There will be major league baseball this year. How much, I am not sure. It is great that the sides were negotiating more often and for longer periods this week, but they were doing so with less action than a race between a tortoise and a snail.

I am caught between optimism that these sides understand the urgency to get a deal done in the very short term and pessimism that these two sides are now fighting to see whether they are the tortoise or the snail. So how about we play that pessimist-optimist game?

If I were a pessimist I would note that the sides have left themselves little margin for error. MLB insists that if a deal is not completed by Monday, regular-season games — and pay from those games for players — will be lost. Even if that’s rhetoric, the 162-game season won’t be preserved if talks go too many days into March.

As of midweek, there was a pretty good chasm on just about every major issue and no movement in months on perhaps the linchpin: the competitive balance (luxury) tax. There are hawks on both sides who don’t want to relent much more and, until proven wrong, I will wonder whether there are owners who are fine with sacrificing more sparsely attended April games and, thus, paying players a prorated amount for 154 or 145 or 130 games, rather than the full 162.

The sides plan to negotiate at least until Monday, but the animosity is such that one incendiary comment between the wrong two participants (you said Rockies owner Dick Monfort and Mets pitcher Max Scherzer, not me) could send both sides racing toward the exit, eliciting yet another round of blame-the-other spin, harder feelings and a freeze in talks.

If that happens, then a whole new layer of problems will be heaped upon the current ones. It is not just games and pay that MLB can threaten. What about service time? A player must accrue 172 days of service in the 186-day season to be credited with a full year of service. Thus, every day lost is potentially another day toward arbitration and free agency.

Remember when the Mets and Brodie Van Wagenen were praised for putting Pete Alonso on the roster to begin the 2019 season and not artificially holding him down the requisite number of days to delay his free agency by a year? Well, if 15 days of that season had been lost and players had not been credited for them, then Alonso would have gone from being a free agent after 2024 to after 2025.

That is just one story. Service time is the lifeblood of every player toward arbitration, free agency and their pension.

In the last work stoppage, in 1994-95, players were credited with service time, so that could be negotiated as part of a back-to-work package. But do these sides really need more issues to get through, especially since you can count on the players’ association pulling its concessions for expanded playoffs and patches on uniforms (money-makers for the owners) if pay and service time are imperiled?

So how about optimism? This week is potentially a lot of “Negotiating for Dummies.” Each side whines about how disappointed it is in every proposal and counterproposal up to the moment it says “yes” to a deal. This is merely a continued stare-down to see if the other side cracks and no true movement comes until the heat of a deadline, which is this weekend, is felt. None of the issues are truly intractable and a tactical, symbolic big move of one toward the other is likely to trigger goodwill in the opposite direction and pretty soon, it would be, “Play Ball!”

It feels like the owners are going to have to make that move, because: 1) They have won the last few collective-bargaining negotiations to distort this financial relationship and 2) without a salary cap (which the players don’t want) which would compel the spending of a certain level of revenue, what is most likely to occur here is a redistribution of revenue — likely younger players getting more dollars early — rather than much of an overall change in spending. Most teams will absorb the new rules and build a roster without changing their payroll budgets.

If, for example, the Rays or Pirates have to add $3 million to $4 million at the bottom of the payroll because the minimum wage went, they will just live without someone like the $3 million to $4 million reliever who would have filled out the roster.

The optimist believes the owners are smart enough to have seen the players’ resolve, especially the way they rally around their distaste for commissioner Rob Manfred, and realize they might not win this negotiation. But they also know they can only truly lose if games are lost, layering more irreparable damage to an industry already struggling with an image problem. They are smart enough to see that, right?

In fact, ownership already has a money-saving mechanism it is about to deploy to deflect some losses in these negotiations. The combination of the pandemic, a labor shutdown that has curtailed the selling of season tickets, sponsorships, etcetera, and the shorter window until the season begins likely will have many owners waving a tin cup about available dollars. Thus, only the top free agents among the hundreds remaining will probably thrive.

So Freddie Freeman and Carlos Correa will get their money, and so will a second tier that includes Nick Castellanos, Kyle Schwarber and Seiya Suzuki. But the owners are going to save a boatload on desperate veterans scrambling for a lifeboat. That, plus expanded playoffs, uniform patches and what still will be large-scale control of players through their minor league phase and first six years in the majors, will give management a victory almost regardless of its concessions.

So as the clock ticks toward midnight, are you a pessimist or an optimist?