LOS ANGELES -- Commissioner Bud Selig claims 25 percent of major league teams could go out of business if the sport's economic system isn't changed.

"I would say six to eight can't exist another year, another year and a half," Selig said Thursday during a meeting with editors and reporters of the Los Angeles Times. "We're talking about the immediate future. There's a lot of clubs that simply can't survive the status quo."

		Thu, May 16 If you've been paying attention to the baseball labor scene for more than 15 minutes in the last six months, it shouldn't come as a shock to anyone that the players are talking about setting a strike date. Ever since the owners replaced the now-departed Paul Beeston on their negotiating team, they've made a series of proposals which -- regardless of their merit or lack thereof -- they should have known the Players Association would never accept. They also had to know exactly how the union would react to those proposals -- namely, with anger and suspicion. Which is exactly what happened. And that's where we are now. Since the formation of the union, not one baseball labor deal has been made without either a work stoppage or the setting of a date for a work stoppage. So this step is all part of a very screwed up process -- and a step we could, or should, have seen coming for months. Setting this date doesn't mean there will be a strike. It's just a warning that that's the alternative if these two sides don't send out a search party real soon to look for some common ground. More ...

No major league baseball team has folded since the National League cut from 12 teams and eight after the 1899, and the last two times teams went bankrupt, both found buyers: Selig led a group that bought the Seattle Pilots in 1970 and moved them to Milwaukee, and Peter Angelos purchased the Baltimore Orioles for $173 million in 1993.

Selig did not identify any endangered teams and said he is through trying to "prop them up" on his own with loans from baseball's central fund or his own financial connections.

He called that the one area where he has been criticized the most internally -- from owners of the more stable teams and his own staff.

"I'm out of that business," Selig said. "The lines of credit those clubs have will still exist, but most are out of credit. They're at the max.

"Baseball has $4 million of debt, the bankers are nervous and the losses are very real. You know how serious the problem is when six to eight clubs are for sale, including the Angels."

Reached by the Times at Dodger Stadium on Thursday night, MLB union leader Donald Fehr said he never heard Selig claim that 6-8 clubs are in danger of going out of business. "It seems to me the most important thing is negotiating (a collective bargaining) agreement so those things don't have to be considered," he told the Times.

Fehr also told The Times he would be "willing to hire a neutral party to grade" whether the union or the owners have been more aggressive in pursuit of an agreement. He has said that the owners have been generally unresponsive to any union proposals.

However, Selig and MLB vice presidents Rob Manfred and Sandy Alderson told The Times that it is the union that has been unwilling to negotiate and that the owners "remain committed to a moderate set of proposals" while avoiding "all this talk about a strike and interruption of play."

The two key ingredients of Selig's "moderate set of proposals" call for a 50 percent tax on all payroll above $98 million and an increase in the sharing of local revenue from 20 percent to 50 percent, according to The Times. The union believes the tax is equivalent to a salary cap, and privately believes, according to The Times, that the high-revenue clubs that drive the market would be hampered in the signing of top players if forced to share half of local revenue.

Union sources wonder if the owners are geared to make another charge at breaking the union and are deluded into thinking fans will come back if the game is shut down for the ninth time. The last work stoppage -- in 1994 -- led to the first-ever cancellation of the World Series, something that fans will find hard to forget.

"Our goal is to make a deal without having to worry about the fans coming back," Manfred told The Times. "Everything we have done during this go around has been calculated to get an agreement without an interruption."

Although baseball revenue has doubled to almost $3.5 billion since the last work stoppage, Selig told The Times there has been an increasing loss of hope in too many MLB cities. He mentioned NFL parity and the booming increase in NFL franchise values as indicative of what can happen in a "reasoned economic system."

"Am I supposed to sit and watch our situation deteriorate just to preserve the status quo?" Selig asked the Times staffers. "Ten years from now people would ask, 'Commissioner, what the hell were you thinking about?' I can't ignore it. It's too stark. If we don't address it now, the consequences will be even worse (than a possible shutdown)."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.