Welcome to leverage theater.
Soon, Major League Baseball and the players’ union will begin collective bargaining, an acrimonious but weighty undertaking that will shape the future of the sport — and, for a time, likely imperil it.
Baseball has a long history of labor wars, but this rendition could be the wildest yet. The owners, an extraordinarily wealthy group, are planning to push for a salary cap, which players, a number of them quite rich themselves, have long considered a non-starter.
What hangs in the balance? Merely the 2027 season, some billions of dollars and the overall structure of the national pastime.
In the next couple weeks, MLB and the Players Association are expected to formally start negotiations. The current agreement expires at 11:59 p.m. ET on Dec. 1, and if a new one isn’t reached by that time, the owners are likely to lock out the players, just as they did in December 2021.
But there’s little reason to believe a deal will be close by then, even at a time when the sport is generally riding high. Recent history shows an agreement is likely to wait until the spring of 2027 at the earliest.
First, the talks will open with a months-long prelude of proposal exchanges. The parties will, naturally, both start out asking for more than they expect to receive.
Last go-around, the sides made opening presentations on April 20, 2021. The players made their first economic proposals in May, and the owners their first in August. A deal wasn’t finalized until March 10, just in time to preserve a full 162-game schedule for 2022.
The in-between will be filled with tough talk and hand-wringing, bluster and rhetoric. Heck, there’s been plenty of all that already.
Retired pitcher Zack Britton, heavily involved in the last round of negotiations, wrote in his newsletter “The Save” that the present moment is for posturing.
“Both sides. That is normal,” Britton wrote Tuesday. “That is how every negotiation starts. The fall is when this gets real.”
But amidst the noise, it’ll be important to remember that both sides are incentivized to project strength. The parties’ leverage to affect change, or prevent it, is their willingness to forego pay. It’s much easier for owners and players to say they are willing to miss games than it will be to actually follow through on those threats.
“Until we get to that red line where we’re seeing, ‘OK, we could potentially be impacting next season’ — that’s when you’re going to start to see the ire of the fans,” said Daniel Kelly, an associate dean at the Tisch Institute for Global Sport, part of New York University.
Fans have never had a seat at the negotiating table except for their ability to vote with their wallets.
Although labor negotiations feature dueling sides and intense rivalry, the process is not sport. Gameday workers, league and team employees, broadcast crews and player agents are among those whose livelihoods rely on the sport’s operation.
Disclaimers aside, though, this production can be considered, well, a revival. A fight over a cap was central to a 232-day player strike from 1994-95 that led to the cancellation of the ’94 World Series.
“I am concerned that the lessons of the past have been lost to time,” player agent Seth Levinson of the firm ACES said.
Let what follows serve as a guide — a most-serious Playbill, if you will — to the process that’s about unfold. MLB and the union declined comment for this story.
Just tell me when this will be over.
March 2027 is the month to circle, because if a deal isn’t reached then, it’s impossible to hold even a truncated spring training ahead of a full 162-game schedule. Not without drastically altering the schedule, anyway.
Could the sides reach a deal a bit later, maybe in April 2027, and push back the regular season and the playoffs while still playing 162? Maybe, but it’d be a logistical nightmare. For example: Fox, a league broadcast partner, would have to be open to moving the World Series.
If the lockout ultimately extends beyond March, the end date becomes anyone’s guess.
Why can’t players and owners make a deal sooner?
Well, they could. But they probably won’t.
“Whatever form this collective bargaining takes, my encouragement to all sides is to start talking earlier,” Greg Johnson, chairman of the San Francisco Giants, told The Athletic’s Andrew Baggarly recently.
That hasn’t happened.
In many walks of life, negotiations often wait until they cannot any longer, including in other corners of the baseball business. On the day before Opening Day this year, the commissioner’s office was still finalizing TV carriage deals for at least some of the teams it’s handling broadcasts for, which caused some chaos.
Nonetheless, MLB and the union likely will wind up blaming each other for the pace of talks.
“This is a method of collective bargaining,” said Kelly of NYU. “I think it’s always going to come down to a potential work stoppage. … Whether it’s academia, whether it’s professional sports, whether it’s the Teamsters, like no matter what, it’s going to push it to the limit because both sides feel like they are correct, and both sides are going to push it to get the best deal possible.
“Getting a deal done prior to the deadline almost makes both sides feel like they could have pushed for something else.”
A look back at the calendar from five years ago suggests neither party was in a rush, although they would both disagree with that assessment.
