Fehr, Selig Take Cautious Approach on Labor Talks

Don Fehr, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players’ Assn., said in New York on Friday that as the sport heads toward another collective bargaining agreement deadline, the situation doesn’t feel quite the way it did six years ago when baseball went through the longest work stoppage in the history of pro sports.

Fehr, meeting with a group of sports editors from around the country, said that the difference between now, with the end of the collective bargaining agreement at the end of this season, and then was, “We [he and Commissioner Bud Selig] just talk to each other a lot more now.

“I was about to add that that just makes me much more optimistic that we can get this done,” Fehr said, “but I’ve been in too many negotiations to know how anything like this will eventually go. I do remember saying before the last time that we were heading for a train wreck. It doesn’t smell like that this time.”

Selig, who met with the sports editors Thursday, also took a cautiously optimistic tone, refusing to say he would push a salary cap proposal by baseball.

“I will only say that we need more salary restraint,” he said.

He said that he wanted the negotiations to avoid being the circus they were the last time the sides battled and the World Series was canceled.

“There are a myriad of ways we can do this and still avoid confrontation,” he said, adding that, for too many years, his sport has operated under what he called the Scarlet O’Hara repression theory, which is “We will think about it tomorrow.”