Major League Baseball and its locked-out players reached an agreement on Thursday on a labor deal that ends the second-longest work stoppage in the game's history.
MLB had initiated a player lockout in December, with months of either silence or flurries of activity on the labor negotiation front following since. At one point, the league set a self-imposed deadline of Feb. 28 to come to an agreement, past which they would have to cancel the first two weeks of games for the 2022 season — originally scheduled to begin on March 31. That deadline came and went, along with the announcement of game cancellations.
For the time being the bitter negotiations are now a thing of the past following Thursday's agreement, but the process has left a bad taste in the mouths of many fans, and likely the players as well.