New York ? With no labor agreement in sight, some baseball players think it is inevitable that the union will set a strike date for August.

“That’s really the only thing we can do,” pitcher Mike Stanton, the New York Yankees player representative, said Wednesday. “It’s not a situation where we have a lot of options.”

Union officials told player agents at a meeting in New York on Tuesday that the staff is considering if and when to set a strike date, two agents said Wednesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Union head Donald Fehr, who told players during spring training to prepare for missing their last two or three paychecks, is to hold a similar meeting with West Coast agents in Los Angeles on Thursday.

“Before everybody reacts or overreacts we’ve got to remember that there’s been no strike date set,” commissioner Bud Selig said Wednesday night. “The industry’s had three or four decades of all this stuff, and nobody knows better than I do how tired people are of it, so I’m hopeful that we can use the coming months to solve our problems. I’m very hopeful.”

For now, the union is trying to play down the possibility of a work stoppage, which would be baseball’s ninth since 1972.

“The executive board has not yet considered whether to set a strike date,” Fehr said. “We hope not to have to do so.”

The consideration of a strike date, first reported Wednesday by The New York Times, is of little surprise. Players are unhappy that owners, in an effort to slow payroll growth, have proposed a 50 percent luxury tax on the portions of payrolls above $98 million. Management also angered players by asking to increase the percentage of locally generated revenue that teams must share from 20 percent to 50 percent, after a deduction for ballpark expenses.

Owners have promised that through the World Series they will not attempt to declare an impasse in talks and implement their proposals. The union fears management will do so immediately after the postseason in an effort to slow salaries for 2003.

“For them to rattle their strike-date cage is frankly disappointing, and in my view counterproductive,” said Bob DuPuy, baseball’s chief operating officer. “We didn’t put proposals on the table that were designed to provoke a work stoppage. There’s no salary cap. There’s no rebate or excise tax, like the other leagues have. We put proposals on the table that were designed to allow bargaining to an agreement. So it’s disappointing when the other side decides to threaten a work stoppage, which is certainly not their only option.”

In the view of management, Selig already made a concession by saying owners wouldn’t lock out players or implement its proposals during this season. The union views that pledge as meaning little, since 2002 salaries already had been determined when Selig made the pledge March 26.