Both sides -- Major League Baseball management and the Players Association -- have their talking points, their partisan perspective, as with every negotiation.

What distinguishes these labor talks from any others in recent memory is that if you go underneath the rhetoric and delve more than one layer deep with players, agents, and team and MLB officials, there is general agreement that the game is doing well. Nobody advocates that a particular issue would justify a complete shutdown of a $10 billion industry and absorbing the lasting damage that a work stoppage would cause.

And yet we are now, about 36 hours from the expiration of the current labor agreement. If the two sides reach 12:01 a.m. ET on Thursday morning without a deal, it's possible that, as a matter of process, management will take the step of formally locking out the players. The two sides met late into Monday night.

Some team officials understand that if sufficient progress is not made in the coming hours, clubs could be instructed to not participate in the sport's signature offseason event, the winter meetings. Labor negotiation dominoes might start to tumble at a time when few people, if anybody, see a significant problem worth fighting over.