Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig and Players Association Executive Director Donald Fehr have been vilified for a laundry list of reasons over the last two decades, often for good reason. But when the first post-strike Basic Agreement expired in late 2002, the players and owners averted a work stoppage for the first time since 1970, reaching an agreement right at the August 31 deadline. Last night, Selig and Fehr appeared at Busch Stadium in St. Louis just before Game 3 of the World Series to announce that, with the 2002 agreement set to expire in December 19, they’ve not only avoided a work stoppage yet again, but they’ve beaten the deadline by nearly two months.
More impressively, despite last night’s game being something of a snoozer (a 5-0 Cardinals win behind a dominant outing from Chris Carpenter), the news of the new agreement appears to have been something of an afterthought to the mainstream media this morning. As well it should be. A dozen years after the World Series was cancelled as a result of what was then the longest work stoppage in professional sports history (thanks NHL!), order has finally been restored with the game on the field stealing the headlines from what, given the history* of labor strife in the sport, is actually a far more remarkable event. While it’s clear that timing of this announcement was in no way coincidental (Selig’s has had the specter of the 1994 World Series hanging over his head throughout his commissionership and is clearly still desperate to exorcise it), it remains apt. Though it is somewhat contradictory to do so, I think Selig and Fehr deserve to be celebrated for conducting this round of labor negotiations outside of the media spotlight, and for allowing the new agreement to be brushed aside by the media as a boring business story secondary to the game itself.
That said, a new labor agreement is big news, regardless of the temperature of the fire in which it was forged. The full agreement hasn’t been posted yet (though once it is, it will likely appear here), but here are a few highlights as cribbed from the official press release.
- The new agreement will last through the 2011 season, expiring on December 11, 2011. The five-year agreement is the longest in baseball’s labor history*.
- The deadlines for teams to resign departing free agents who have not been offered or have rejected salary arbitration have been eliminated, allowing all 30 teams to negotiate with free agents on equal terms.
- Free agent compensation has been rolled back. Teams will have to surrender compensatory draft picks for Type A free agents only, with Type A being redefined at the top 20 percent of the free agent pool (was the top 30 percent). Teams losing Type B free agents (correspondingly redefined as players from 21-40 percent–was 31-50) will be compensated with supplemental round picks only. There is no longer any compensation for teams losing Type C free agents.
- Players traded in the middle of multi-year contracts are no longer allowed to demand a trade from their new team. (Existing multi-year contracts are grandfathered, allowing a player already under a multi-year contract to demand a trade only if dealt during the term of his current contract.)
- All amateur draft picks (with the exception of college seniors) must be signed by August 15. Teams that are unable to sign first or second round picks by that deadline will get the identical pick the next year as compensation. Teams unable to sign third round picks will get supplemental round picks between the third and fourth rounds the following year.
- Minor leaguers are bound to their organizations for an extra year before becoming eligible for the Rule 5 draft.
- No teams will be contracted during the term of the agreement.
