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If the owners want even a beginning to a permanent fix, they will have at least two things that they will have to do at long, long last:

One: They will have to cut the crap and accept more equitable box office splits between home and visiting teams. This is one area in which baseball can draw upon the NFL, if nowhere much else. But to my knowledge the NFL's box office split is 60-40, with the home team getting the 60. A reasonable split, that. Again to my knowledge - I could be very wrong about the actual percentages - the American League uses something like a 75-25 (or worse) box office split between home and visitor, and the National League uses 80-20 or thereabout. Among other "revenue sharings," the box office gate splits are among the most ridiculously lopsided or blindsided across professional sports, period, never mind baseball. And since Bug Selig's clever enough idea of dissolving the separate administrations of the National and American Leagues, there seems to me to be no damned excuse to perpetuate the overly inequitable box office splits that have too long existed.

Two: They will have to agree to a requirement - not a "faith understanding," a requirement - that any revenue shares distributed must be reinvested into the team. The revenue sharing implemented in the second half of the 1990s made no such requirements, and it is probably better than an educated guess that most owners whose teams did qualify to receive revenue shares put the money right into their own pockets. Essentially, this is the crux of why George Steinbrenner explodes like Mt. St. Helens whenever revenue sharing comes up in the discussion: he demands to know, and he is not unreasonable about it, why the hell he should be penalised for his having rebuilt and reconstituted a very successful franchise - with brains (or, at least, with his having learned at last it isn't too bright to keep meddling with the good brains he brings in to run the Yankees) more than money - by having monies siphoned from his organisation, monies his organisation in a nutshell earned the old fashioned way, and redistributed to franchises whose managements have neither the foresight, the insight, or the basic brains to put into their teams and reconstitute them?

In other words: Think of the Yankees as a wealth-generating, wealth-producing taxpayer. Now, if taxpayers (like us rightward folk on the FREEP for example) qua taxpayers think it criminal that the government (well, really, the State, since a properly construed government would not even think of such a thing) should take from them what they have earned and give it arbitrarily to those who have not and have no inclination to earn their keep and development, where is it a crime for the New York Yankees to think likewise?

Granted: Baseball is, essentially, a franchise business. It has its distinctions, like any franchise business. (One such distinction, which the "traditionalists" who lament the "good old days" of the reserve system and player indenture seem to forget, if ever they realised: Baseball the franchise business is selling its work force as the attraction to the public. You don't go to McDonald's because you think someone behind the counter is going to whomp up record french fries, but you do go to baseball games to see baseball players.) And, like any franchise business, there should be a particular minimum of revenues distributed for the basic sustenance and upkeep of each franchisee. Now: How far do you think a McDonald's franchise would be allowed to go by the parent corporation if said franchisee just pocketed those corporation revenue shares rather than putting a reasonable enough percentage of them into his franchise? I don't think this one would go very far, either.

Which brings me to a third thing baseball the parent corporation must repair: its insane promotion. Do you really think that even the longest-serving baseball fans will continue patronising a game whose management is a bunch of franchisees who haven't got clues about promoting their franchises (and who would rather get their hands in the back pockets of those who do - instead of banging on the Yankees, for example, for coming up with new promotion and thus new revenue streams, what the hell is keeping them from thinking likewise within the parameters of their regional markets real and prospective?) or whose idea of promoting the game is to denigrate its condition (albeit a condition they themselves have instigated) and its major product (the players)? Players in the NBA aren't any less "greedy" than major league baseball players. Michael Jordan actually earned better than the major leagues' highest average salary in his prime, and he was also not exactly a consistently sterling citizen...yet the NBA promoted the living daylights out of him and various other players and even went so far as to say how wonderful it was that these players could make so much money because the league was doing so wonderfully! MLB bitches about who's making how much money within seconds after they variously insist upon this or that player taking the money.

And between that and their gimmick-mentality "changes" in the game (the three-division alignment, the wild-card, interleague play, et. al.) which are aimed more at turning baseball into spectacle of a sort rather than enhancing the singularity of baseball as a pastime (a pastime, you don't give a damn how long the game lasts, and anyway, have we forgotten how long football and basketball games last when you factor in not just the TV commercial requirements but all the damn timeouts, fouls, penalties, and the like? You think an average baseball game lasts two hours and change? You sure haven't spent a Sunday afternoon with an NFL team where a game which in theory takes a minimum of an hour to play can take as long as three hours to finish, and football isn't even a game that you could call a pastime...), you could almost make the case that baseball - if you consider the game in no terms beyond its mandarins and their trained media parrots - was overtaken by a suicide wish.

Baseball the game wasn't broken until the owners decided to (quick) fix it. Baseball the business, of course, is a mess. And I can guarantee that businessmen in other lines of work who had handled their businesses the way baseball owners handle baseball the business would have some of the shortest executive careers in history...