ANALYSIS : It May Be Now or Never for Baseball : Labor: A season with replacement players is possible, but the price would be high for players, owners and fans.

Larry Bowa, a coach with the Philadelphia Phillies, isn’t eagerly anticipating a major league baseball season with replacement players.

In fact, he says, he’s “frothing at the mouth” over what he has seen in spring training and what he expects to see when the season begins next Sunday, providing it is not delayed.

Bowa, at least, still cares. Does anyone else?

How rampant is the apathy on the sidewalks and sandlots?

How deep are the wounds?

What is the long-term damage as the ongoing labor dispute--the bargaining battle between millionaires and billionaires--devours another month and threatens to turn the new season into an aberration bordering on the absurd?

If the questions haunt both owners and players, the alleged custodians of a unique institution, they have failed to stimulate even a consistent effort--let alone a coveted compromise--in the on-again, off-again negotiations.

It has been eight months since the players went on strike. It has been 27 months since the owners voted to reopen collective bargaining a year early.

The calendar is a painful reminder of the hurt inflicted on a sport that has survived scandal, a Depression, two World Wars and decades of often suspect leadership.

Is it possible now--face to face with a season of replacement players and a summer of batterymates from Jiffy Lube--that common sense will resurface and prevail?

A court injunction could bring the players back without a settlement but some owners are believed willing to delay the season two or three weeks if negotiations produce a surprise settlement, giving the striking major leaguers an opportunity to get ready.

There is little optimism, but who can predict?

The work stoppage, which has cost owners more than $600 million in revenue and players more than $200 million in salaries, has gone far beyond the realm of rationale.

It has:

--Driven one of the game’s most respected managers, Sparky Anderson, into semi-retirement.

--Forced the Toronto Blue Jays, the defending World Series champions, to arrange to play regular-season games in a spring training stadium in Florida.

--Prompted the owner of the Baltimore Orioles, who are consistently sold out in one of baseball’s most attractive stadiums, to refuse to field a team.

If all that suggests an industry in disarray, uncertain of its future and direction, this much seems clear: If a compromise isn’t reached this week, the chances of it happening at all are reduced even further.

As union attorney Lauren Rich noted, owners and players have “already damaged the integrity of the 1994 season, are about to tarnish ’95 and could ultimately destroy 1996 as well.”

Rich added: “We’re at a crossroads. If there’s not a settlement in the next seven to 10 days, it will reopen an era of litigation that will make collusion seem like child’s play. If there’s not a settlement in the next seven to 10 days, this will degenerate into a legal war that will take a very long time to play out and (in) which the only winners will be football, basketball and hockey.

“I don’t know if the owners understand that. The players do because we explain the alternatives as we go along. Some owners seem to have a cartoon-like belief that once the season starts, the players will capitulate and (the owners) will get their seven-year nirvana (a new contract). That’s not the way labor strategy works.

“Positions will only harden if there’s no settlement now or the owners institute a lockout. If we don’t wake up now, baseball could become a relic and lose its privileged and unique (antitrust) position. It’s unbelievably frustrating, but we’re way behind many sports internationally and I don’t know if we can come back.”

There have been seven previous work stoppages, and baseball has always come back.

It can come back from the longest and costliest stoppage in professional sports history, too, but it has to get on with it. The time to compromise is now, and it shouldn’t be that difficult.

No matter how a negotiated settlement plays out, the owners would finally win one.

They would come out of a negotiated settlement at this point with a revenue-sharing plan that provides assistance for the small markets and is a drag on salaries in itself; a payroll tax that should provide a further drag and help repay the big markets for their generosity to the small, and the elimination of the long-hated arbitration.

The owners simply have to:

--Disentangle from the Jerry Reinsdorf-led attempt to break the union and eliminate all 25 years’ worth of the union’s negotiated gains.

--Convince acting commissioner Bud Selig to act like the commissioner many are convinced he wants to become, stop the emoting about short-term pain being worth long-term gain, become a deal maker instead of a consensus builder and recognize he may not be able to get every item on his conflict-of-interest agenda as owner of the small-market Milwaukee Brewers.

--Compromise on the tax rate and payroll level at which it kicks in; include a three-year reopener on the tax plan with an agreement to go to binding arbitration on it if there is no agreement on it then, and, in the name of Marvin Miller, give union leader Donald Fehr something with which to save face, primarily unrestricted free agency for players with four or more years of free agency, and right-of-first-refusal free agency for players with three.

“The players came into these negotiations with the expectation of holding on to what they had and they will not,” attorney Rich said. “The owners came in with the expectation of getting more and they will.

“The question is, when is enough enough?

