Thursday, Aug. 29, 2002: Sometime on this day the owners -- probably still clinging to the $107 million mark for the luxury tax threshold for all four years of the deal -- will suddenly instruct their mouthpieces to push it up in at least the final three years. If their creditors, TV partners and sponsors have scared them enough, the offer will be sufficient for the players to say yes and to announce a tentative settlement in time for Peter Jennings to nod sagely about it.
If the owners present a lukewarm offer that Don Fehr still thinks he can finesse in short order, some kind of public announcement or leakage of "positive signs," will be made by 6 p.m. EDT. This is pure logistics: Players have to know whether to travel to the cities in which their new weekend series will begin the next day. The union has never sent players into the air to get to games unless it expects those games to be played.
There remains a 50-50 chance that despite all the exterior pressure, all the fear of cataclysmic revenue collapse and ownership financial fatalities, management will still be belligerent. In that event, talks will break off by dinnertime or by midevening at the latest, and the strike will begin at the end of the Tampa Bay at Anaheim game, around 12:30 a.m.
Simple rule of thumb here: If they haven't broken off talks and announced a strike by 7 or 8 p.m., they've probably got a deal, or at worst, are about to get one.
Friday, Aug. 30, 2002 to Monday, Sept. 2, 2002: If the strike has been averted, there may yet be bloodshed: an internecine war between the big-market owners (who feel they've been shot in the back) and the small-market owners (who feel like they're on Pickett's March). More on that next week, if we find ourselves in what is, oddly, the best-case scenario for the fan.
If not, and there is a strike, nothing will seem to happen over the weekend because of an almost-forgotten quirk of the calendar. This is Labor Day weekend. History tells us that only once (1985) have the two sides stayed at the table immediately after a walkout. They might not meet before Tuesday, although there will be plenty of back-channel scuffling regardless.
Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2002: The amount of external pressure on the owners can be forecast proportionately, based on how many of the bankers' weekends last past Monday. If they're not all still pretending we're in the middle of the '90s boom, they'll be back at their desks this morning. It will not be them on the phones to the owners today -- it'll be their corporate attorneys, speaking in those cool, almost soothing tones Richard Burton whispered just before he snapped the rat cage on John Hurt's head in the movie "1984."
There will be an announcement of phone contact between the two sides, possibly even a meeting. Most of the sound and fury will be from talk radio. This will obscure the scuttling noise of Morgan Stanley rounding up its rats.
Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2002: The moneylenders will have advanced from screaming, to cordial threatening, to faxes so long some owners will run out of paper, and the summoning of many couriers to deliver long, obnoxious, intimidating legal documents. There will not be any loans called in. There will merely be warnings in black and white that bank rats like to go for the eyes first.
Thursday, Sept. 5, 2002: The hawks, always enervated by conflict, may still be holding out. If so, it's at this point that George Steinbrenner's newest attorney, David Boies, will give an interview, possibly to the New York Times, about the fiduciary responsibility of the Office of the Commissioner to treat all partners in baseball fairly and equally, regardless of the powers ceded to that office by all owners. This will be a hidden, coded message that Boies is preparing a lawsuit against commissioner Selig and the others for conflicts of interest, and damages to the New York Yankees and their related entity, Yankees Entertainment and Sports Television.
Friday, Sept. 6, 2002: Bud Selig will explain to the owners the implications of Boies' comments, and with the rats having already eaten all the grass on the field at Kansas City's Kauffman Stadium, even the hard-liners will get the message. The owners will present a final luxury tax proposal that will be slightly better than the minimum the union needs to protect its membership and its face.
Saturday, Sept. 7, 2002: Both sides may dawdle long enough that the settlement is not reached until the early hours of this day and not announced until some time in the afternoon.
Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002: During a joint news conference with Fehr and owners negotiators Rob Manfred and Bob DuPuy -- but not the soon-to-be-scapegoated Selig -- it will be announced that logistics will demand that the games can't resume until Monday.
Each side will pronounce itself dissatisfied with the compromise, and that the real reason they were so willing to make such concessions was their side's overwhelming and abiding primary concern; the one thing that has animated them throughout these 10 long days: their awareness that, at all costs, the games of Sept. 11, 2002, had to be played.
The news conference will end with the singing of "God Bless America."
About the writer
Salon columnist Keith Olbermann hosts the ABC Radio Network's "Speaking of Sports ... Speaking of Everything."
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