CHICAGO -- Baseball, at last, is back, albeit with an uneasy labor peace.


The longest work stoppage in professional sports history ended Sunday when major league baseball's 28 team owners accepted the players' offer to end their nearly eight-month strike.


The players will report to spring training camps in Florida and Arizona no later than Friday, and the regular season, with 144 games per team rather than the usual 162, will begin April 26.


Donald Fehr, chief of the Major League Baseball Players Association, said Sunday night from his home in Rye Brook, N.Y.: "It's good news. We should get things started as quickly as possible. But more importantly, we should continue to negotiate. I think we're making progress."


The owners, who met for about five hours Sunday at an O'Hare Airport hotel, had little choice but to accept the players' unconditional return-to-work offer. It had become clear even before the union offered Friday to end its strike -- after a federal judge in New York granted an injunction restoring terms of the sport's expired collective bargaining agreement -- that there would not be the necessary 21 votes among 28 owners to lock out the players.


Owners said they did not take an official lockout vote Sunday, but unanimously decided against such a measure.


"The players are back," acting commissioner Bud Selig, the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, said during a news conference Sunday night. "The mood in the meeting today was to do what's in the best interests of the game."


On Tuesday a New York court will hear arguments on the owners' request for a stay of the injunction, which was requested by the National Labor Relations Board. Selig said only that a stay would not affect the owners' acceptance of the players' return-to-work offer. Other management officials doubt the owners will get the stay.


Selig said the owners will speak to the union about a no-strike pledge for the 1995 season. The union may be reluctant, since the owners retain the right to declare an impasse in negotiations and unilaterally impose terms of employment. Baltimore Orioles majority owner Peter Angelos repeated that he believes there is sentiment on both sides for the union issuing a no-strike pledge for the '95 season, and the owners agreeing in return not to implement working conditions through Dec. 31.


Selig said, "It's important that we have a season without interruption."


The strike ends without a new labor agreement and, 234 days after the players' walked out last Aug. 12, baseball is set to begin again.


The major -- and perhaps the only -- issue separating the sides is formulating a system for taxing teams' player payrolls. That is, however, a formidable obstacle.


Judge Sonia Sotomayor sided with the NLRB and the union Friday, issuing an injunction that restored the salary arbitration system, anti-collusion protections for free agent players and competitive bidding for free agents. The owners had unilaterally eliminated those provisions of baseball's most recent labor agreement in early February, but the NLRB, and the judge, called that an unfair labor practice.


The owners began these negotiations seeking a hard salary cap. They ended up seeking a tax system as the cost-control mechanism they say they need for curbing players' rising salaries. At least for now, the owners got nothing. Baseball's old economic system, the one by which the average salary for a player had grown to nearly $1.2 million a year, is back in place.


The strike caused cancellation of the final 52 days of the 1994 regular season and the expanded postseason -- including the World Series, which was called off for the first time in 90 years. Teams spent the winter scrambling, mostly unsuccessfully, to sell tickets and advertising as they prepared to open this season with replacement players. Baseball will lose 3 1/2 weeks of the '95 season, which had been scheduled to open Sunday.


Both sides have suffered enormous financial losses. The players last year lost about $230 million in income. The owners, according to the brief they submitted to the district court last week, lost approximately $700 million.


According to Boston Red Sox general partner John Harrington, the owners would have suffered operating losses of $400 million to $600 million had they played the entire 1995 season with replacement players, and $600 million to $800 million had they shut down the industry for the year.