The owners barely even tried to save opening day.

Maybe you already think that because Major League Baseball implemented a discretionary lockout mere minutes after the last collective bargaining agreement expired. Or because it infamously slow-played negotiations for months despite knowing years in advance that these talks would be particularly contentious. Or just because the naïveté sometimes necessary to be a sports fan has been strained beyond credulity by the constant reminders that baseball is a business run by billionaires who consider winning simply a secondary perk.

Some of that is reasonable enough as a strategy. Commissioner Rob Manfred wasn’t entirely wrong when he labeled the lockout as “defensive” — even if the comment read as laughable. Leaving themselves open to a player strike would have weakened the owners’ position unnecessarily. Forty-three days without making a proposal is inexcusable, but the best bargaining is always done under the gun.

And so let’s consider the league’s actions in the final 36 hours before Manfred announced the cancellation of the first two series of the 2022 season. It’s there that the franchise owners’ apathy toward opening day became evident.

The players will say that the deadlines set by MLB are strategic and arbitrary, meant more as a threat than an actual accommodation. They’re absolutely right, but the calendar can’t be completely ignored. The regular season was scheduled to start March 31, guys need multiple weeks before that to ramp up. The union, then, had to navigate nine days of consistent negotiations in Jupiter, Florida, maintaining the logistical possibility of beginning the regular season by the end of March without capitulating to the league’s pressure to take an unfair deal.

Perhaps the best reason for hope that the club owners were serious about meeting their own deadline — and not just in the event that the players panicked and signed a CBA that didn’t include the significant gains they’re rightfully seeking — was that no specific time was given as the drop-dead point Monday. The last leg of bargaining is often long and harried, and requires a good-faith willingness from both sides to ride the momentum to something mutually agreeable.

And Monday did prove to be productive. MLB dropped the penalty rates on the luxury tax from essentially prohibitive back to the previous rates and accepted the players’ preferred 12-team postseason field. The union withdrew its request to expand arbitration eligibility and reduce the net revenue shared — issues MLB had long labeled non-starters. With earlier free agency already off the table, the union was effectively giving up on the more radical re-envisioning of the economic structure that the league had balked at in favor of meaningful raises in multiple areas.

Even though the union cautioned that the two sides were still far apart on numbers, the deadline was postponed. MLB expressed optimism — another strategic decision to drum up expectations to either pressure players into accepting something subpar or turn public opinion against them if they didn’t — and a commitment to “exhaust every possibility to get a deal done,” as a league spokesperson said.