With players agreeing Sunday to reduce the time to implement rules changes, which means baseball will look differently next season, a path opened for commissioner Rob Manfred to get a deal that ends the baseball lockout: trade economics for quality of play.
His win can come from honestly telling fans that baseball at last is moving forward with a faster game with a bigger, more exciting postseason—the stuff baseball fans, not accountants, actually care about and, oh, by the way, means growing revenues long term. And he can do it with the players as a partner, not an adversary.
The beginning of such a win is to convince his hawkish owners that nudging the Competitive Balance Tax at the cost of about one Andrew Heaney per team ($8.5 million from the Dodgers after a 5.21 ERA over the past three years) is more than worth the cost of a better game.
