Often the best news is no news, and so the successful negotiation of a new collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball and the players’ union was great news. There were no threats to eliminate teams, no farcical testimony before Congress claiming that baseball loses hundreds of millions of dollars a year, no talk of a salary cap, no hint of a strike. Instead, owners and players realized they had every reason to extend a wildly successful compact, and so the changes in the CBA are for the most part minor technical adjustments to transaction rules. These changes, having mainly to do with the draft and compensation for free agent signings, will have their effect on the game — there are a lot of loopholes in the CBA now, and there will be opportunities for clever teams to work the system to their advantage — but nothing 98% or so of fans will ever directly notice.

Without venturing too deeply into the arcana of transactions rules, it looks like the main impact of the new CBA will be to essentially codify a slotted drafting system like those in place in the NFL and the NBA. The mechanism is a pair of related rules changes: All draft picks who aren’t college seniors must be signed by August 15, and any team that doesn’t sign a first- or second-round pick will receive a compensatory pick in the same position in the next year’s draft. These changes, in concert with the current system in which the commissioner’s office “suggests”how much each draft pick should be signed for (with implied unpleasantness for a club that doesn’t take the suggestion), will combine to strip amateurs of a great deal of their leverage. They’ll now have from draft day — usually the first Tuesday in June — until mid-August to either take what a club wants to give them or decide to go back to school. This will greatly reduce drawn-out holdouts and go a long way toward ensuring that the worst and poorest teams have access to the best American amateur talent. On balance, this is probably a good thing, though the effects of this system will have to be carefully watched, as the law of unintended consequences applies to baseball as much as it does to anything else.

The other main changes have to do with free agency. The scheduling of various dates for offering and accepting arbitration has been moved up, which should go some way toward doing away with the traditional late-November dead period when few signings take place. Teams can also sign their own free agents before May 1 now even if they’ve declined arbitration, which will probably end up being known as the Roger Clemens rule.

Draft pick compensation for free agents has also been changed a bit. Whereas previously, losing a player who ranked among the top half of players at his position (as determined by a dumb, BCS-type formula) could net a team the signing club’s first-round draft pick and a sandwich round pick, now only 40% of players will net top draft picks, and only the top 20% of players can net a first-round pick. (I said the changes were technical.)

Basically, this will make good, but not elite, free agents a bit more valuable, and do a bit to encourage teams to sign their own free agents; it’s not a huge set of changes.

Why, when just a few years ago we were on the precipice of baseball apocalypse, with claims that teams would be bankrupted unless the players agreed to pay for peanut shells and spare sanitary socks, has the current round of negotiations come down to such a set of tedious tweaks? Two reasons: The compromises the players’ union made in 2003 to avoid a labor stoppage resulted in a system both sides could truly live with while doing something to moderate the confrontational relationship between management and the union, but more important, a lot of money fell out of the sky.

Baseball is in the midst of a profound economic shift right now. The traditional model has been built around local television contracts and gate attendance. That won’t change for a long time, but the future of the game is quite clearly with advanced media, the Internet especially. Teams are raking in $10 million apiece a year in satellite radio fees and divvying up tens of millions more in Web site revenue—all of which are equally divided among the teams, unlike television monies. Some clubs have literally had more money allocated for payroll than they could spend over the last couple of years.

In the short term, this has relieved much of the pressure on high-revenue teams and players to agree to a salarycap system; a team like the Marlins, with a $15 million payroll, can’t convincingly plead poverty when XM Radio is giving them $10 million just for putting a team on the field. It’s also relived a lot of the pressure on both sides in labor negotiations because the field is shifting; with everything changing around them, there’s a great appeal in ensuring stability of terms right now. Neither side wants to insist on a big innovation that might end up giving the other side a long-term advantage as conditions change.

What this means is that this is probably just the first in a string of negotiations that will pass utterly unnoticed and without comment — probably, barring a massive general economic upheaval, and until television has essentially been replaced by broadband Webcasting as a delivery medium, which isn’t going to happen any time soon. Everyone knows that technological utopians are insane when they claim the Internet is going to make politics, music, fashion, or stock trading infinitely better forever and for everyone; in the narrow area of baseball’s labor negotiations, though, they may actually be right.