Owners

With less than a week to complete the deal, John J. Rigas probably will learn today whether major league club owners will give him preliminary approval to buy the Pittsburgh Pirates. Rigas needs a positive vote of the 10-member major league ownership committee to begin serious negotiations with the current Pirates owners. The cable TV franchise owner already has made a preliminary bid of $80 million for the money-losing team. The ownership committee, which is expected to meet via conference call, consists of the two league presidents and representatives of eight teams.

Marge Schott might be right when she says people are trying to force her out. Only it's not someone who wants to buy the Cincinnati Reds, it's other owners and top baseball officials. Acting commissioner Bud Selig and National League president Len Coleman prefer that Schott step back from day-to-day operation of the Reds, two high-ranking baseball officials said this week, speaking on condition they not be identified. Officials can act under rules protecting the "best interests" of baseball.

IT APPEARS all the t's have been crossed and all the i's dotted, and now there will be a formal announcement that the 76ers sale has been completed. Last week, the NBA Board of Governors approved the sale of the team by Comcast-Spectacor to a group led by billionaire Joshua Harris, co-founder of Apollo Global Management. Harris grew up in the Philadelphia area and graduated from the Wharton School of Business. Today at the Palestra, the group will be introduced to the media at an 11:30 a.m. news conference.

The effort seems there in the NBA labor talks. Time might not be. Owners and players are scheduled to meet again today, a session that commissioner David Stern indicated would be critical in gauging whether a new collective bargaining agreement can be reached before the current deal expires on June 30. This will be at least the sixth meeting this month. After Friday's 4 1/2-hour session, both parties left believing the commitment to getting a deal done was there, yet unsure there would be enough time to avoid a lockout.

It's still a little hard to fathom that after 231 days of ever-mounting debt and aggravation, the great baseball strike of 1994-95 might be ended by a court order. Yesterday, though, major-league players laid their final piece of groundwork for that precise scenario. They have been talking for months about calling off their strike if an injunction against the owners restores the old rules on arbitration and free agency. And yesterday, at a gathering of player representatives in Manhattan, the most famous strikers in America finally passed an official motion to put that pledge in writing.

Up and down the escalator they rode. Representatives from big-market clubs would caucus in a small room. Then the small-market guys would do the same. Big market, small market, over and over and over, almost 11 hours of tedious wrangling that finally was settled at a position that sounded strikingly similar to one that at least 20 of baseball's 28 owners had started the day with. "This is not a business," Florida Marlins owner Wayne Huizenga said after one midday escalator ride.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson will be in Philadelphia today to confront major- league baseball owners on the lack of minority hiring for management positions. Jackson, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, will speak at the owners' quarterly meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel and present the 26 franchises with a June 29 deadline for developing an affirmative- action plan. He also will request plans covering the commissioner's office, the league offices and the umpires.

Colorado Rockies chairman Jerry McMorris said owners might make a new offer to the union, but a person on the players' side said management's position had hardened. The source said several owners were prepared to start the season with replacement players and see if striking major leaguers would break ranks and return to work. Management lawyer Chuck O'Connor said he thought mediator W.J. Usery would ask owners to make a "best offer" when he addresses today's owners' meeting in Palm Beach, Fla. "We're probably at the point where we ought to put our best offer on the table," McMorris said.

Major league baseball owners will finally get around to dropping the other shoe today, even if it crushes their own feet in the process. At approximately 3 p.m., barring a new and unexpected proposal from the players' union or the owners, the remainder of the 1994 season and the World Series, will be - officially - toast. Then, the exhaustive march of sordid events that began with the firing of commissioner Fay Vincent nearly two years ago will have reached its most feared conclusion.

Baseball's salary cap is on hold for now. It will be back, though, unless players and owners agree on a tax proposal by mid-December. Under pressure from mediator W.J. Usery, owners agreed yesterday not to impose the cap next week. The owners' meeting scheduled for Monday in Chicago was postponed to Dec. 15 or 16, and bargaining will resume Dec. 9, when players are expected to make a new offer. "I've asked the owners to withdraw their threat of implementation and they've agreed to do that," Usery said.