepticism among fans, players and agents.

“I haven’t yet had anybody explain to me what it is the owners are trying to do,” Axelrod said.

“I wasted my time watching Bud’s testimony, and now I have even less of an idea of what the owners are trying to do after watching Bud try to explain it.”