Quiet down, now

It's about time everyone shuts up and gets to work

BOSTON -- Sometimes, when people talk, they really don't say a thing. Or what they say just muddles everything up.

"I'm cautiously optimistic," says Tony Clark of the Boston Red Sox. It's a favorite line, too, of Atlanta's Tom Glavine.

What's that mean? That they're optimistic but not that optimistic? Aren't you either optimistic or not? Is there a fear-of-commitment issue here?

Then again, sometimes when people don't talk -- when they just shut up and go about their business -- that says volumes. And that is exactly where we are as baseball's warring cousins enter the final days before what could be a crippling strike.

Representatives of baseball's owners and players met a couple of times Monday and even considered -- get this -- working into the night in their attempts to reach a collective bargaining agreement.

A quick aside: With the fate of the national pastime in the balance, with thousands of ushers and parking attendants and ticket takers and concessionaires twisting in the wind, you'd think these guys would be willing to put in a little overtime, eh? Maybe they're resting up for that final cram session before the Friday strike date.

So the lawyers met twice Monday, talked about meeting more, decided to postpone things until Tuesday and then, for the most part, simply clammed up.

It was a welcome development.

There are a couple of assumptions we can make from this. No. 1 is that the sides are close to a deal and don't want loose lips to sink this deal. It's a dangerous assumption. We know they are closer to a deal than they have been in the past, or at least they were closer before last weekend's falling out put a frost on the talks. But close to a deal? Nobody's going to make that leap. Not just yet.

No. 2 is that the two sides realize, finally, that there are only three full days, starting with Tuesday, for this thing to get worked out. The heat, officially, is on.

It's time for everyone involved to stop the yakking and get cracking.

These negotiations, like all of them, have been filled with so much gobbledygook that it's hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. It's hard to measure progress. Everyone tries, but the rhetoric gets in the way.

So now, hopefully, the daily back-and-forth stops and there is more forth than back to these talks. We'll still hear the guys outside of those rooms in New York. The players will still have something to say.

"We are definitely bridging the gap," Boston's Johnny Damon said Monday, barely a day after he said, "It could get ugly."

But the guys in the suits need to cease and desist with the public talking, as they did Monday. Keep the analysis, the sniping, the finger-pointing behind closed doors. Shut up. Get it done or get on with it.

There are still some major problems that have to be worked out. The sides can't agree on a lot about revenue sharing, the process of taking money from rich teams and redistributing it to poorer teams. They can't agree on the owners' proposal to tax teams who spend too much on players.

Even steroid testing, a concept that the players have agreed to, has become a last-hour hang-up.

These are serious issues that take some serious work, and when there are hard-liners in each camp pulling the sides away from a compromise, a potential deal is made even more difficult. Some owners, it's been reported, don't think the players will strike (even though they've done it before). There are hard-line representatives of the players who want to force the owners' hands, perhaps with a short strike.

That is what negotiators face in the next few days. It figures to be brutal. Tensions will be high. The stakes can't get any higher.

The last thing either side needs now is to hear the other side blasting an idea or a proposal in public. The last thing either side needs is more threats or posturing or empty talk.

It's quiet now and that's good. If it starts to get too noisy again, then you know baseball's really in trouble.

John Donovan is a senior writer for CNNSI.com. Comments? To e-mail Donovan, click here.

 

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