Disappointing as the Mets have been, you’d hardly blame them if they favored a strike.
But after the players’ union on Monday backed off setting a strike date, players and management sounded hopeful of an agreement eventually being reached.
“Everybody did get in some good discussion,” said Vance Wilson, the Mets’ backup catcher and assistant player rep.
“Tom Glavine [Atlanta’s rep] put it best when he said there are still bumps in the road, but if we keep working and keep sitting at the table, hopefully we can get something done. “There’s a lot of progress on smaller issues, and some of the younger guys were thinking, ‘Yeah, that’s great.’ But the core economic issues are still a problem.”
Said Met GM Steve Phillips: “Probably no news is good news. Teams seem to be functioning as if they expect to play a full season.”
A luxury tax and greater revenue sharing, along with drug testing, are points of contention.
Wilson went to Monday’s union meeting in Chicago instead of team player rep Al Leiter, and he seemed cautiously optimistic about the meeting before last night’s game against San Diego.
“Any time you can agree on anything with the owners that’s a positive,” Wilson said. “Hopefully something can get done in the next couple of days, and we can go into September and the postseason without something drastic being done.
“There were a lot of good discussions, and it was definitely a good meeting,” he added. “There were [differences] a little bit on the smaller issues, but on the main issues we [the players are] exactly on the same page.
“Hopefully we can get something done. Hopefully by next week we can get a deal done. It’s not the same as it was in ’94. I wasn’t around then, but the mood’s good.”
But Wilson cautioned that a strike still is “possible.”
“As a union, we feel strongly,” he said.
While not setting a date may have turned some fans in to the players’ corner, it wasn’t a public-relations move, Wilson said.
“We care about the fans but I don’t want to sound cold, but we only care about getting a deal done,” he said. “We can’t get caught up in PR.”
Baseball has had eight work stoppages since 1972, including the ’94 strike that lasted 232 days and was the longest stoppage in U.S. pro sports.
But the players don’t want to finish the season without a contract – which expired Nov. 7 – and about 50 players attended the meeting, where they were could’ve set a date.
Phillips, when asked about how a strike might take the spotlight off his struggling, underachieving team, which came into last night’s game with the Padres at 58-59 and in sixth place in the National League wild-card race, 7½ games behind Los Angeles.
“You can’t unring a bell,” Phillips said. “Enough has been said about our struggles to this point. I don’t think it will take away from [the bad publicity].
“We’re not looking for a strike to distract anybody, that’s for sure.”