Bud Selig, Marvin Miller and Don Fehr ate dinner last Thursday evening. Nothing unusual about that. They probably ate dinner Wednesday evening as well, not to mention other days of that week or any other week. But why was this night different from all other nights?

Selig, Miller and Fehr had dinner that night together. Seated at the same table. The baseball commissioner and the former and current executive directors of the Major League Baseball Players Association. It was an historic occasion, having the former labor combatants sitting together collegially.

Selig and Miller and Selig and Fehr had certainly talked with each other before that night, but at Va Bene restaurant on Second Avenue in Manhattan they sat with their wives and each other at the same table for the first time.

In the interest of full disclosure my wife and I sat at the next table with three of our children and their spouses. The occasion was a dinner the commissioner hosted in my honor. But enough of that aspect of the evening. The invited guests were more intriguing.

Bob DuPuy, Major League Baseball’s president and chief operating officer, and his wife were at the table with the commissioner and the two labor leaders. Len Coleman, former National League president, was at the dinner. Sitting together were the general managers of New York’s two baseball teams, Brian Cashman of the Yankees and Omar Minaya of the Mets.

Randy Levine, the Yankees president was there; so was Rob Manfred, who succeeded Levine as the owners’ chief labor executive.

Strikes and lockouts were the event du jour through 30 years of labor negotiations. Even before he became commissioner, Selig was deeply involved in labor relations as owner of the Milwaukee Brewers and chairman of the Player Relations Committee, the owners’ labor arm.

By the time Selig became commissioner, in 1992, Miller was retired and Fehr was the union’s executive director. The labor wars lasted through the 1994 season and into the next season, killing the 1994 World Series and plunging baseball into perhaps the lowest point in its history. But the two sides reached agreement on a new labor contract during the 1996 World Series.

That was the last negotiation that resulted in a work stoppage, strike or lockout. The owners and the players peacefully negotiated an agreement in 2002 and repeated that act in 2006.

Labor peace brought other benefits. Last year Major League Baseball surpassed $6 billion in revenue for the first time, and its attendance was a record for the third successive season. With the way revenue from advanced media mushroomed, baseball was suddenly awash in money. The players were getting their share, too, as clubs had more money to spend.

Furthermore, the revenue sharing plan for the clubs that the two sides had negotiated made the low-revenue teams wealthier and gave them money to spend to improve their teams.

For all of those reasons, labor peace was possible, old battle scars could be forgotten and the commissioner and the labor leaders could share a table at dinner.

Photo credits: Selig, Fehr and Miller by Joyce Klein; Minaya and Cashman by Steve Smedresman