Players, owners reach tentative agreement on labor deal

Record economic success helped produce an agreement with no public rancor. Commissioner Bud Selig said last week that he estimated the sport will produce $5.2 billion in revenue this year, up from about $3.6 billion in 2001.

Major league teams drew a record 76 million fans this year.

"With the amount of fans coming out with their support," Detroit center fielder Curtis Granderson said, "a strike would've been devastating."

Granderson was 13 when players struck in 1994, and he vividly recalls the aftermath.

"Nobody really talked about baseball too much," he said.

Selig credited the changes in the 2002 agreement with making more teams competitive.

"I had dreams of things getting better but, no, in many ways this has exceeded my fondest expectations," he said last Tuesday night in St. Louis. "This sport has more parity than ever. We have more parity than any other sport."

An agreement had been anticipated by officials on both sides in recent days.

"This is a setting of success. It's a platform, a stage that's been built through very difficult times," agent Scott Boras said Sunday. "To do anything to alter that success would be something that wouldn't be in the best interests of the game."

The huge influx of money smoothed negotiations. The average player salary was $1.1 million in 1995, the first season after the 1994-95 strike. It rose to just under $2.3 million in 2002 and will be about $2.7 million this year. The average likely will top $3 million next year or in 2008.

Still, the very top of the salary scale has stayed the same since Alex Rodriguez signed his record $252 million, 10-year contract with Texas before the 2001 season. And in a sign that spending doesn't translate into postseason success, the New York Yankees failed to advance past the opening round of the playoffs in 2005 and 2006 despite a $200 million annual payroll.

"The business of baseball is being operated much more efficiently," said Boras, who negotiated Rodriguez's deal. "Owners are becoming better owners. League officials are becoming more aware of the opportunity for content both nationally and internationally. The force of the revenue streams basically put the collective bargaining process into a different framework than it's been in the past."

An AP-AOL Sports poll released Thursday shows that only one-third of Americans call themselves fans of professional baseball -- about the level of support for the last decade, but lower than 1990 among all Americans. Skyrocketing salaries were identified as the biggest problem in baseball by more poll respondents -- 28 percent -- than any other. Twenty-one percent said it was the high cost of attending games and 19 percent said it was players using steroids and performance-enhancing drugs.