MLB owners, players’ union agree to 5-year labor contract
It took nearly around-the-clock bargaining over the past two days and nights, but Major League Baseball and its players’ union have kept their 21-year streak of labor peace intact for another five years.
Shortly before 9 p.m. ET Wednesday, the two sides reached agreement on a five-year collective bargaining agreement that will run through the 2021 season. The deal was agreed to just over three hours before the previous CBA would have expired at 12:01 a.m. ET Thursday.
The new agreement averts a potential lockout of the players that would have frozen baseball’s hot stove and pulled the plug on the major league portion of next week’s winter meetings.
By the time the deal was reached Wednesday, the two sides had been negotiating almost continuously for more than 24 hours — on little or no sleep. It is believed that the final hurdle was an agreement on a new luxury-tax system, in tandem with an end to draft-pick compensation for free agents signed by all but a handful of teams.
In announcing the agreement, MLB said it will make specific terms available when drafting is complete.
“Happy it’s done, and baseball is back on,” Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Brandon McCarthy said.
Sources said the luxury-tax threshold will jump from $189 million to $195 million next year, then to $197 million in 2018, $206 million in 2019, $209 million in 2020 and $210 million in 2021. Teams that exceed the threshold will pay similar tax rates to the current deal, unless they go way over the threshold, in which case their tax rate could jump as high as 92 percent.
Teams that sign a premium free agent will no longer have to give up a first-round draft pick to the team that lost that player. However, teams with payrolls higher than the luxury-tax threshold…