CHICAGO (AP) Baseball players wore shorts and sweat suits to their union meeting Monday. Fans certainly hope it's not the look they'll sporting by the end of the season.

Labor negotiations took on a new sense of urgency as the union's executive board moved toward setting a date for a walkout that could end this season prematurely and lead to baseball's ninth work stoppage since 1972.

Setting a strike date, though, doesn't mean the season is lost yet. The sides have been to the bargaining table, and many say matters aren't as dire as they were in 1994.

"There's good reason to be optimistic at this point," said former pitcher David Cone, a key member of the players' negotiating team during the last walkout. "The framework's there for an agreement, unlike last time."

It was exactly eight years ago that major league baseball ground to a halt, laid low by labor issues that eventually cost fans 921 games and a World Series.

Now the sport is moving closer to doing it all over again.

The key stumbling block in talks between players and owners appears to be management's demand to slow escalating player salaries - a luxury tax on teams with high payrolls.

"Eventually, it all has to be tied together," said Atlanta pitcher Tom Glavine, the National League player representative. "There's caution on our side because obviously the big issues - revenue sharing and luxury tax - are out there. Those can set the negotiations in motion quickly in one direction or the other."

Finding a way to slow salaries has been a perennial management goal, but players would like to keep things the way they are. Since 1976, the last season before free agency, the average salary has jumped from $51,500 to $2.38 million, a 46-fold increase.

Commissioner Bud Selig said it has reached the point where only the richest teams can compete. He thinks revenue-sharing - taking from the biggest clubs and giving to the smaller ones, like his family-owned Milwaukee Brewers - is the only way to restore competitive balance.

"The system is so, in my judgment, badly flawed, it's going to take a myriad of solutions," Selig said earlier this month.

One owner who sticks up for big-market clubs is George Steinbrenner, whose New York Yankees' payroll is $135 million. He doesn't think they should have to subsidize smaller teams.

But Steinbrenner isn't sure how much his opinion counts these days.

"Bud Selig and I have been friends for a long time. I'm not sure how much he relies on me anymore," Steinbrenner said in an interview published Sunday in The New York Times. "I don't know. He kind of has his allies, and most of them are small-market guys."

While neither side commented after a three-hour bargaining session Sunday, there seemed to be some progress in negotiations the past week. Players ended their decades-old opposition to mandatory drug testing and agreed to be tested for illegal steroids starting next year.

Players also are amenable to increasing the amount of local revenue teams share. But they oppose the luxury tax.

"We don't consider players to be a luxury," union head Donald Fehr said.

The union doesn't want to leave itself open to a lockout, which would delay a confrontation until next spring, when owners have less money at stake. That's why a strike date probably will be set.

Arizona pitcher Brian Anderson said part of the reason to set a strike date is to spur negotiations.

"It's like anything else in life - you talk about getting your car washed, and you procrastinate and procrastinate all week long," he said. "We all do it. But all of a sudden, if your car has to be in a car show on Saturday, you go get it washed, because there's a deadline, and that is the purpose of setting a strike date."

Unlike the failed negotiations of 1994-95, which eliminated the World Series for the first time since 1904, both sides have had dozens of bargaining sessions in recent weeks and have narrowed their differences. In 1994, when owners were demanding a fixed ceiling on salaries, known as a cap, the first substantive talks didn't take place until three months after the walkout.

The last strike wiped out the final 52 days and 669 games of the regular season and forced cancellation of the first 23 days and 252 games of the following season. It ended only after a federal judge issued an injunction restoring the terms of the former labor contract, ruling owners had illegally changed work rules.

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