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With labor negotiations at a standstill and a strike looming, Bud Selig had some strong words about the future of Major League Baseball on Thursday.

Selig claims that six to eight major league clubs could go out of business in the next 12-18 months if the current economic climate does not improve, Selig said.

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

Selig also told The Times that the future of those clubs depends solely on a change in the system because he is through trying to "prop them up" on his own with loans from baseball's central fund or his own connections. "I'm out of that business," he told The Times. "The lines of credit those clubs have will still exist, but most are out of credit. They're at the max.

"Baseball has $4 billion of debt, the bankers are nervous and the losses are very real," he continued. "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)."

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