Baseball boss Bud Selig was heckled as he strode into a Park Avenue office yesterday to join negotiators deciding if Major League baseball will go on strike tomorrow.
The drop-dead deadline for a strike will be 10 a.m. when officials at Wrigley Field are scheduled to open the gates to players for baseball’s first game of the day, scheduled to be played between the Cubs and Cardinals.
Cubs officials said yesterday they will only allow players access to their clubhouses if an agreement has been reached.
The possibility of that happening – and a strike being averted – remained unclear. Sources told The Post the tenor of yesterday’s talks was much improved over previous days and that participants were “cautiously optimistic.”
But if no deal is reached, tomorrow’s games will be called off and fans will be left in the lurch again by Major League Baseball’s ninth work stoppage since 1972. Shortly before 5 p.m. yesterday, Selig – surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards – arrived at the 11th-hour negotiations.
As a grim-looking Selig tried to navigate a mob of reporters outside 245 Park Ave., a man spotted the tall, bespectacled baseball bigwig and shouted: “Get a deal done – you’re ruining the game!”
Selig didn’t answer the critic – and was only a little less tight-lipped with reporters. When asked what he hoped to accomplish by showing up, he said: “Just keep the talks going and have a constructive 24 to 36 hours.”
Selig stayed until 11:45 and still was unsure of where the negotiations were going when he left.
“We still have a lot of issues to resolve,” he said. “There’s a lot of work to be done. These things usually go down to the last second, but you hope you can avoid that because you get on dangerous ground.
“It’s been very constructive. Both sides have been reaching out. Only time will tell.”
It is unclear what role, if any, Selig played in yesterday’s faceoff between chief negotiator Rob Manfred, representing 30 team owners, and players advocate Steve Fehr, the brother of player’s union boss Donald Fehr.
“What he is going to do in the room or out of the room is up to him,” Manfred said.
Earlier in the evening, Manfred and Robert DuPuy, president and chief executive office of Major League Baseball, emerged from the negotiations looking tired.
“It’s going to be a long couple of nights,” DuPuy said with no hint of optimism in his voice.
The status of the talks, which concluded at 12:15 this morning, also remained unclear. Sources told The Post that the sides had reached a tentative agreement on testing for steroids but not hard drugs.
The major sticking point is the issue of revenue sharing and a so-called luxury tax, designed to help teams from smaller markets compete with big-spending, big-market teams such as the Yankees.