Counter Intuitive

MLB Players make their first counter today and really negotiations will officially begin again, since the owners opening salvo was really just restating their stance when the lockout was put into place. It'll be interesting to see what the players ask for here, but what they really want is more money spent on players to get back to the usual split- which honestly was in place a couple years ago but has moved away in the past couple of years and it's fair for the players to be worried that it wouldn't shift back without negotiations. 

What would shift it back? And what do I think will happen?

• Raising the cap is an obvious ones. Expect that to be in there and some compromise to be reached.
  
• Shifting free agency earlier would help, since teams are purposely going younger. There are two ways to attack this: earlier FA in general and stopping the "guy called up in early May" service time manipulation. The first one is straightforward but is such a shift that it will be a huge fight to change that if the players really want to make a stand. The latter is more promising, especially if teams bother to look and see it's not sure to matter down the road. Plus the limit it crazy, its being active for 90%+ of the season.  I'd expect some tweak to it adjusting that percentage down to like 75%.  That won't stop service time manipulation. It won't even make a big dent in it, but it'll help a handful of players on contenders get called up.  I Not much but even if you got down to the logical number - 50% that still won't make a huge dent. This is more about fixing an specific obvious unfair situation that 
  
•  Getting more teams to want to compete is another goal but this is a vague goal. It mainly boils down to revenue sharing where the players want teams to spend money on players and a lot of cheap teams are pocketing that revenue sharing money. But REALLY the players want good teams to have money to spend on players so they want less revenue sharing in general rather than stricter guidelines to spend this money on players.  The owners as a group don't like that because there will always be a rogue owner or two when given free reign to spend will do so and drive up costs for everyone.  They could probably agree on some sort of forced spending (bc the very rich teams don't like the normal rich teams not spending either), but it'll take a perspective change on this by the players
• Another way to get teams to compete is to somehow make tanking less appealing but it's pretty much a very minor benefit now once you look at things and that hasn't stopped anyone. The public (media + fans) buy into rebuild narratives for at least a few cycles.
  

Ultimately I think the deal will raise the cap and will do SOMETHING else but not much.  If you think that is too little I agree, but anything that keeps the lights on.