Baseball: Sense prevails as strike avoided

In a quite uncharacteristic outbreak of common sense, Major League Baseball owners and players yesterday reached an 11th hour deal to avert a strike that would have been calamity for America's tarnished national pastime.

"There's no strike," Donald Fehr, the players' union director, told reporters as he emerged after marathon talks in New York, just three hours before the first game that would have been halted by a strike, between the Chicago Cubs and the St Louis Cardinals, was due to start in Chicago.

Bud Selig, the often criticised Commissioner of Baseball and chief representative of the owners, hailed what he termed "a historic agreement" which would help restore competitive balance between teams. It had been "a long, difficult and winding road, but we can now get attention back where it belongs – on the field. This is a day people thought could never happen."

The agreement, to be ratified by each club within the next week, runs until the end of the 2006 season. It represents a compromise in which both sides have given ground. The owners have secured acceptance for the greater revenue sharing and luxury tax on excessively high payrolls, which they insist is essential if poorer market teams are to have a hope of competing with the plutocrats like the New York Yankees, the Atlanta Braves and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

They have also secured mandatory drug testing for players – something baseball, alone of all major sports, has thus far shunned despite persistent allegations that steroid use was widespread.

But owners have had to soften the terms of the tax, which the players argue amounts to a salary cap. In return, too, the owners have put back their plans for "contraction" or the closure of two of the 30 Major League franchises from next year until 2007.

Two factors above all forced the two sides to overcome the legacy of mistrust and downright antagonism between the two sides, which has led to no fewer than eight work stoppages since 1972.

One was the memory of the last one, in 1994, which lasted 232 days, wiped out the World Series for the first time in 90 years, and caused a 25 per cent plunge in attendances which has still not been recouped.

Fan patience with both "billionaire owners and millionaire players" – whose average salary is $2.4m (£1.6m) – was exhausted. The clubs owe a collective $3.5bn to the banks. Salaries, culminating in the record shattering $252m paid in 1990 by the Texas Rangers for the services of shortstop Alex Rodriguez for 10 years, defy economic logic.

Hitherto the players have held the whiphand. This year, however, both sides were negotiating from a position of weakness. As Tom Boswell, the Washington Post columnist, put it yesterday, "What good is 'winning' a strike if demand for your industry's product falls by 25 per cent and half a dozen factories close as a result? What happens to your members?" This time, with two-thirds of the franchises losing money, that penny finally dropped.

The second was the approaching anniversary of 11 September. After baseball played a big part in the national convalescence from that tragedy, culminating in the 2001 World Series, a strike now would have been a public relations disaster for which the sport might never have been forgiven.