ATLANTA -- Special mediator William J. Usery said yesterday that he has urged ownership to back away from the threat to implement a salary cap, but baseball's long-running labor dispute still appears to be moving in that direction.
Usery, who addressed a crowd of about 90 players during the second day of a Major League Baseball Players Association executive board meeting, said that implementation would be counterproductive to his goal of forging a new relationship between the players and owners.
"From my perspective, implementation would be very, very unfortunate, and I've told the owners that," Usery said. "It is not in the best interests of collective bargaining or for me in trying to mediate this dispute. But that is up to the parties, what they do or won't do."
The owners originally were scheduled to declare an impasse in the negotiations at a meeting of the full ownership on Monday, but Usery convinced them to postpone that meeting -- and hold off on implementation -- for at least 10 days. The players and owners are expected to resume bargaining on Friday or Saturday, but nothing has happened to change the chemistry of the stalled negotiations.
Implementation would raise the level of animosity and push the dispute into a frightening new phase. No one really knows where things would go from there.
"I'm trying to promote mutual respect, understanding and mutual trust," Usery said. "You bargain to achieve certain things. That [implementation] is not in the spirit of what we're trying to promote."
Ownership has the right under federal labor law to declare an impasse and impose its last best offer if owners feel that further negotiations would be pointless. The players can challenge the impasse declaration through the National Labor Relations Board, but what happens after that is anyone's guess.
The owners insist that they do not want to impose their salary cap unilaterally, but have made it clear that they will do so if there is not a negotiated settlement by the new Dec. 17 deadline for clubs to offer salary arbitration to their free agents. That deadline originally would have been today, but Usery persuaded the players and owners to agree to push it back to keep negotiations alive.
"Certainly, we were fortunate enough and used all our influence to stop implementation last week," Usery said. "I sincerely hope we don't have to face it again on the 19th or the 17th -- whenever the owners are going to meet again."
The ownership meeting has been rescheduled for Dec. 15 in Chicago. If the owners implement, their new economic system probably would take effect the following day. The owners do not want to go past the arbitration deadline, because they would be forced to begin a process that would be eliminated in their new system.
Management spokesman John Harrington indicated last week that there would be no further postponement, and a source indicated yesterday that there was enough resistance within ownership ranks to the first delay that another would be hard to sell.
Acting commissioner Bud Selig took issue with Usery's remarks yesterday and fired off a prepared statement that left little doubt about management's intentions.
"Even though our negotiations with the MLBPA have long been deadlocked, the 28 major-league clubs do not want to implement," the statement read. "We view it as a last resort. We are hopeful the union will give us a meaningful counterproposal in Rye Brook later this week, as promised, that will provide the framework for resolving the current labor deadlock.
"Anything less than a meaningful counterproposal will force the clubs to once again consider implementation, assuming that the current deadlock persists. We have explained to the union as well as to Mr. Usery that baseball is a seasonal business. The clubs cannot remain in limbo as a result of stalemated negotiations. . . . There is still time to reach an agreement if the union is serious about negotiating. But the deadlines faced by the clubs are hard and fast upon us."
Union officials are all but certain to present a redesigned taxation system to the owners when negotiations resume. It probably will not, however, meet ownership demands for direct downward pressure on player salaries.
"I think, coming out of this meeting, there's going to be a solid counterproposal that will keep this thing moving," said free-agent pitcher Jack McDowell. "We're taking into account everything that they have thrown at us and trying to put something together."
If the owners held out hope that the union would cave this week, they could not have been buoyed by the comments of several veteran players after Monday's meeting. Free-agent pitcher Kevin Brown said that the players "would never back down," and others voiced the same kind of solidarity that marked union meetings before the players strike began on Aug. 12.