As baseball players get set to walk out on the owners Friday, we’d like to take a step back from all of the pox-on-both-their-houses rhetoric. Sports fans might have a hard time rooting for either side in a conflict between millionaires and billionaires, we recognize, but both sides have legitimate interests and every right to defend them. After all, this is, despite the emotional attachments of the fans, a business. The owners, for all the scorn they endure, are the ones who have invested in the sport and ultimately sustain its existence. The players, though some bat in unfathomably large salaries, have bet their livelihoods on a risky career and deserve to earn for their skills whatever the market will bear. If a rough-and-tumble labor dispute is the only way for them to come to terms, then so be it. Our own analysis, however, inclines us to sympathy with the owners — or at least the owner of the Yankees.

More than a struggle between the players and the owners, this current conflict is a struggle between the owners of bigmarket clubs, who are relatively happy with the status quo, and the owners who are stuck with small-market clubs and want to tax high-flying payrolls and redistribute some cash their way. George Steinbrenner, from the biggest market around, put it best when he told the New York Times earlier this month — in a gag-order violation that earned him a fine from the so-called baseball commissioner, Allan Selig — “I see it hurting the union and the players, and I see it hurting us and other big-market clubs.” The commissioner may dress this up by claiming that a more level financial playing field is necessary to maintain the sport’s vitality, but we don’t buy it. The fact is that some teams are simply better run than others.

Mostly, we don’t buy the idea that money is the key to success for a baseball team. Several of the small-market teams have failed to invest the monies received from their wealthier counterparts back into the ball clubs. Some have even cut payroll. What’s more, small-market teams like the Oakland Athletics have thrived by employing “sabermetrics” (a kind of baseball calculus, used for determining a player’s past and future productivity) and otherwise utilizing their dollars. Conversely, if one wants proof that it’s not just location, look to Queens, where the Mets, with one of the league’s largest payrolls, are languishing in the cellar of the National League East. Sentimentalizing a business transaction helps no one, not even the fans. They can’t be expected to like strikes any more than customers in other industries, but strikes are part of the business of baseball. At the end of the day, the reason this is happening is that the other teams want to be like the Yankees but lack the stripes.