Batting champions Mookie Betts and Christian Yelich win MVP awards

Boston's Mookie Betts and Milwaukee's Christian Yelich were runaway winners of the Most Valuable Player awards Thursday after the 26-year-old outfielders each led their teams to first-place finishes with dominant seasons that included batting titles.

Both batting champions won MVP awards for the first time since San Francisco's Buster Posey and Detroit's Miguel Cabrera in 2012.

Betts won the American League award with 28 first-place votes and 410 points from the Baseball Writers' Association of America.

Betts hit .346 with 32 homers, 80 RBI and 30 stolen bases as the leadoff hitter for the Red Sox, who won a team-record 108 games.

Yelich got 29 first-place votes and 415 points in winning the National League award. The other first-place vote went to New York Mets pitcher Jacob deGrom, the Cy Young Award winner, who finished fifth.

Acquired from the payroll-paring Miami Marlins about a month before spring training, Yelich won the first batting title in Brewers history with a .326 average. He set career highs with 36 homers and 110 RBI and had a 1.000 OPS.

Yelich nearly became the NL's first Triple Crown winner since Joe Medwick in 1937, finishing two homers shy of Arenado and one RBI back of Baez.

After wrapping up two days of meetings in Atlanta, the owners announced a new contract for Commissioner Rob Manfred, keeping him on the job at least through the 2024 regular season. Manfred, 60, started a five-year term in January 2015.

The owners also signed off on a new TV deal with Fox, which still has three seasons to go on its current eight-year contract that pays baseball an average of $525 million per season.

The seven-year extension, which runs through 2028, will be worth just over $5 billion to MLB — roughly a 36 percent increase to an average of about $715 million per season.

Major League Baseball and the players' association ended a footwear flap, agreeing to loosen restrictions on the colors of spikes that may be used. Several players ran afoul of rules last season by wearing black. Under the new rule, shoes may be black, white, any color on the team's uniform and any color the team approves.