The Braves are the only team owned by a publicly traded company and thus the only one for which there is that kind of transparency available. Passan didn't "pick" anything.
The very simple reality is that of the overall pie of baseball revenue, the owners share is growing and the player's share is shrinking. And that point of slicing the pie has gone from the MLB players making a higher percentage of the revenue than NFL/NBA players to a lower percentage. That's why this dispute exists.
And what is being demanded by the owners would rapidly accelerate their growing share of the pie under any possible set of circumstances, beyond any reasonable doubt. The press has been reluctant to use these words, but the CBT is already essentially a salary cap and with what the owners are demanding would be at least as much restriction on team spending as the NBA salary cap.
Since at least the 2020 Covid dispute and likely much further back than that, the owners have been gearing up for an apocalyptic confrontation with the union. They have not and will not bargain in good faith, large amounts of games being missed was always part of the plan, and they believe that withholding game checks from the players who have less financial security and short careers to exploit will break them. That has been a very successful strategy for the NBA and NFL in recent times, we'll see. But my bet is that the 60 game 2020 quasi season is the absolute maximum amount of baseball we'll see this year, and we'll only see that if the players do in fact cave to ownership demands. I hope I'm wrong on both counts, but that's my read of it.
Baseball labor relations has been a very fragile ecosystem since forever, and ultimately what's happening is the invasive species of sabermetrics and the new universal understanding of how to value players has disturbed that ecosystem and this is the conflict where those contradictions will need to be resolved.
