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With little time to spare, baseball negotiators who talked through the night
reached a tentative agreement on a labor contract that averted a strike
threatened for Friday.

The season will go on after all. Baseball's owners and players agreed on a deal
Friday, hours before the strike deadline. As part of the settlement, contraction
has been tabled until 2006. And while most fans blamed the players, Tim Keown
writes, the owners just might have fooled you. Meanwhile, it was business as
usual at ballparks across the country.

The result of the negotiations that led to a new four-year collective bargaining
agreement between baseball's owners and players Friday can be summarized by the
words so often spoken by Minnesota broadcasters this summer: Twins win.
The agreement averted a players' strike, meaning that the Twins on Friday night
in Oakland, resumed pursuit of their first division title since 1991. It also
could give the Twins the financial means to retain their players as they become
more expensive.

As part of the agreement, the owners agreed to drop contraction -- the plan to
eliminate low-revenue teams like the Twins -- until 2007, giving the Twins time
to pursue a stadium deal they say will make them more financially viable.

And by breaking a streak of eight consecutive labor negotiations that led to
work stoppages, the owners and players created a system of revenue sharing and
luxury taxes that could improve competitive balance in baseball.

Asked if the agreement could, in effect, save the Twins, Twins President Jerry
Bell said, "That would not be overdramatizing it -- it could."

Bell said he believed the Twins needed a new collective bargaining agreement and
a new stadium to survive for the long term. "This agreement does not take away
the need for a new ballpark," he said. "But it's important in its own right.
There were a significant number of people, particularly legislators, who said
that baseball has to do something to improve our own economics and competitive
balance. I believe this agreement will do that.

"This is one of the really good days I've had since I've been here."



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