It’s fair to say that you saw this coming. Maybe you saw it when negotiations between players and owners flared and sputtered over the last week. Maybe you saw it earlier in the lockout: days, then a month, then more spent waiting for the league to make a proposal on core economics. Maybe you saw it before any of this officially started, in the years since the last collective bargaining agreement, as players shared their frustrations with the system. It’s fair to say that you knew this would not play out easily—that it was all but guaranteed that MLB’s outlook for a new CBA, and for its season as a whole, would still be up in the air when the calendar hit March.
But it’s not fair to say this was inevitable. Because it wasn’t.
Wilfredo Lee/AP Photo
