Contraction Plans Further Complicated by Arbitrator

Baseball’s plan to eliminate two teams, presumably the Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos, before the 2002 season was complicated further Wednesday when arbitrator Shyam Das established dates to hear the players’ union grievance charging owners with violating the collective bargaining agreement when they voted to contract.

Das will hold two days of hearings with baseball and union lawyers beginning Tuesday in Irving, Texas, where the union’s executive board will be holding its annual meeting.

He will hold four more days of hearings beginning Dec. 10 in New York, with the possibility of more dates to be scheduled. It’s possible that Das might not deliver a decision until after Christmas.

With baseball also in legal limbo in Minnesota on the appeal of a district court injunction forcing the Twins to honor the last year of their lease and play in the Metrodome in 2002, the possibility that baseball could conduct a dispersal draft of contracted players on the originally projected dates of Dec. 14 or 15 seems remote, as does the possibility of contraction itself in 2002.

Sandy Alderson, baseball’s executive vice president, said Wednesday that the Dec. 14-15 dates were merely projections three weeks ago and not cast in stone. In addition, he said the Dec. 20 date by which 2002 contracts have to be tendered does not affect the timing of a dispersal draft, although Minnesota President Jerry Bell said recently that he viewed Dec. 20 as the potential deadline for contracting in 2002.

“Baseball’s administrative and roster decisions are not really affecting the contraction decision making,” Alderson said. “To a large extent we can be flexible as we go forward. Obviously, the later it gets the more complicated it becomes.”

Commissioner Bud Selig, in a news conference after owners approved his three-year contract extension Tuesday, said emphatically that baseball will contract, but whether it’s this year or next is uncertain.

“I can’t give a precise timetable because some things are obviously out of our hands,” Selig said, referring to the legal hurdles.