Owners

Two major league owners, including Phillies president Bill Giles, were quoted in yesterday's editions of the Los Angeles Times as saying the owners voted unanimously during last December's winter meetings in Nashville to shut down spring training if no accord had been reached on a new Basic Agreement by the time camps were supposed to open. That sounded like pretty hot stuff since, at those same meetings, commissioner Fay Vincent and Chuck O'Connor, head of the Player Relations Committee, were telling the media that they wanted to develop a spirit of trust and harmony between management and the players.

Paul Tagliabue approached the recently completed NFL owners meeting with a grand design in mind. Faced with a roomful of enormous egos and diverse personalties, the new commssioner steered the NFL's moguls and mavens through his agenda the way a head coach puts his players through grass drills - purposefully and with dispatch. And he made them like it. "I give him an AAA-plus," said Minnesota general manager Mike Lynn. "We've gotten more done here than I can remember in many, many years.

It is not easy to get a roomful of rich men to agree on anything. But during the 29 years Pete Rozelle spent as commissioner of the National Football League, he usually found a way. Sometimes it took some arm-twisting, sometimes it took some sweet-talking and sometimes it took some threats. But Rozelle usually could coax the league's owners to do what he wanted them to do. Paul Tagliabue isn't nearly as persuasive as Rozelle. In the 2 1/2 years since he replaced Rozelle, he has seldom gotten the owners to do what he has wanted them to do. That never was more evident than at the league's annual winter meetings at the Arizona Biltmore Resort this week.

After Jennifer Peacock picked up Sugar from the pet sitter two weeks ago, her 6-year-old Maltese was lethargic and extremely thirsty, and began urinating in the house - all early signs of renal failure. The cause, Peacock believes, since hearing about the recall of nearly 100 brands of tainted pet food: Sugar's Mighty Dog food pouches. Worried animal lovers have swamped local veterinarians with calls since the Food and Drug Administration confirmed Monday that nine cats and one dog have died from renal failure caused by contaminated Menu Foods products.

Baseball owners worked on their new "tax" plan yesterday, a proposal that already has created doubts among the striking players. Talks between the two sides are to resume today under mediator W.J. Usery at a hotel in suburban Washington. The owners will put forth their first new proposal in five months. It asks for a so-called tax on team payrolls above a certain level and a tax on the teams with the highest revenues. The money would be used to subsidize small- market teams.

Former Phillies pitching great Robin Roberts, among a group of retired stars in New York to promote the 1987 Old-timers' Series, said salary arbitration is more of an issue in baseball than players' charges of collusion against owners for not signing free agents for the past two years. "The owners are to the point where they feel they have to make adjustments," said Roberts, 60, a Hall of Fame righthander who won 286 games and spent the bulk of his 19-year major league career with the Phillies.

Kevin McClatchy's $90 million purchase of the Pittsburgh Pirates was unanimously approved yesterday by major league owners, ending an 18-month ordeal that threatened the franchise's very existence. McClatchy, who at 33 will be the majors' youngest owner, was a decided longshot last fall after he was given only two weeks to assemble an ownership group. Cable TV franchise owner John Rigas's deal had collapsed, and the only prospective buyers were promising to move the team. But the Sacramento, Calif.

Donna Giblan says she was "scared, real scared" when the Upper Darby IGA supermarket where she worked was faced with the possibility of closing. That was in mid-1986, when the store, in the Barclay Square Shopping Center on Garrett Road, was foundering and its future was bleak. Giblan, a cashier who had worked there for four years, faced unemployment. In earlier years, the store probably would have closed. However, a recent trend in the food-retailing business, employee-owned and-operated markets, has changed that.

Change is coming fast to the blocks around Broad Street and Ridge Avenue. Restaurant impresario Stephen Starr is opening a kitchen and commissary in the soon-to-be-vacated Ridge Avenue men's shelter. Project H.O.M.E. is building a four-story apartment building on a vacant lot at 15th Street and Fairmount Avenue. Across the street, private developers are replacing a warehouse and taproom with 34 rental apartments. Around the corner on Broad, the Laborers' District Council of Metropolitan Philadelphia is raising a five-story office building.

Facing growing political pressure to end the baseball strike, owners made a major shift when they abandoned their salary cap proposal for a luxury tax. The new offer, made as talks resumed yesterday after a 40-day break, moved the owners off their central demand to reduce player salaries to 50 percent of revenue. While the owners offered two luxury tax plans in November and December, those plans would have worked as caps, since both contained escalators that would have raised the tax rates without limit until the players' share of revenue declined from 58 percent to 50 percent.