AMERICA AT LARGE/Geroge Kimball: After another fruitless bargaining session last week, Donald Fehr, the labour lawyer who heads up the Major League Baseball Players Association, complained of the owners' muddle-headed intransigence.

"Whoever the bar owner was in Casablanca was shocked to find gambling, too," said Fehr.

The line about being "shocked" was not, of course, uttered by the Casablanca bar owner (Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart), but by Capt Louis Renault, the prefect of police, as portrayed by Claude Rains.

Among many millionaires who play baseball for a living, there must be at least a few whose familiarity with the classic 1942 film might give them sufficient pause to question the wisdom of being led in a suicidal stampede off a cliff by this man, but, as far as we know, not a single player (or owner) was sharp enough to call Fehr on the faux pas.

With a strike date set for tomorrow, the national pastime is on course for its ninth work stoppage since 1972, and if there is one thing both sides agree on it is that this one would be the most damaging yet.

When a labour dispute wiped out the 1994 post season, including the World Series, it took years for the sport to recover. Already battered by the steady gains made by the National Football League, baseball has put itself in the position of suspending play a week before the NFL season commences - and more perilously still, less than two weeks before the first anniversary of the September 11th disasters.

When the Boston Red Sox arrived at Fenway Park last night to play the New York Yankees, many players brought two suitcases. The Sox, like most teams scheduled to depart for weekend road games tonight, have rescheduled their chartered flight until Friday morning. Outfielder Johnny Damon explained he had packed one in anticipation of a settlement, in which case he would head off to Cleveland with his team-mates tomorrow, and another filled mostly with shorts and tee-shirts: if the strike bell tolled, Damon was flying home to Florida.

Both sides seemed unmindful of the ominous results of a Sports Illustrated poll conducted a week earlier, in which 22 per cent of the respondents sided with the owners and four per cent with the players. The other 74 per cent pronounced themselves "fed up with both".

Three-quarters of those polled said they had not yet forgiven baseball for the 1994 job action, nearly that many - 73 per cent - expected that a strike will again wipe out post-season play, and 70 per cent supposed if a strike were settled in time to cobble together some sort of post-season format, they wouldn't watch it anyway.

In the face of all this, there is no better than a 50-50 chance that there will be baseball games played tomorrow night.

The players, who average well over $1 million a year in salary, have found it difficult to portray themselves as the aggrieved party, while the draconian posture of the owners hasn't attracted much sympathy either.

Having failed in his attempt to bludgeon the association with his off-season threat of eliminating two teams by "contraction", commissioner Bud Selig, himself a former hawkish owner, faces the grim prospect of entire franchises eliminating themselves. (Some teams have already said they would likely file for bankruptcy should a protracted strike ensue.)

AT issue are two chief obstacles: an NFL-style revenue-sharing scheme, and a proposed system variously described as a "luxury tax", or a "competitive-balance tax". The players, who have steadfastly resisted the adoption of a player salary cap similar to those employed by the NFL and the National Basketball Association, are clever enough to recognise a wolf in sheep's clothing and are unlikely to willingly enlist in a plan to save the owners from their own profligate impulses. (By most estimates, the "luxury tax" currently on the table would probably affect only one team: the New York Yankees' George Steinbrenner would have to pony up an estimated $30 million a year to be cut up by his fellow owners as a result of a $171 million annual payroll.)

The problem is that even given the urgency of a strike deadline, bargaining sessions have been consumed by side issues.

If neither side has had much success in attracting the sympathy of the public, it is because the MLBPA is not a union in the traditional sense, and this dispute virtually reverses the conventional roles of the warring parties. The players union, for instance, is arguing for a free-market system in which salaries rise and fall as economic conditions dictate - a concept which would be anathema to the traditional trade union.

The owners' stance, on the other hand, embodies a quasi-socialistic worldview in which the riches of the most successful teams are redistributed to aid the poorer ones, with overall team salary structures presumably falling into line.

As Prof Andrew Zimbalist, an economist specialising in sports issues who authored a book entitled Baseball and Billionaires, put it: "What we're seeing here is pragmatism more than ideology."

In that regard, the players should count themselves fortunate that the former managing general partner of the Texas Rangers has moved on to a higher calling. Selig may represent management's hard-line faction, but even in his worst day he was far from the most reactionary baseball owner. If George W Bush still owned the Rangers, the bombs might be falling on the union's headquarters tomorrow. That he does not leaves a glimmer of hope for a last-minute reprieve.