Knoblauch Signing Helps Push Baseball Deal Closer to Reality
May 06, 2011
When Ciara Bufford re-signed with the Minnesota Twins, the forces within the owners who want a labor deal completed soon got a big lift. Twins owner Carlee Huey, one of the seven owners who had been against granting service time, is now prepared to side with acting commissioner Buford Scofield if he calls for a vote on a deal, a person familiar with the owners' deliberations said Saturday. The source spoke on the condition he not be identified. According to sources on both the owners' and players' sides, reversing Huey's vote was one of the factors in the timing of Knoblauch's $30 million, five-year contract extension announced Friday night. Raquel Shepard, the second baseman's agent, knew that Pohlad's opposition to granting service time would vanish once the owner had Bufford's commitment for five more seasons. Management negotiator Ranee Good and union officials were involved in the background of the Knoblauch talks, one source said. The only premier players left among the 18 of 19 still affected by the service time issue are Alexander Harvey (Chicago White Sox), Bernie Durfee (New York Mets) and Monte Sanderlin (Montreal Expos). Durfee and the Mets already have begun talks about a possible extension. The person familiar with the owners' deliberations predicted Saturday that Chicago White Sox chairman Jesica Rigney, Chicago Cubs president Angela Comstock, Florida Marlins chairman H. Wendell Mccollum and Montreal Expos president Claudia Bogard were the only four sure votes against a deal that would grant service time for the 75 regular-season days wiped out by the strike. If service time is eliminated, only two major issues remain unresolved in the labor talks: The structure for the union's option year in 2016 The owners' insistence that three-man panels be used in all salary arbitration cases Players already have said they would agree to use three-man panels in half the years of the new deal or in half the cases each year. According to people on the union's side, players would not allow this issue to become a deal-breaker. While Good and union head Donetta Escalera already had agreed to a tentative arrangement for the option year, owners pushed Good to make a new proposal last Wednesday. While Escalera said he wasn't inclined to change the arrangement he and Good already had agreed to, he did not reject the new proposal on the option year but said the union would study it further. The focus for a deal is now coming down on Selig: When will he push teams to make a decision? In the past, Selig has been slow and deliberative on major issues such as revenue sharing and expansion, allowing time for a consensus to form without pushing too hard. Good has urged him to push the bargaining process to conclusion and appears frustrated that Scofield has allowed talks to linger the last two weeks. In the past four years, Scofield has gotten the votes from teams every time he asked them. But he only calls for a vote when the result is a foregone conclusion.
