If the commissioner’s office were going to file a grievance against the Players Association, you’d think 27 months would be enough time to get it together and submit it. If there were “a growing rift between the commissioner’s office and the union,” you wouldn’t think the two sides would be turning out one unforced agreement after another.

Contrary to the growing hostility The New York Times reported in February 2009, the commissioner’s office and the union have been engaged in a veritable love fest.

With one agreement after another, as if it were a scripted series on a reality television show, the once fierce combatants have created a period unprecedented in the 45-year history of baseball labor negotiations.

In the view of the only reporter who has covered labor matters in all four major professional sports, it is the most stunning, most remarkable development ever in sports labor.

That the development occurs now is particularly interesting because baseball is immune from the potentially cataclysmic events engulfing other sports.

The National Football League is engaged in a lockout of its players, fighting feverishly in federal court to enforce it. The National Basketball Association is likely preparing a lockout of its own.

The National Hockey League doesn’t have to prepare anything yet, but internally league officials are very likely chomping at the bit to take on the big bad ogre newly in charge of the players union.

Donald Fehr, after all, led baseball players through the longest, most crippling strike in American sports, and didn’t the hockey union hire him to flex his negotiating muscles?

I’m not sure why, but the situation reminds me of a softball incident in the 1960s when an umpire in Central Park’s Broadway Show League, seeing the imposing figure of the great actor George Scott charging toward him, a menacing scowl on his rugged face, whipped off his mask and swatted Scott with it as a pre-emptive strike.

That’s the feeling I have about Gary Bettman, the diminutive N.H.L. commissioner, and Fehr, who is no giant physically but is in sports labor relations. I would see Bettman’s pre-emptive swipe at Fehr a metaphorical one.

Some of Fehr’s critics see him as a reason for much of baseball’s former labor problems. For example, Jerry Reinsdorf, the Chicago White Sox chairman, has always blamed Fehr for the 1994 strike, but that has always been Reinsdorf doing his best imitation of a hallucinatory owner.

Lest we forget, baseball had labor peace in Fehr’s time. Both the 2002 and 2006 agreements were negotiated without a strike or a lockout.

The two sides went further while Fehr was still in office. Twice in 2005 (Jan. 13 and Nov. 15) and in 2008 (April 11), they reopened the collective bargaining agreement, which they had never done, and toughened the regimen for testing for performance-enhancing drugs and disciplining for their use.

In the past 16 months management and union lawyers reached agreement on these issues:

• Jan. 12, 2010 – Florida Marlins’ use of revenue-sharing funds, avoiding grievance
• Sept. 30, 2010 – Changes in free-agent provisions, avoiding new collusion grievance
• March 29, 2011 – Creation of 7-day disabled list for players with possible concussions
• April 21, 2011 – Agreement on payments to pre-1980 players who missed out on pension

Somewhere along the way they also agreed on bereavement and paternity leaves for players, which had never existed. And in the current talks for a new labor contract to replace the one that expires Dec. 11, the two sides are expected to agree to a disciplinary program for players who are convicted of driving under the influence.

This kind of thing was unthinkable in the dark old days, not that Miller or Fehr, on the players’ side, or John Gaherin or Barry Rona, on the clubs’ side, was to blame for the unrest. The times and the bargaining aims were different.

When Miller and his general counsel, Richard Moss, took up their jobs in 1966, both fresh from positions with the United Steelworkers, they had far more basic goals than paternity and bereavement leaves: minimum salary, for example, pensions, working conditions, salary arbitration, free agency, to name a few issues of significantly greater importance.

Later on, the owners had their own issues of importance. A cap on payrolls was most critical to them. Other sports had caps, and the baseball owners felt they deserved a cap, too. They tried and tried and tried to get it, but the players resolutely resisted.

In 1994 the owners made one last attempt. In plotting their strategy, the owners, led by Reinsdorf and Bud Selig of the Milwaukee Brewers, forced Fay Vincent to resign as commissioner because they feared he would get in the way of their strategy to slay the union.

As long-time chairman of the clubs’ player relations committee, Selig had been centrally involved in the labor strategy that produced four strikes and three lockouts. The players’ 1994 walkout would be strike five. In baseball it isn’t always three strikes and you’re out.

Even though he describes himself as a history buff, Selig doesn’t like to talk about the labor history in which he played a major role. “We all know what happened,” he said in a telephone conversation Tuesday and left it at that.

He is, however, proud of what is happening now.

“Think of how the concussion thing was handled,” Selig said. “Do you need a better example than that? This is what I’ve always wanted.”

I think he always wanted a payroll cap, too, but he didn’t get it and he was smart enough to quit trying to get it.

Now Selig has a different reason to have a peaceful negotiation. He has said he will retire after the 2012 season, and there’s no way he wants a work stoppage to wreck his legacy, which right now is lustrous.

“I think that’s right,” said a former baseball official.

“There’s something to that,” said a current official.

Yet another official said, “Bud Selig will do nothing to affect his legacy.”

The commissioner wouldn’t discuss his legacy, but he said, alluding to labor problems, “I’ve often thought about all the heartaches. I think both sides realized that to continue the way we were was not in going to be conducive to our economic well-being.”

The owners’ reluctant but intelligent decision to give up on a cap is really what separates the two labor eras. When the owners stopped fighting for a cap, the bargaining temperature cooled considerably.

“A lot of the big issues have been resolved,” said a lawyer who is a close observer of baseball’s labor scene. “They have things to be tinkered with, things like revenue sharing and luxury tax. But there’s no longer any argument on philosophical issues. It’s just tinkering. The fighting was over fundamental issues.”

The owners, the lawyer added, “wanted a salary cap but took a luxury tax. They wanted a salary cap but took revenue sharing.”

The agreements reached on lesser elements is nothing to be overlooked, Rob Manfred said.

“One feature of a maturing labor relationship,” said Manfred, the clubs’ chief labor executive, “is that the parties work on issues during the term of the agreement. That has two benefits. Things don’t get built up and secondly you make an opportunity for positive interactive developments during the agreement and that leads to a better relationship.”

The agreements the two sides have forged, however, don’t mean they will agree on everything.

“It’s collective bargaining,” Michael Weiner, the union leader, said. “There are matters of dispute. If there are no disagreements, the parties aren’t representing their constituents appropriately.”

Indeed, Fehr said, “We had some disagreements about performance-enhancing drugs between ’02 and ’06.”

No one, however, from the commissioner on down. recalled the alleged grievance and growing hostilities that Michael S. Schmidt wrote about in The New York Times in February 2009.

“I have no recollection of anything like that,” Selig said.

Lawyers on both sides said they were dubious about the reporting that produced that story, and developments since – the string of agreements – would seem to support that view. Schmidt did not respond to e-mail requests for comment.

I raise the issue of the accuracy of the Times reporting because I know from vast experience that negotiators take reporting on their talks seriously. There were times in past negotiations when people at the table, spent much of their time during a bargaining session discussing and debating what had been reported, in some instances accusing the other side of leaking information from the talks.

That is less likely to happen in the current negotiations because the two sides have agreed to maintain public silence on their talks.

“We’re bargaining out of the public eye and well in advance of the termination of our agreement,” Weiner said.

They have maintained the silence. They have met about 10 times, and no results of those talks have been reported.