MLB And Players Association Agree To New Collective Bargaining Agreement, Avoid Lockout

Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association have reportedly avoided a lockout by agreeing to a new collective bargaining agreement less than four hours before the deadline to do so. The new CBA will last five years. Fox Sports’ Ken Rosenthal was first to report the news.

While the details are still slowing becoming available, we won’t know the full content of the new agreement for a bit. The immediate good news is that the league’s Winter Meetings will go on as scheduled, and teams can continue preparing for the 2017 season without a cloudy labor future hanging over their heads. Additionally, this means that by the end of this agreement, baseball will have gone 26 years with labor peace, showing that the sport learned the lessons of the disastrous 1994 players strike.

At the heart of the negotiations were draft-pick compensation for free agents, changes to the international signing bonus pool and raising the luxury tax threshold.

Some information has leaked out thanks to Rosenthal, here’s what he’s got as this is being written:

At least we know we will have baseball this spring and after such a fantastic postseason everyone has to be excited about that.