Baseball will return in July, and as has been the case in every work stoppage in the game's history, many fans promise to remain angry that the owners and players didn't settle their negotiations earlier.
In any dispute, casting equal blame benefits the party that is more in the wrong.
The owners are counting on this.
To apportion equal blame for this mess is to ignore facts.
In March, the players agreed to play and be paid on a prorated, per-game basis.
For the next three months, the owners made a series of offers that would have paid the players less than what the owners originally agreed to.
The owners repackaged their offers to fool the public into thinking they were negotiating in good faith, but each offer was a version of this proposal:
"We know we agreed to give you a whole pie. Instead, we're going to give you half a pie, but we'll cut it into as many slices as you would like. How about we cut the half a pie into eight pieces? Eight pieces! How greedy do you have to be to turn down eight pieces of pie?''