Baseball’s slow crawl toward a delayed Opening Day has seemed inevitable. But whom should we blame?

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That was a dress rehearsal for what we have now.

Once the collective bargaining agreement expired in December, there was little chance the league and union would come together and put aside the differences that have been festering for years.

Now spring training remains on hold and Opening Day is on the verge of being pushed back unless an agreement can be reached on Monday when the parties meet again across the state in Jupiter.

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Fight the temptation to blame both sides. This is almost entirely on the owners.

The lockout was imposed by the league on Dec. 2. Then their negotiating team waited six weeks to make a proposal. The league also selected Monday as the deadline to make a deal in time to save Opening Day.

If not, they say, games will be canceled. Throughout the process, the owners have ducked behind Rob Manfred, who as commissioner is less a steward of the game and more a staunch defender of the financial status quo.

The union is asking for a necessary balancing of the books. The average salary has dropped by nearly five percent in the last three years and free agency has become less profitable because of the guardrails installed to keep even the most competitive teams from spending.

Players once accepted the idea that they would earn less the first few seasons of their careers, then make it back at the end.

Teams routinely awarded long-term contracts to their core players knowing that while the final few years of the deal might not be particularly cost effective, it was the fair thing to do given how they were underpaid earlier.

Now a new generation of data-crunching, bloodless general managers have abandoned that blueprint and either trade their second-tier stars before they become expensive or let them walk.

Once they become free agents, the market is awash in similar players. There are also fewer options because there are always at least two or three teams intent on losing for a few years so they can stockpile high draft picks.

Technically, baseball has no salary cap. But even large-market owners treat the competitive balance tax threshold like one, spending up to the first limit but not exceeding it as the Red Sox did last season.

The penalties, both financial and in restricting access to amateur talent, are such that getting under the limit at least once every three years seasons is essentially necessary.

The union wants better compensation for younger players, measures put in place to discourage tanking and more payroll space under the luxury tax.

The owners appear determined to grind the players down and the players are unified in their dislike of Manfred. It’s a bad mix.

The players have prepared for this, the union withholding their annual licensing checks to build a robust war chest. It doesn’t replace their salaries, but there’s likely enough to keep the players from breaking ranks any time soon.

Max Scherzer (left, back to camera), former player Kevin Slowey, and former player Andrew Miller gathered for negotiations last week. The MLBPA has created a war chest that will help players avoid breaking ranks. Greg Lovett/Associated Press

As the sides bicker, baseball slides a little further out of the national consciousness. Once an agreement is reached, there will be a hurried spring training and likely the second shortened season in three years.

The infighting will continue once Manfred seeks to impose rule changes to improve the pace of the game and correct the damage done by executives who have taken the analytics and turned the sport into an endless spin cycle of strikeouts, walks, and groundouts into a shift interrupted by occasional home runs.

Baseball is a business, not a public trust. But the owners should care about the aesthetics of the game and work with the players on making it better. The people in uniform know better than anybody that the game is getting harder to watch.

Yet many of us still love it because you never know what will happen when you go to a ballpark or turn on a game. We overlook all the nonsense because the good parts are worth it.

But if they fail again on Monday and the season is delayed, it’ll become a little harder to remember the good parts and some people won’t bother to try.

At this point, who could blame them?

Peter Abraham can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @PeteAbe.

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