NEW YORK (CNN) - I like baseball... I pull for the Yankees, the Diamondbacks and the Braves... but a bigger game is underway now. A players' strike looms against the owners of major league baseball after tonight's games. Now, this isn't your normal collective bargaining situation... it's not about pay, because the average player in the big leagues makes almost 2 and a half million dollars a year. It's not about benefits, or working conditions. It's about something called a luxury tax, which is appropriately named... as far as I can tell, that's a device the owners want to put in to place to protect the owners from the owners. Some of those owners like to spend a lot of money on players, whether they can perform or not... the luxury tax would also have the benefit of permitting relatively frugal owners to act more like their free-spending counterparts. That's the baseball owners idea of parity.

Also there's the issue of drug testing... well, not really drug testing per se. It's more like steroid surveying. As I understand it, if more than five per cent of the ballplayers next spring tested positive for steroids, there'll be more testing at random... and at some distant point, the owners will do something about it. That's real unclear. But it certainly looks as though professional ballplayers will continue to act as if they're exempt from the drug laws of this country. That's probably a bad thing for the players, the owners the sport and the country.

And the owners continue to complain about the economics of their business...or sport, if you want to stretch the definition of the term. There are little owners, and big ones... individuals and corporations... and they all operate under an exemption from the anti-trust laws of this country. That's probably a bad thing for the country, too... and I'd sure like to know why that exemption hasn't been revoked. And many of those owners also run their businesses, that is teams, in stadiums paid for by local taxpayers in cities all around the country. With all of those exemptions and subsidies, the owners say they still can't succeed in the business of baseball without some big changes.

Now, I don't know whether there'll be a strike or not... but if there is, I'll bet you the players will rout the owners... because the players are smarter. And I'll bet the only losers will be us fans, cause we're still dumb enough to care.