Major League Baseball’s labor negotiations involve two paradoxes. The players’ union’s primary objective is to protect the revenues of a very few very rich owners – principally, the Yankees’. The owners’ primary objective is a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. The union believes that unconstrained spending by the richest three teams pulls up all payrolls. Most owners believe that baseball’s problems–competitive imbalance, the parlous financial conditions of many clubs–result from large and growing disparities of what are mistakenly treated as ‘local’ revenues.