With players agreeing Sunday to reduce the time to implement rules changes, which means baseball will look differently next season, a path opened for commissioner Rob Manfred to get a deal that ends the baseball lockout: trade economics for quality of play.
His win can come from honestly telling fans that baseball at last is moving forward with a faster game with a bigger, more exciting postseason—the stuff baseball fans, not accountants, actually care about and, oh, by the way, means growing revenues long term. And he can do it with the players as a partner, not an adversary.