It's Looking Far Less Likely The MLB Season Starts On Time After Today's 15-Minute Meeting

Today's meeting between MLB owners and the MLBPA lasted "just 15 minutes," USA Today's Bob Nightengale reports. Really sad since we're now just 11 days away from the deadline that MLB stated a few weeks back would avoid a delayed season.

So far, there's no reason to believe baseball gets started on time. Baseball is so shooting itself in the foot.

ESPN's Jeff Passan offered a few tweets that help explain what went down this afternoon:

Let's break down what Passan said: the players want to shorten the service time it takes to reach arbitration so players can get paid sooner. This makes sense from a player's perspective because no one wants to play for any longer than they have to at below-market value.

Free agency is where players reach their true "market value" -- and players and owners know it. It's just a question of how soon the owners will be willing to allow the talent to get there. No one wants to pay more money to their employees than they have to.

So we have a standoff, but we'll have a better sense of who'll fold first when deadlines begin to pass. There's a sad feeling amongst the writers that the players will fold due to a lack of leverage. Updates can be expected to be released over the next couple weeks.