The basic and fundamental problem is shown on this page in the tweet SSHM shared. Over the past 20 years, baseball’s revenue has tripled. However, the earnings of the players have not tripled (Mike Trout’s deal compared to ARod - would have been $750 million, for an easy example). The owners, through a variety of means, have limited salary growth - the luxury tax limits high spending teams, revenue sharing means the Pirates and Marlins make a hefty profit if they spend nothing, and teams like the Astros and White Sox clear a fortune while they are rebuilding.
The end result is a broken free agent market. When only 1 or 2 teams are trying to get better, Machado and Harper don’t get contract offers in December at all, and we wind up with these 3 month free agent sagas that are bad for fans but which push costs down. That is a symptom of the problem.
Ownership will change a lot of things, but this is a HUGE win for them, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of extra dollars among the 30 owners per year. Under no circumstance will they give this up and allow things to rebalance without a fight. That is the fundamental issue and it’s why I mostly come down on the side of the players. It also negatively impacts the game, because it’s no fun watching a team win 55 games with a payroll lower than what Max Scherzer is making and it’s no fun watching a 3 month free agent sagas compared to the big signing surges we see in the NBA and NFL.
However, the NBA and NFL run differently, and that shows why some blame goes to the players too. They have a defined share of the money going to the players, with a salary cap and floor set by the revenue coming in, and with an independent audit to verify it. The MLB players have specifically rejected this format, in part because it does limit the upper salaries, in part because 2 decades ago their share of revenue was growing and they didn’t want to shut down that gold mine, and in part because these 2 sides trust each other so little that they don’t believe the owners wouldn’t find a way to “Joel Osteen” some of their money into the wall of a bathroom to avoid an audit, which frankly some of them might. Had the players agreed to a true revenue split, the game would look very different, some of these problems wouldn’t exist, and this lockout might never have happened, so there is blame for the players as well.