Inside the Phillies: More positives than negatives to baseball's new labor deal

Baseball as a role model for labor peace in professional sports is a difficult concept to grasp for those of us who watched interim commissioner Bud Selig and the owners stage a full-length faux spring training in 1995 after a season that ended in mid-August without a World Series champion.

It was an unforgivable and unforgettable act in which the players equally shared the blame.

No World Series in October followed by six weeks of the Philadelphia Phil-Ins and the rest of the replacement-player fraud teams - that either had no business being in spring-training camps or no choice but to be there - remains one of the greatest stains in the history of the game.

Even though baseball's fraudulence did not leak into the regular season, as the NFL's replacement games did in 1987, it was worse. Baseball should have learned what a bad idea it was from the disgrace of its fellow professional league.

It was every bit as embarrassing as the steroids scandal. In fact, it was a big part of the reason Selig and the owners saw no evil as the performance-enhanced power numbers ripped the pages out of baseball's record book. Everybody loved the long ball, and the fans started to return to the game, so why worry about how it was being done?

That's the past, of course, and the good news for baseball fans is that Selig, the owners, and the players learned from their tarnished history that it's much better to work together and grow the golden goose than tear their sport apart. The result will be 21 consecutive years without a work stoppage when the new collective bargaining agreement expires in 2016. Given baseball's labor climate during the previous 30 years - five strikes, three lockouts, 1,736 games, and an entire postseason lost - this current streak has a Ripkenian feel to it.

This latest agreement may be the most impressive, because it shows a real sense of give and take at a time when the NBA owners and players are pulling with all their might in opposite directions.

It's impressive that baseball is the first North American professional league to have an agreement for human growth hormone blood testing.

It's refreshing that guidelines have been put in place to limit the spending on draft picks and international signings, although the top picks still will have a net worth that sets them up for life before they ever prove their worth.

Low-revenue/small-market teams also will get a chance to make more draft selections, another idea that could help competitive balance, although teams such as Tampa Bay have proved that front-office competence is as important as any of baseball's "help-the-little-guy" rules.

There have been some arguments that high school athletes who are two-sport stars, such as the Phillies' Domonic Brown, might choose football over baseball because of the changes, but that's not likely. Baseball still will offer substantial bonuses, guaranteed contracts, and superior longevity to the players who make it to the big leagues, so deciding between the two sports should remain easy.

The possible effects of the restrictions on international spending are unclear, but the idea that an international draft could soon be in place is a positive step.

There are negatives to this new CBA, too, starting with the expansion of the postseason and the move of the Houston Astros to the American League.

One thing that has made baseball's long and grinding season so special is that there were few invitations to the postseason party. Now, we're getting an extra wild-card team and a made-for-TV, one-game playoff.

More teams get to be contenders even when most of them are pretenders.

In the last five years, there have been no wild-card teams with fewer than 90 wins, a number that designates a team as pretty darn good.

If the new playoff format had been in place, eight wild-card teams with fewer than 90 wins would have had a chance to go to the World Series in the last five years. That's not playoff parity, it's diluting the product.

The new format cheapens the regular season. Baseball would have been better served by expanding the division series to seven games, making that series a better simulation of the regular season in terms of a team's pitching depth.

As for the Astros' move, it is not as bad for Houston as it is for baseball. Starting in 2013, fans will be subjected to a daily dose of interleague play, a novelty that has never worked in cities that do not have natural rivals and becomes even less attractive when it no longer has a special place on the schedule.

Even with these minor complaints, however, it is amazing that baseball's players and owners have found a way to peacefully coexist, and the timing could not be better for this city, which is in the midst of a golden age.