Baseball peace endures, but new CBA curbs spending
Once upon a time in baseball, it wouldn’t have ended like this. And that, of course, is because, for close to 25 years, labor negotiations in baseball never ended like this.
With peace. With stability. With a sport that has now gone so long without a work stoppage that the three other major professional sports in this land have combined for SIX of them since the last time a labor war erupted in baseball. How surreal is that?
So even though the labor agreement of 2016 went down almost a week after Thanksgiving, this, my friends, was something to be thankful for. Peace is good. But more than that, peace is essential.
As someone who has covered a few of those messy baseball work stoppages of yesteryear, I’d be happy to hop up on the stand and testify. Whatever was gained on the inside from those strikes or those lockouts, it wasn’t enough to undo the damage it caused on the outside.
Baseball will never, ever be the same after the strike that wiped out the 1994 World Series. It will never regain the place it held in the American soul because of that strike. So no matter how vehemently people inside the game may want to defend the stands that they took back then, the truth is that in the big picture, only one good thing ever came of that strike:
The people who run this sport got the memo — Peace is good. And they learned that they should never go down that ugly, self-destructive road again. And they haven’t.
They’ve now made it through 21 consecutive years of labor peace since the strike of 1994-95. And thanks to the deal they made Wednesday night, we know they’re about to make it through five more. Hallelujah.
As you look over the details of that deal today, could it possibly be more obvious that there was never an issue in the 2016 labor talks that was worth blowing up a $10 billion industry over? Never.
Over the qualifying offer for a select group of free agents? Over containing spending on 18-year-old amateur players who happened to be born outside the United States? Over luxury-tax thresholds or tax rates? How did this sport ever drive itself to the brink of a lockout over issues like that? Incredible.
We still have a lot to learn about the specifics of this new labor deal. So we can’t fully judge the complete scope of everything that was agreed to yet. But the highlights that did leak out were fascinating, all right. Here are some quick reactions:
• We’d been led to believe that owners were willing to shred the entire system which required teams…