Inside the self-inflicted crisis boiling over as MLB's lockout deadline arrives

MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL is in a crisis of its own making, a self-inflicted wound borne of equal parts hubris, short-sightedness and stubbornness from a class of owners who run the teams and seemingly have designs on running the game into the ground. Barring a miracle eleventh-hour agreement Monday on a new labor deal that ends its lockout of the MLB Players Association, the league has said it will cancel Opening Day games. That baseball finds itself on the precipice of such an ugly denouement is no accident. It is a study in the consequences of bad behavior -- of indignities big and small, of abiding by the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit and, worst of all, of alienating those who make the sport great.

The players are angry at the trajectory of the negotiations, which have inched along for almost a year with little demonstrable progress. More than that, they're tired of the game they love saying, in ways both active and passive, it does not love them back.

Player pay has decreased for four consecutive years, even as industry revenues grew and franchise values soared and the would-be stewards of the game pleaded to anyone who would listen that owning a baseball team isn't a particularly profitable venture. Players' service time has been manipulated to keep them from free agency and salary arbitration. The luxury tax, instituted to discourage runaway spending, has morphed into a de facto salary cap, and too many teams are nowhere near it anyway, instead gutting their rosters and slashing their payrolls because the game's rules incentivize losing. The commissioner has called the World Series trophy a "piece of metal," and the league has awarded the team that did the best job curtailing arbitration salaries a replica championship belt.

Any of these is a problem. In aggregate, they served as a call to action for the players, who even now struggle to pull off the delicate balance of being aggrieved while trying to negotiate a larger piece of a $10 billion-plus pie. The MLBPA grew into the strongest union in the United States during the late 1960s and 1970s by marrying morality and money -- by fighting for itself and for the betterment of the game simultaneously. Now, following a quarter-century of labor peace and the relative complacency that accompanied it, the players are energized and engaged beyond what even they expected.

"We're just trying not to get screwed," one player told ESPN.

Easy as it is to point to the average major league salary ($4.17 million last Opening Day) as a sign players aren't on the wrong end of anything, it's also facile. Finance in sports is a zero-sum game. What doesn't go to the players goes to the league and teams, and owners control how their teams spend money. Since the 1994 player strike that canceled the World Series -- and especially over the last two collective bargaining agreements -- the league has through canny negotiating positioned itself to be the aggressor, a role with which it has grown comfortable and familiar.

On Dec. 2, when the league instituted what commissioner Rob Manfred, in a letter to fans, called a "defensive lockout," MLB acted first -- ostensibly in the name of proactivity. "We hope that the lockout will jump-start the negotiations," Manfred wrote. The league then waited 43 days to present the union its next offer.

Now, the sides find themselves at another inflection point, one with the ability to do grave harm to the game -- a "disastrous outcome," Manfred said recently. Without a deal, the league says, games will be missed and player salaries lost. If players don't get paid for 162 games, they say, they'll refuse to agree to postseason expansion, one of MLB's key targets in any new deal. Neither knows for certain if the other is bluffing.

Players do know that they don't trust the league, and those misgivings only amplify concerns that already permeate their 1,200-man group. The next basic agreement will, for better or worse, govern the sport over the next half-decade, and players are well aware of the ways front offices, ever seeking the slightest advantage over their competitors, will plumb the document for opportunities to game the system in their favor.

Getting the right deal is the players' only recourse, and their position is simple: The sport needs to evolve with its aspirations. Baseball remains a game with incredible upside, with a collection of players young and dynamic and eminently likable. There is ample room for improvement to the sport itself, which has grown too plodding for a wide swath of young, would-be fans who regard it as slow and boring. The players have prepared themselves to miss games, to forfeit more than $20 million a day in salaries. They believe a bad agreement -- one that attempts to further neuter their power -- could do even more damage.

It could be a faulty premise. Even if the players outfox the Lords of Baseball -- as John Helyar called the owners in his indispensable book on the history of the game's labor strife, "Lords of the Realm" -- the inherent nature of the owner-worker dynamic may be too strong to reverse. But over the last few months, as they've grown more emboldened, they've found a voice that the MLBPA had lost. The players steeled themselves to stand behind a cause that rang true across the rank-and-file: doing what's right for the game they've spent their lives loving and living.

ON DAY 89 of the lockout, with MLB willing to immolate the game to achieve its goals, it's important to understand how far apart the sides are - and why the narrative that the players aren't giving up anything substantive in negotiations is false.

The players walked into bargaining asking for the moon but possessing a weak hand, not exactly the sort of combination that affects change. They outlined four key areas they wanted the new agreement to address -- getting players paid more earlier in their careers, fixing service-time manipulation, preventing teams from tanking and removing restraints on free agency -- and attacked them with an extensive set of proposals. Some, like reducing the six-year reserve period for some players to reach free agency, were dead on arrival. Others, such as offering arbitration to all players after their second full season instead of the standard third, were unlikely to gain traction. More still: an anti-tanking plan that would institute a draft lottery to penalize teams for habitual losing and a pre-arbitration bonus pool to enrich the best young players made too much sense for the league to ignore.

What players had to give in exchange for their asks was simple, and the sort of thing that tends to carry the day in labor negotiations: money.