Baseball: Five-year deal ensures strike-free run

ST LOUIS - Major League Baseball has reached a five-year labour agreement with the players' association that ensures uninterrupted play through the 2011 season, Commissioner Bud Selig announced yesterday.

The deal is the longest in baseball history and guarantees baseball will have gone 16 years without a strike or lock-out by the end of the pact.

Selig said baseball's economic boom in recent years made this "baseball's golden age", and led to less rancour between owners and the Major League Baseball Players' Association.

More than 76 million fans attended major league games this season, setting an attendance record for the third straight year, and produced US$5.2 billion ($7.86 billion) in revenue, Selig said.

Baseball had eight work stoppages between 1972 and 1995, the last of which was a seven-month players' strike that forced the cancellation of the 1994 playoffs and World Series.

"I've been representing players on an everyday basis for some 29 years," said union chief Donald Fehr, noting that over the years there had been "a lot of acrimony, a lot of disputes".

"There was a shared desire to see if we could resolve this well ahead of time and if we could get it done by about the time of the World Series," Fehr said.

Among details of the new contract, the revenue-sharing plan will continue with a provision requiring recipient clubs to spend receipts to improve their product on-field.

The drug programme in place also continues and there will be no contraction of teams during the agreement.

Selig said a key to baseball's recent successes was the competitiveness of both leagues, which he attributed in part to revenue sharing.

"On this past Labour Day [September 4] there were 17 teams that had legitimate shots at reaching the playoffs," Selig said.

"Major League Baseball today has parity, thanks to an economic system that is working for both the clubs and the players."

Tigers manager Jim Leyland said the game was booming.

- REUTERS