Well, this is some Armageddon baseball's giving us, isn't it? I mean, insurance adjusters move faster with a legitimate claim than this.

Donald Fehr rose from what is apparently the worst tanning booth on the planet to explain to us that the players have decided to put off setting a strike date for another four days.

	Hey Mr. Glavine! You've got it all wrong. We want a strike date!

Evident reason: Some progress is being made in the negotiations, at least enough to convince the players to put off a procedural vote until Friday.

Presumably at that time, they'll put it off again, and again after that. After all, a strike date is mostly a matter of convenience for the dues-paying unioneers, and a slap upside the ear to the owners, who were the ones setting all the deadlines back in 1994.

Too bad, too. A strike date is probably the only real prod left to encourage both sides to find the unhappy medium that will serve as the spur for the next threatened lockout/strike/work stoppage/skin rash in 2007. And that is, after all, what we're all after, anyway.

Besides, we're all geared up for the spitting contest that we knew is out there, and all we need to give us a sense of the horror ahead is a date on the calendar.

So far, we are saddened to report, the biggest attacks on the owners' position have come from owners. Most recently, George Steinbrenner, who for all his well-wishers on the management side may as well go work for Fehr. He all but defected in Sunday's editions of The New York Times, saying among other things that commissioner Bud Selig had virtually abandoned the big-money teams in search of his legacy.

Before that, Nelson Doubleday accused Selig and his little wizards of trying to manipulate franchise values to screw him out of a larger check for selling his share of the Mets.

And before that, Canada declared war on Jeff Loria and Selig for trying to blow the Montreal Expos to smithereens ... according to court documents, just to tell their friends at the Elks Club that they did.

With all the hilarity that comes with such institutional cannibalism, there seemed to be no place at all for the players in this little spit-fest. That's why we've all been waiting for a strike date to see just how hard the players want to get involved in this fray.

So we waited for the players to rise as one ... well, as 750, anyway ... and say they would be walking out on Date X, because they've had all they can stands, and they can't stands no more, to quote a seafaring philosopher of the early 20th century.

Instead, we got another round of, "Well, we're thinking about it." Second graders are more decisive about whether they need to go to the bathroom.

What we want here ... what all of America wants here ... is whatever the opposite of closure is. We want a strike date. We deserve a strike date. We DEMAND a strike date.

What is more, we want it adhered to. We want the players and owners to know that we have a deadline, too. We have empty threats to make about never following the game again. We have tear-filled messages to deliver to the participants about how this is destroying our children's long-term health and happiness. We have angry gestures to make toward all those empty stadiums, and impassioned interviews to absorb about the ticket takers and peanut vendors to schedule.

We have lives here, fellas. We need to make plans. We've got people to hate and issues to misunderstand. And we can't just stand here with our thumbs in our ears wading through vague hints about possible progress that they can't tell us about because the negotiations are at such a sensitive stage and because we're too stupid to understand the explanations they're not giving us.

I for one am sympathetic to most of the players' explanations and arguments, and even I wanted to grab a bag of chisels and take a few swings at Fehr's pink, bulbous mug as he droned on and on and on Monday. I even scared the neighbors by yelling at the screen, "Say SOMETHING, you ferret-faced gasbag!"

And strangely enough, the neighbors know exactly what ferret-faced gasbag to whom I was referring this time. Usually, they think the ferret-faced gasbag in question is an owner. And just as usually, they're right.

But he's got enough trouble without my neighbors complaining. Some of them are lawyers, after all, and he's got plenty of those clawing at his intestines as it is.

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com