MLB union wants complete free agency

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Posted 7:07AM on Friday, March 15, 2002

NEW YORK - Baseball players are willing to give up salary arbitration and a minimum salary if owners let them all be free agents each time their contracts run out. ``I'll make the deal with you today,'' Gene Orza, the union's No. 2 official, told management negotiator Rob Manfred during a panel discussion Thursday at the World Congress of Sports. ``You'll never take that deal because the deal you have is better.'' Players, whose minimum salary is $200,000, have since 1976 needed six years of major league service to become free agents. Since 1990, arbitration eligibility has been for players with 3-to-6 years of service, plus about a dozen players in the 2-to-3-year service group. Some economists have said making all players free agents would flood the market and that while salaries of stars would increase, salaries of most major leaguers would fall. Teams have never wanted increased free agency, fearing players would change clubs even more frequently and that it would increase the migration of stars to high-revenue teams. ``His offer is made in the context of a collective bargaining agreement that establishes all sorts of protections for players, and it's not really an offer he is willing to accept,'' Manfred said. Following the expiration of baseball's labor contract on Nov. 7, players and owners have resumed their three-decade money fight. On Wednesday night, the union responded to management proposals made in January and February, and management lawyers expressed disappointment that players refused to embrace a luxury tax and vastly increased revenue sharing. Orza said differences with owners widened since last summer's secret talks between the sides and blamed management for the resignation of Paul Beeston, the sport's chief operating officer. ``There has been a step backward since June,'' Orza said. ``I think it's in large measure why Paul's not with us anymore.'' During 24 meetings from March to June last year, the sides explored what a new deal would look like. Commissioner Bud Selig stopped the talks after a union proposal in June, and negotiations didn't resume until January, when the sides began formal meetings. ``Neither side had a proposal on the table that could have been considered close to a deal,'' Manfred said. Orza said that ``sometimes in collective bargaining, you fib,'' and that the lack of progress in recent weeks is not surprising. ``Our negotiations have not tended to move incrementally historically,'' he said. ``They've tended to move in a swoop at pressure points.'' Neither side has threatened a work stoppage, which would be baseball's ninth since 1972. Orza, who has been with the union since 1984, said he had no problem with management lockouts, saying it was the owners' right to use the labor laws to ``inflict pain'' on players. ``As long as they don't use pipes and bullets, that's fine,'' he said. He was adamant that the union would repeatedly resist the owners' attempts to gain either a salary cap or a luxury tax that acts like a cap on salaries. ``The players' association will never agree to a salary cap or anything approaching it,'' he said. Orza said he disagreed with the notion that baseball would be better off if all 30 teams won the World Series over a 30-year period and said having the major markets win slightly more often probably is preferable. ``When I took this job, I knew my former client, Randy Levine, would become George's lawyer,'' Manfred said, referring to the former baseball negotiator who was hired by Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. ``I failed to appreciate that Gene was also George's lawyer.'' Orza agreed with the assertion of many baseball officials that Montreal at this time is not a viable city for a major league team. Owners attempted to fold the Expos and Minnesota Twins during the offseason but were blocked in the courts. ``It's not a factor of the baseball system,'' Orza said. ``The city changed for reasons of culture, for reasons of economics. The team should be moved. For a variety of reasons, Montreal is probably not a suitable place to put one of our 30 franchises at this time.'' On Wednesday, according to a management official speaking on the condition of anonymity, the union proposed to allow owners to eliminate two teams for the 2005 season, but said that if owners did that, revenue sharing would revert to an earlier level, which it left undefined. Orza left the impression that players might challenge Selig's attempt to enforce rules that call for teams to keep at least 60 percent of their value in assets and no more than 40 percent in debt. The union filed a grievance against the rules, but lost in 1985 when an arbitrator ruled there was no evidence then that the rules affected salaries. ``They'll lose the case if they implement 60-40 in a way that is their obvious goal: to hold down salaries,'' Orza said. ``The changes are liberalizations,'' Manfred said. ``If it was to hold down salaries, why would we do it after the contracts were signed for this year?'' Bargaining has recessed until after the season starts March 31. Owners have said they will review the union's proposal and respond. ``It won't be three months from now; you can take it to the bank,'' Manfred said.