There will be baseball in 2022.
After a lockout of 99 days, Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association finally struck a deal on a new collective bargaining agreement on Thursday evening after the union voted to accept the league’s latest proposal. Both sides ratified the deal, meaning the offseason freeze ended at 7 p.m. Thursday night, spring training camps open Sunday and Opening Day — originally scheduled for March 31 — will now be April 7, with the Yankees opening at home against the Red Sox and the Mets in Washington.
“I am genuinely thrilled to be able to say that Major League Baseball is back and we’re gonna play 162 games,’’ commissioner Rob Manfred said at MLB headquarters in Midtown shortly after the deal was finalized.
Games will be made up by extending the season and making up other “canceled” games throughout the season on off days and with doubleheaders.
Before any of that, there will be another free-agent frenzy after the sport shut down when MLB locked out the players on Dec. 2.
Players can report to spring training camps for a shortened spring training as early as Friday.
“The deal pushes the game forward,’’ Yankees right-hander Gerrit Cole told the Associated Press. “It addresses a lot of the things that the players in the game should be focused on: the competitive integrity aspect of it.”
While the competitive balance tax thresholds appeared to be the biggest hurdle for most of the negotiations, the hang-up on Wednesday — leading to Manfred announcing that two more series (making it four total) had been “removed from the schedule” — was over the league’s proposal to introduce an international draft in 2024 in exchange for eliminating the qualifying offer, which the union declined.
The sides agreed Thursday to hold off on a deadline on the decision until July 25 and reopened the rest of the CBA, leading to the final agreement.
The union’s executive board approved the deal 26-12 among the 30 team representatives, but all eight members of the executive subcommittee voted against the deal.
“Our union endured the second-longest work stoppage in its history to achieve significant progress in key areas that will improve not just current players’ rights and benefits, but those of generations to come,” MLBPA executive director Tony Clark said.
Among the details of the new deal are a CBT starting at $230 million this year, rising to $244 million over the course of the five-year agreement.
The pre-arbitration pool landed at $50 million, the minimum salary bumped to $700,000 going to $780,000 in the final year of the agreement.
There will also be changes on the field, with a universal DH starting this season, as well as an expanded postseason, which will go from 10 teams to 12.
Nine-inning doubleheaders will also return and the extra runner at second in extra innings will be eliminated. Players will be optioned no more than five times in a season. And rather than the amateur draft being based solely on record, there will be a six-pick draft lottery.
As for rule changes such as a pitch clock, increased base size and the defensive shift, there will be a joint committee made up of six MLB representatives, four active players and one umpire that will vote starting next offseason and will allow for changes after a 45-day window following approval.
MLB formerly had the ability to implement such changes on its own.
Teams will also be allowed to put ads on their jerseys.
The agreement ended a contentious bargaining session that stretched from November and stalled after the Dec. 2 lockout.
Over the course of the talks, both sides took shots at each other, with the union unhappy with the previous two agreements and its belief that some teams were manipulating service time for certain young players, as well as certain teams not spending money and trying to win.
They pointed to the fact overall payrolls are down 4 percent since 2019, reduced to where they were in 2015.
Manfred acknowledged he was at fault for some of the poor relationships he had with players and insisted he’d work hard to improve those over the course of this CBA — a process that began with a phone call to union head Tony Clark after the deal was ratified.
“One of the things I’m supposed to do is promote a good relationship with our players,’’ Manfred said. “I’ve tried to do that. I think I have not been successful in that. It begins with small steps.” But the commissioner still considered the lockout to have been necessary to get the sport to this point.
“I believe in sports, an offseason lockout is the most effective way to get to an agreement without losing games if there’s no agreement before expiration,’’ said Manfred, adding no agreement was possible before the previous CBA ended. “I do believe the lockout helped move the process along. If we had just slid into the season [and] started the season without a lockout I don’t think we’d have an agreement today.”