MLB’s owners and athletes just aren’t playing ball. Two series for each team will be canceled, after the Major League Baseball Players Association rejected the league’s “best and final” offer. The impasse came on the tail end of nine straight days of negotiations over a range of financial issues, including minimum salary levels and the sums teams can spend on their rosters before the luxury tax kicks in. MLB owners locked out the players in early December, and the work stoppage is now the second-longest in major league history. Will laments the loss of field time, as well as the fact that game-related reforms are taking a backseat to monetary concerns. As for LZ, his grievance is that MLB is losing sight of its true adversary — it’s not the players, it’s Netflix, the NFL, television shows and every other content generator that continues to compete with it in the attention economy.
