Jeff Bagwell, Tim Raines, Ivan Rodriguez elected to Baseball Hall of Fame
USA TODAY Sports
A former unanimous MVP, an elite leadoff hitter and one of the game’s most complete catchers were elected Wednesday into Baseball’s Hall of Fame. More
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01/18/2017 by PeekYou Team
Author: Jorge L. Ortiz / Source: USA TODAY
USA TODAY Sports
A former unanimous MVP, an elite leadoff hitter and one of the game’s most complete catchers were elected Wednesday into Baseball’s Hall of Fame. More
12/01/2016 by PeekYou Team
Source: ESPN.com
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…
12/01/2016 by PeekYou Team
Source: ESPN.com
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…
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