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.

The disconnect seems to reflect the negotiations, in which there is an oil/water, Mars/Venus, tomato/toe-mah-toe dynamic at play, something very different in the talks from the last two decades. Former union chief Michael Weiner and then-lead negotiator Rob Manfred developed a strong working relationship, and agents and management describe how the two men would identify common ground -- a place acceptable for both sides -- and then methodically work through the details over months to reach the desired result.

But in the current negotiations, it's as if one side is speaking Greek and the other side is conversing in Latin. They have seemingly talked past each other. Management has been frustrated by the slow pace of the talks, which have been very different than in the Weiner years, and players say the union's proposals have been dismissed. Sources say the two sides haven't identified common ground in the same way they did in the past, nor have they worked through the particulars. Meanwhile the clock is ticking.

It seems like a difference in negotiating styles -- with Dan Halem leading management, backed by Manfred, and Tony Clark's team on the union side -- have made a big difference.

The agents feel the difference, too. Although there are player representatives who have been in the sport for many years, with years of practical experience in negotiating and identifying sticking points, some say they have felt shut out of the process. And they're not sure exactly why that is.

The strategy of both leaderships may well be revealed Tuesday or Wednesday. The owners signaled flexibility in the issue of the international draft before, and now they have reportedly backed off the request. But sources familiar with the negotiations say this shift didn't jump-start the talks in the way the management side had hoped, and as of Monday evening, there was still a lot of progress needed.

The two sides are still a long, long way from an actual work stoppage and the integrity of the season being affected. As many folks on both sides noted last week, Dec. 1 is really a soft deadline, for all practical purposes.

But this is a time when teams are trying to sell season tickets, and on the union side, it could be that one particular group of players might have more to lose than any other -- the enormous pool of free-agent sluggers, which includes Jose Bautista, Mark Trumbo and many others.

The Brewers' decision to not tender a contract to Chris Carter following a season in which Carter belted 41 homers is just the latest indication of how wholly saturated the market for sluggers is. Think about this for a moment: The Brewers are cutting Carter for nothing -- they're getting nothing in return -- after Carter bashed more homers than all but five players. The obvious preference would've been to trade him for something, and yet they are cutting him for nothing.

If the business of baseball is shut down in the days ahead and into the winter meetings and teams stop negotiating with free agents, this will cut into the amount of time that players and clubs will have in identifying deals for the many unsigned first base/DH/corner outfield types.

If there is no labor stoppage, then teams and agents can continue to their work unobstructed, and gradually, deals can be reached, with the market percolating and marinating properly. Edwin Encarnacion will probably get one of the biggest deals of the winter, and so will Yoenis Cespedes. As each name comes off the board, teams and agents will have time to reflect and evaluate and identify suitable contracts.

But if the timetable becomes accelerated -- if there is erosion in the earning potential for the sport -- the context will change. One hypothetical: If the winter free-agent market is shut down until just before spring training, the pool of sluggers would suddenly become like a NASCAR race decided with two laps. The decisions would change. The pool of dollars available for each team could be altered.

Some of the first work stoppages were about pension plans, and the reserve clause, which prevented players from choosing to leave an organization ever. The players went on strike in August 1994 as the owners tried to make the union pay for management's internal squabbles. In the summer of 2002, players pushed for an agreement in spite of problems because they understood how demonized they would be if they went on strike less than a year after 9/11.

But unless something changes, management officials will be left to explain to fans why the seemingly thriving business of baseball is being shut down, and players will have to describe to family and friends why their salary spigot might be shut off.

Good luck with that.

Here are some of the pending issues in the negotiations, courtesy of the Associated Press.