Dec 17, 2016 4 min read

New CBA, same old story.

With very little fanfare, Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association approved a new labor agreement Wednesday.

Lots of bragging followed. You are supposed to be either impressed or thrilled by the news that a new five-year agreement means that, in 2021, MLB will have gone 26 years without a work stoppage.

The last one was in 1994 when the end of the regular season and the postseason were cancelled because of a lockout.

The new agreement obviously doesn’t make it any better for Pirates fans since, while negotiators for the new CBA were going on, the Pirates were shopping Andrew McCutchen. He’s their biggest star since Barry Bonds, who left Pittsburgh two years before the last lockout because the CBA at that time gave the Pirates no chance of signing him as a free agent.

And, while the negotiations were winding down last week, the San Francisco Giants signed a new closer for $62 million over four years. Maybe you remember him. Does the name Mark Melancon ring a bell? Yeah, he’s the guy the Pirates dealt to the Washington nationals near the trade deadline last season for a few prospects.

Why was Melancon traded? Because he was to become a free agent this month and the Pirates saw this coming.

When guys, who have established themselves as one of the best at their position, become free agents they don’t stay in small markets. They usually end up in a Top-10 TV market.

Giants manager Bruce Bochy had no problem with spending so much of his boss’ money on a closer. He said losing games late can be a killer and closers are more valuable than they’ve ever been.

The more valuable a player becomes the more unlikely he is to finish his career in Pittsburgh.

And that will be true until at least 2021, thanks to the new CBA.

And you’ll be happy to know that the CBA will mean a Merry Christmas for the Nutting family. It means more shared revenue for owners of teams outside the TV mega-markets, who sold their fans down the river when they agreed to the CBA that ended that last lockout in 1994.

• When the ball is kicked off in Cincinnati today there is a 39 percent chance that it will be returned. That’s down three percent from least season’s 42 percent. So the NFL’s sneaky plan to put an end to kickoffs is working, and if coaches paid more attention to what happens when one of their guys decides to run it out of the end zone, then the percentage will plummet.

The NFL gave the return team the ball at the 25-yard line when it moved kickoffs up to the 35-yard line in 2011. With the extra five yards was supposed to reduce the number of returns. The smart teams will take a knee every time a kickoff crosses the goal line. It will make the games a little less exciting, but the NFL doesn’t care. It just wants to come as close to eliminating the kickoff as it can without just placing the ball at the 25.

The statistics geeks at 538.com will tell you that a team’s average field position would be much better if returners were to take the knee on every kickoff into the end zone. And a team’s number of fumbles on kickoff returns would, of course, be reduced to zero.

According to the stats geeks, the best plan for the kicking team would be to kick it high and just short of the goal line. With the coverage team being closer, the chances of tackling the return man inside the 25 are much better than they used to be.

If fans are really, really lucky, coaches can encourage kickers to kick it high enough to create one of the most exciting plays in all of sports.

The fair catch.

• If you get a chance, then check out “Running for His Life” on Showtime. It’s a documentary of Lawrence Phillips, the former running back from the University of Nebraska. When you see that name you probably think of the Heisman Trophy contender who dragged his girlfriend down two flights of stairs by her hair.

It’s a lot more complicated than that. It changed my opinion of his coach, Tom Osborne, who took a lot of heat at the time for reinstating Phillips for the 1994 season after a six-game suspension.

And, boy, was that kid a great runner.

John Steigerwald writes a weekly sports column for the Observer-Reporter.