Please, let's never do this again.
By "this," I mean, let's never pretend that a baseball labor negotiation is the end of the world or even the end of a season.
The popular stance regarding baseball's collective bargaining agreements and the owners' lockout of the players has been to scream and kvetch over the greed on display, and to vow that we'll never go to another ballgame.
But after all of the owners' threats and all the worry, what happened?
Baseball will for the 27th consecutive season not miss any games over a labor dispute.
Every five years or so, the players and owners threaten and pose and posture during negotiations and baseball fans react like children who have had their binkies taken away … and then baseball plays a full season.
If you want to blame someone for the belated start to spring training this year, blame the owners. They imposed the lockout, posted false deadlines and made bogus threats.
They also got a deal done in time to play a complete regular season, and they gave the players valuable concessions — including increasing minimum pay, perhaps the best concession the players as a whole could have received.