There may be more to Major League Baseball’s bombastic rhetoric than just stalling or flat-out hubris, though both still factor heavily. By constantly repeating publicly the claims that the league has made multiple entreaties to players to restart the season, despite all of them being essentially the same offer, they create an illusion of good faith. To paraphrase George Costanza, it’s not a lie if you can get an independent arbitrator to believe it.
That would come in handy in the case of a nuclear option in which the players file a grievance following the league’s implementation of a severely truncated season.