Negotiations Resume With No Progress

Major league baseball owners Wednesday offered to restore service time lost because of the strike to all players except the 20 who would become free agents at the end of this year if the time were restored.

The union is certain to reject the offer today.

Owners had insisted that their reluctance to credit players with service time for the 75 regular-season days they were on strike was based on principal. But as labor negotiations resumed after about a 10-day break to allow acting Commissioner Bud Selig to negotiate with fellow owners by phone, principal seemed to give way to basic economics and a degree of self-interest by clubs that could lose free agents if service time is restored.

Management negotiator Randy Levine and union leader Donald Fehr met for about 90 minutes in New York. Levine made two proposals seemingly designed to placate hard-line owners who oppose the granting of service time and inclusion of a second tax-free year at the end of the proposed agreement.

In reaction to the service time proposal, Fehr said:

“We’re not going to leave 20 players high and dry. The other players wouldn’t permit that. All the concessions and trade-offs that have been made have been made against the background of service time being part of the deal.”

A deal breaker? The prediction when talks resumed was that it would take five to seven more days to produce a settlement, assuming progress. How it plays out isn’t clear. The owners probably would trade full service time if the players accepted either of two proposals offered Wednesday on the second, tax-free year.

That too is unlikely, since an agreement had already been reached to give the union an option on a tax-free year in 2001 (2000 is also tax-free) in trade for the union reducing its share of the divisional playoff receipts from 80% to 60%.

On Wednesday, the owners offered a different plan:

--If the players want the option on 2001, they would have to lower their playoff take to 55% for a specified series of games in each round of the playoffs and World Series and pay the owners about $10 million top of it.

--If the players give up the option (leaving only one tax-free year at the end of what would be a five-year agreement), they could keep their playoff take at 80% in the divisional series and 65% in the following rounds and the owners will give the union about $13 million.

In other words, a bribe to give up the second, tax-free year.

“We’re willing to listen to what Randy has to say,” Fehr said, “but we’ve already had those negotiations. I mean, I’m inclined to think that the structure of what has already been agreed to should remain in place.”