Baseball Players Association

Orioles owner Peter Angelos is ready to take up the cause again. He tried hard during baseball's last labor dispute to convince fellow owners to focus their revenue-sharing program on new stadium construction, and still feels that it would be a better way to use the millions that are being transferred from large-market to small-market clubs.Angelos talked informally to some other owners about the idea during the last quarterly ownership meeting and could bring it up again when Major League Baseball begins to devise its strategy for the next collective bargaining talks with the Major League Baseball Players Association.

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig has called club owners together again for a meeting today in Chicago, where they are expected to plot strategy for upcoming labor negotiations, discuss the fallout from their controversial contraction plan and, perhaps, vote to extend Selig's term. The meeting, the second in three weeks at the Chicago O'Hare Airport Hilton Hotel, is not expected to produce any dramatic change in ownership strategy on any front, but it could end with an announcement that Major League Baseball will delay the dissolution of two franchises until after the 2002 season.

Marvin Miller, the former head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, changed baseball's labor situation forever with arbitration and free agency.Today Miller envisions a whole new ballgame. If the strike cancels the World Series and the owners declare a labor impasse and implement a salary cap, Miller said the striking players could be working for a rival league next season."If there are some real entrepreneurs out there, you might see some competition for the first time," Miller said.

All of a sudden, some of the same baseball owners who called Orioles chairman Peter Angelos a savior and a welcome addition are now labeling him a "maverick," and a "loose cannon" because he does not completely toe their line on issues at the center of today's players strike.But Angelos appears undaunted by the new labels, and vowed yesterday to continue speaking publicly, especially if his comments can bring a quick end to baseball's eighth work stoppage in the past 22 years.Though he believes, with other owners, that baseball is in financial distress, Angelos has broken ranks with comments that place him apart from the rest of management and with Richard Ravitch, the owners' chief negotiator.

NEW YORK -- The baseball labor negotiations have taken another emotional swing . . . and perhaps a miss.Baseball owners, in an attempt to break the deadlock that has kept the game in crisis since August, came forth with a new proposal last night that might have had a major catalytic effect on the negotiations if it had not arrived with just six days remaining before the scheduled start of the 1995 season.Instead of a big move and a major public relations coup for an ownership negotiating team that has taken its lumps over the past eight months, the new proposal was presented as a take-it-or-watch-replacements offer that is almost certain to be rejected by the Major League Baseball Players Association.

WASHINGTON - Baseball commissioner Bud Selig said yesterday that he remains committed to finding an economic framework that will bridge the huge revenue gap between Major League Baseball's richest and poorest teams, but he stopped well short of predicting another game of hardball with the Major League Baseball Players Association. Selig, speaking before a luncheon crowd at the National Press Club, restated the need for greater economic parity among the 30 major-league clubs and reasserted his commitment to find a solution that would restore hope to fans of the game's struggling franchises.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan helped push Major League Baseball toward a program to discourage the use of anabolic steroids last summer. Now, he's focusing on ephedrine. The ranking Democrat on the Senate Consumer Affairs Subcommittee that oversees professional sports recently called for hearings to examine the widespread use of ephedrine-based products among professional athletes. If Dorgan has his way, baseball commissioner Bud Selig and Major League Baseball Players Association director Donald Fehr will be summoned to Washington to explain why there are no major-league restrictions on the herbal stimulant and weight-loss aid that apparently contributed to the heatstroke death of Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Orioles right fielder Jay Gibbons has taken over as the team's player representative this season, making him a point man for all matters concerning the Major League Baseball Players Association, but that wasn't the reason reporters kept approaching his locker yesterday. The latest news in baseball's steroid scandal had hit, with a report in the San Francisco Chronicle saying All-Star sluggers Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield allegedly had received steroids distributed by a Bay Area nutritional supplement lab. That could only mean more scrutiny for the rest of baseball, and as the Orioles' resident strongman, Gibbons could see the questions coming like 95-mph fastballs aimed directly at his Popeye-sized forearms.

WASHINGTON - Last March, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain warned baseball to get serious about drug testing. "Your failure to address these issues straight on will motivate this committee to search for legislative remedies," the Republican senator from Arizona told leaders of the sport and its players union. Nine months later - with baseball still not having acted - McCain issued a second, sterner warning last weekend. This time, according to sports lawyers, marketers and Capitol Hill staff, the senator's coaxing has a better chance of achieving the desired results.

Welcome to the worst nightmare of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Former Orioles relief pitcher Jason Grimsley might have created a portal to a new era of enforcement in baseball's battle to eradicate illegal performance-enhancing drugs. Call it a loophole if you want. Major League Baseball recently embarked on a wide-ranging investigation to determine the true extent of the sport's steroid problem, but it appeared powerless to punish past offenders because the collectively bargained anti-steroid program requires a positive urine test to trigger specific disciplinary action.