Here are some truths about Major League Baseball right now.
The league and players have spent the past two months bickering, not listening to one another and prioritizing self over sport. Their only job was to figure out how to get the game back on the field as soon as possible. They failed.
The public faith in baseball is at its lowest point in a quarter century, and every last bit of damage done is self-inflicted. It did not need to be this way.
Unless there is a drastic change in the relationship between league and union leaders, baseball will spend at least the next two years stuck in an endless pattern of fighting, ugliness, pettiness and counterproductivity.