Gloves, Not Cap, Come Off In Bigs

With the two sides in baseball’s labor dispute so far apart and rigid in their positions, major-league players began their strike after Thursday night’s games, shutting down the season with the eighth work stoppage in 23 contentious seasons.

The dispute, centering on the owners’ demand to create cost control through a salary cap, was so severe that negotiators for the two sides didn’t bother to meet Thursday.

There were early reports, later denied, that some owners had made suggestions to generate movement on their side.

Barring a change in the owners’ position, which has occurred in previous shutdowns, or a collapse of the players’ solidarity, which never has happened, the strike threatens to wipe out the last 52 days and 669 games of the regular season and, for the first time, the playoffs and the World Series.

“There is no doubt in my mind the players are united, as always, and the owners are united this time for a significant series of reasons,” Bud Selig, the acting commissioner, said. “But having said that, now we have to figure a way to solve this thing.”

No one had a clue how to do that Thursday as the 10 games on the schedule slipped past. The strike began at midnight.

Off the field, some owners spoke out in ways that the union interpreted as hopeful, and reports circulated that some were trying to maneuver behind the scenes if not to avert a strike, at least to create some movement that could lead to a settlement in time to salvage the season.

But Selig, the Milwaukee Brewers owner who earlier presided over a conferencecall meeting of the owners’ executive council, denied that the owners had any intention of budging from their salary-cap position. The executive council runs baseball in the absence of a commissioner.

One owner who wanted to avert a strike indicated last week there weren’t enough owners to force a change in the salary-cap stance. “If there were, it would’ve been done, but it wasn’t,” he said.

People on the players’ side who received reports of an owners’ conference call said they believed there was a perception by Richard Ravitch, the owners’ chief labor executive, that some owners wanted to try to get a settlement and he killed the effort. Ravitch did not return a telephone call seeking comment on the union’s understanding of those events.