On early Wednesday night, in the hours before a midnight deadline, Major League Baseball’s owners and its players’ union agreed to terms on a five-year extension of their collective-bargaining agreement, calming nerves and eliciting a deep exhale as the sport prepares to kick its offseason into gear next week at the annual winter meetings.
The deal was met with widespread approval and delight — when this latest contract expires, the sport will have enjoyed 26 years of labor peace since the disastrous strike of 1994. But as the parameters of the deal filtered out — tweet by tweet, story by story — the new rules structure began to offer real-world implications.