Agree with everything in these two posts. I think the MLB owners are acting much like the ill-fated Champions League owners, except they don't have prior written agreements to consider.
To be more specific, they definitely want a system that has more cost certainty like the other professional sports league. I'm sure there are hawkish owners who are willing to give up the entire season to "break the union."
BTW, I ran across this NYT article -
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/sports/baseball/mlb-lockout-manfred.html - that contains an interview with Fay Vincent. Here's a story that Vincent told that I think is germane to the present situation (the bold is added):
Consider Fay Vincent, the last commissioner to preside over a March lockout, which came in 1990. Vincent understood that the union did not trust his office, with good reason — the owners had illegally colluded against the players to suppress free agency in the 1980s. Vincent needed a deputy who could effectively engage with the union’s executive director, Donald Fehr, and he hired Steve Greenberg, whom Fehr deeply respected.
“The only person on the owners’ side, and this includes me, who had credibility with Don Fehr was Steve Greenberg,” Vincent, 83, recalled by phone on Tuesday from his home in Vero Beach, Fla. “So they went into a little room on the side of my office on Park Avenue. They were gone for about an hour and they came back and said, ‘We have made a handshake on these issues. Let’s explain what they are and we hope the two sides will agree.’
“Some of the owners didn’t agree; they wanted to stay and fight, but calmer heads prevailed. And my lesson from that is eventually, these negotiations come down to one or two people on each side deciding to bury the morality issue — who’s right, who’s wrong — and look at it, just ruthlessly, financially, and say, ‘We can’t go on anymore, because if we do, we’re hurting ourselves. We’re destroying our own lunch and our own dinner, and that never makes sense.’”