Just weeks away from Opening Day, the 2022 Major League Baseball (MLB) season is still in limbo. The players’ union and team owners continued talks this week, with both sides offering proposals and neither willing to budge. Tuesday’s meeting lasted a mere hour. MLB says a deal must be reached by February 28, or regular-season games will begin to be canceled. “The deadline is the deadline,” a league spokesman said. “Missed games are missed games, and salary will not be paid for those games.”

While the negotiations are complicated (involving everything from a “competitive balance tax” to a “pre-arbitration bonus pool”), the fundamental situation is not. As baseball writer Jay Jaffe recently summarized:

This is a lockout, not a strike. It is entirely of the owners’ doing — you could say they own it — and entirely unnecessary, because the 2022 season could be played under the terms of the previous [collective bargaining agreement] until a new one is in place.