By JOEL SHERMAN
Forget the details. The details are not that important. Not now they aren’t. The key thing if you are a baseball fan is that the players and management reached an agreement for a new labor deal through 2011. But to leave it there is incomplete. This deal was reached without acrimony, without public threats of strike or lockouts, and with months to spare until the actual deadline. Rather than a long history lesson, just know this, that is not the history of these things. In the past, blood was always spilled, hard feelings were always made harder, baseball always suffered by having labor, rather than the sport itself, front and center for long periods.
This deal guarantees that , by the end, there will have been no lockout or strike for 16 years. At this moment, incredibly, there is more labor unrest in the normally fall-in-line NFL than in the major leagues.
Major league fans know now they can love their sport without threat of interruption. They can know that both sides – players and management – thought they could essentially just tinker with the old deal to get a new one, and that the old one had already helped foster the greatest era of parity in the sport’s history. This will be the seventh straight year that a new champion will be crowned. And, as you look to the landscape next year, it is hard to eliminate more than 3-5 teams from contention. Heck, who thought the Detroit Tigers would be playing in the World Series this year.
The darkest day in Bud Selig’s administration was being in charge when a postseason had to be cancelled due to labor strife in 1994. That is going to be part of his legacy forever. But now so is this. He is the commissioner when players and owners finally found the common ground to apply logic and professionalism to negotiations. He is the commissioner who finally realized it is better to seek partnership with the players rather than retreat behind all the old familiar hard lines and hatreds.
It seems to me there are three important items that made this new way of doing business possible:
1. It all starts with money. The industry now takes in $5.2 billion annually and that should only grow with further inroads into international markets and new technologies. This is so much money that everybody felt they could get a slab of the pie.
2. The World Baseball Classic. That was a joint effort between the owners and the players. It was a difficult endeavor and the two sides built some respect and bonhomie by working together to pull it off. It was the most stark moment when the two sides realized that they could accomplish more working with respect together than in the old ways of distrust.
3. Rob Manfred for the owners and Michael Weiner for the players emerged as the key negotiators and – more important – as partners. The old warhorses of labor negotiations, including Selig, Don Fehr and Gene Orza, needed to work more as advisors to avoid a return to how things had been. Manfred and Weiner had been working for a long time with each other on many matters, notably sensitive issues involving illegal performance enhancing drugs. They developed a bond that carried over into these talks. They were able to speak with one another and trust that their words would not be mangled or leaked. That set the tenor for these negotiations.
So these negotiations went behind closed doors without public rancor, without much comment. Ultimately both sides understood that the vast majority of the fans of the game do not care about labor minutiae, and they certainly do not want to hear about the inequity involved in determining how to split $5.2 billion. They care about the game going on unimpeded and with a system in place in which their team has a legitimate shot of winning a championship.
That system was in place and now will be in place through 2011. That is good and you know why.
The fans won.