Again, 20 years ago, players held about 63% of baseball's revenue pie. Today it is a touch over 47%. They have lost 16 percentage points or about 25% of the share they once had. In order to start to make some of that back up to get back to even where they were, it is going to take some revenues flowing their way. For some perspective, the most recent baseball revenue numbers I saw were $10.7 billion. So when the players were asking for a $110 million piece for a specific group of underpaid arb qualifiers, you are talking about just a shade over 1% of the pool. When the dropped their ask to $100 million, it became less than 1%. The generous owners who proposed this idea and were willing to put $5 million into it are offering players 0.04% of revenues back.
To simply get back to the 52% share the players had a few years back, the ownership would have to move almost $500 million in revenue over to players. To get back to 63%, it would take about $1.6 billion.
So while the owners and their mouthpieces will try to blow people away with headlines about the players asking for 100 MILLION DOLLARS!, they leave out all perspective of the missing $1.6 BILLION that players would have had if things had remained simply the same for the last 20 years.