(FORTUNE Magazine) – What we've got here, to quote the noted labor economist Yogi Berra, is deja vu all over again. Major League Baseball is on the brink of its ninth labor war since 1972, with owners and players singing the same old tune. The owners' lament: Stop us from spending too much, or we'll go broke. They want to impose a luxury tax on team payrolls that exceed $98 million. The players' reply: fat chance. At press time, union chief Don Fehr was mulling a strike date, possibly beginning a replay of events that ended the 1994 season in August.

Both sides should cock an ear toward a third chorus coming from half-empty stadiums; it sounds a lot like Bronx cheers. Fans are fed up with the brinkmanship of wealthy owners and $2 million utility infielders. This is precisely the wrong note to sound when people are worried about losing their 401(k) nest eggs, not to mention their taste for $145 afternoons at the ballpark (the average cost for a family of four to attend a game, according to Team Marketing Report). Major League Baseball's attendance is down 5% this year; its All-Star TV ratings declined 14%. The usual confidence that fans will forgive and forget is misplaced. Average attendance per game has never matched records set before the 1994 strike.

The sport is in desperate need of a change. Instead of fighting over how to carve up $3.5 billion in annual revenue, the owners should figure out how to enlarge the pie. But baseball's big-market and small-market owners would rather snipe at each other than work together. Commissioner Bud Selig is ingenious at looking after the needs of his owners but inept at guiding them into a new sports-business age. Management negotiators and union leaders dwell on who did what to whom 25 years ago, which is precisely how long Fehr and Selig have been in opposing corners; Fehr became union general counsel in 1977, Selig the president of the Milwaukee Brewers in 1970. They are the Yasir Arafat and Ariel Sharon of baseball.

Bitter history and visceral distrust is what makes baseball's labor relations so much like Middle East diplomacy. But peace probably has a better chance of breaking out here than there. Selig needs Fehr to do what he cannot do on his own: make the haves of baseball share more of their revenue with the have-nots. The huge revenue gap between, say, the Yankees ($215 million) and the Montreal Expos ($63 million) is baseball's core economic problem. Selig proposes to close it by requiring teams to put 50% of their local revenues into a pot to be shared. The players want to contribute 22.5%. They love rich teams that pay high salaries and set the pay scale.

The outcome probably won't be determined until the last possible moment. A lot depends on what Selig wants as his legacy. He could either be the commissioner who canceled two World Series (and called this year's All-Star Game a tie) or be the first ever to reach a labor deal without a war. A lot depends, too, on the union's finally acknowledging the real economic problem and moderating its historical militance. It could happen. The two sides may be certifiably mad, but they should at least see that another war, to use the nuclear-war acronym, would be MAD.