For Reinsdorf, who apparently still controls enough votes to prevent the moderates from getting the 21 needed to approve a settlement, only a total submission by the union will be enough--and neither Selig nor any other owner, except Baltimore’s Peter Angelos, has shown the fortitude to try leading the owners down a different path.

For Reinsdorf and others, it also goes beyond breaking the union. They view this as a chance to enhance franchise values by severely restricting salaries and the free market, swallowing pride of ownership in the process.

They have bribed minor leaguers to get them to play in replacement games. They have gone to the White House and asked the President to serve as a tour guide for the players while they conducted a private caucus. They have been cited for unfair labor practices three times in three months by the National Labor Relations Board.

Special mediator William J. Usery has described the tedious dispute as “ridiculous and embarrassing,” but Usery lacks the clout to get it resolved and gets little respect from a union that believes him to be owner-oriented.

The union?

If it banked on history and miscalculated the solidarity of the owners, it has also shown more interest at times in rhetoric than resolution--”I’m tired of being told I’m evil and stupid just because I disagree,” said Andy MacPhail, president of the Chicago Cubs--and has failed to win sympathy from fans by lining up some of its highest-salaried players to plead its case, maintaining that this isn’t about money or greed.

The union also might have missed a chance to make the owners weigh the financial, legal and public relations risks of a lockout by unconditionally ending the strike when the owners withdrew the implemented salary cap on Feb. 3. After all, one factor in the decision to strike on Aug. 12 was to kill the cap.

In fact, nothing has been gained by the strike, and the antagonists would be where they are even if the union had not walked and had played out the 1994 season. But the economic leverage of a strike seemed to be the players’ most viable option at the time.

What we have is an industry that can’t figure out how to divide $1.8 billion in revenue, that has teetered through 30 months without a legitimate chief executive, that has allowed 25 years of mistrust and animosity between owners and players to deepen to a point where neither side has the courage to produce a deal maker.

The image isn’t pretty and it may get uglier.

Barring a settlement, the season will open with replacement players next Sunday night, and the NLRB will soon pursue and, probably, get the injunction forcing owners to reinstate terms of the old labor agreement.

The players then will end the strike and try to return without a settlement. The owners, who have shown no interest in playing another season under the previous terms and are convinced that striking players will begin to cross the symbolic picket line as the replacement season rolls on, will be forced to consider a lockout, needing 21 votes they may not have.

At some point, the owners may look for ways to declare another impasse and implement their new economic package.

In all likelihood, litigation will soon replace negotiation.

“Every day that goes by and every step the process works itself down the road, it’s that much more difficult to (get a resolution),” said Jerry McMorris, owner of the Colorado Rockies. “I’ve thought that for a long time. The further you go into the judicial process and the longer you play replacement ball, the more you’re going to harden each party’s position.”

Although the reduced replacement-player payrolls will allow clubs to meet their expenses, the losses will continue to mount because of farm and developmental costs.

Players will begin drawing from their $175-million-plus strike fund again next week, but the union has already said that 20% of the fund will have to be used for expenses, and many first- and second-year players have asked the union for financial help.

The owners apparently are willing to play a replacement season in hopes of drawing the players back and breaking the union. But at what price?

Mostly empty stadiums. . . . Local TV and radio stations asking for rebates. . . . Dormant national sales. . . . A continuing slide in the popularity polls. . . . Deterioration in the relationship between owners and players to the point where one wonders if it can be rebuilt, as it must be for a settlement to prove meaningful.

“I don’t take the damage lightly, but the damage was going to come one way or the other,” said the respected MacPhail. “We were headed down a path on which six, seven or eight clubs weren’t going to make it. We were going to put the game so far out of the reach of fans (with the impact of big payrolls on ticket prices) that we were going to be in trouble anyway. I don’t think winning them back is a sure thing, but I do think it was critical that we took steps to rebuild the game and the system, rather than continue down the path we were headed.”

The union, of course, has trouble with that. It remains unconvinced that there were problems with the old system and the previous path, which is why it has trouble handing back all of its negotiating gains. The union hasn’t been shown that the game was in economic peril, particularly considering that attendance and revenues were continuing to rise, the prices of franchises were continuing to escalate--the 1998 expansion franchises just went for $130 million each and there’s a line at the door for the next expansion--and clubs were continuing to hand out multiyear, multimillion-dollar contracts before the signings stopped last fall.

The owners agree that there is enough money to go around but that the revenue disparity among clubs has to be adjusted and that the players’ share of revenue--about 58%--needs to be lowered to about 50%.

Union leader Fehr says it’s the familiar story of the owners asking the players for help rather than helping themselves.

“The owners’ position has as its premise that the owners are not capable of adequately managing the business, and so the players should accept a salary structure well below what the owners admit players would otherwise be paid,” he said.

Fehr wasn’t frothing at the mouth, but many may soon be.