When the last lockout started, in December 2021, the sides had exchanged only a handful economic proposals each. (Counting proposals can be tricky business: on the eve of the lockout, the parties were fighting over whether or not the league had actually made an updated offer.)
Once the lockout began, December was essentially a dead period. There was a bit of movement in January 2022, but February is really when the action began.
Take the owners’ proposals on the first luxury-tax threshold, a key financial issue.
The owners’ first proposal in the context of the current system was $214 million, in November 2021. That marked a $4 million raise from the status quo at the time. They upped it to $220 million in late February 2022, and then reached $230 million in March, which was what was ultimately agreed to.
In another example, the players didn’t drop a proposal to change free agency to an age-based system — a major change that owners were unlikely to ever accept — until late January 2022.
Not every bargaining session will center on core economics, with a gaggle of topics the sides need to work through. But the big-money pieces are typically the most important and contentious. Sometimes, one side will bring a proposal on just one piece of the economics.
Will MLB games be canceled in 2027?
No one knows yet, but there are many reasons to believe most or all of a season will be preserved. The easiest way for everyone to make money is to play.
It’s been three decades since baseball games were canceled as part of a labor dispute, a track record often touted by league commissioner Rob Manfred, who has the difficult task of corralling 30 owners. During the last lockout, players had been angry over various issues for a decade — and still, no games were canceled.
Owners and players alike all have great incentive to reach a deal: to preserve not only their revenue streams, but the national pastime’s foothold in a crowded entertainment landscape. So much money is at stake today, more than in 1994-95, and the industry has a sense of momentum.
“My worldview is, we love this game,” Athletics owner John Fisher said during spring training. “The players love it. The owners love it. There’s no separation between who you are in terms of the love for the game and the desire to have labor peace. And I’m confident that our group within Major League Baseball and the MLBPA will work well toward finding a constructive solution.”
MLB eclipsed $12 billion as an industry in 2024, and although the league hasn’t released a figure for 2025, the sport presumably will be approaching $13 billion by the end of this year, or will have passed that mark.
“The game has never been in a better place,” player agent Scott Boras said.
Now, just how well the game is doing is a point of contention. The owners of the San Diego Padres just agreed to sell a controlling percentage of the team in a deal that values the club overall at a league-record $3.9 billion. But some other owners have not been able to fetch their desired sale price amidst dwindling local television revenues.
Not to be overlooked: The league office also has to soon negotiate new national TV deals for 2029 and beyond, and missed games will not help the haul.
If regular-season games wind up canceled, the outcry would be immense. Pressure to end the lockout would fly in from all angles, including TV networks and cable companies and sponsors. Fans would vilify all involved, from the owners who bought teams with hope of being beloved public figures, to the superstar players who are otherwise adored.
Then there’s the potential for Capitol Hill to take notice. The president has been keen to involve himself in sports.
So why does the 2027 season hang in the balance?
Mostly because a salary cap is a major change that owners really want and players really don’t.
“This is an entertainment star-driven business,” said the agent Levinson, who counts Freddy Peralta and Logan Webb among his clients. “No one goes to the movies to see the co-stars. The top 10 percent of the players are immune to the cap, but it will have a profound negative impact on the remaining 90 percent.
“I am vehemently opposed to the cap, and it needs to be recognized that the irreparable damage it would cause players goes well beyond salaries.”
MLB has not confirmed it will make a cap proposal, but Manfred has made many overtures in that direction, and people briefed on ownership thinking who were not authorized to speak publicly say the owners have settled on that approach.
Much will depend, however, on whether owners actually stick by their opening salvo. It’s one thing for MLB to propose a cap at the outset and another to still be fighting for it next spring.
If owners are committed to landing a cap no matter what it takes, the lockout could well cost a season. In that scenario, both sides would try to outlast the other, and historically, little has galvanized players more than attempts to limit their pay.
If the owners eventually back off a cap proposal, preserving some form of the current market system, the 2027 season probably has a better chance to be played in full. The devil would then be in the details of the alternative proposals — and, as always, which side is motivated to outlast the other.
What is hard for anyone to predict is what the owners will believe to be the best course of action many months from now. There’s a lot of new faces in MLB’s ownership circle, and that makes for a lot of unknowns.
Owners are not a monolith. While billionaires, they have differing net worths, business interests and levels of tolerance for public scorn.
How many missed games would make sound business sense to them? That answer is complicated by the fact that their franchise values all grow if they succeed in bringing in a cap.
Is there a chance some games are canceled, but not many?
Anything is possible. The damage done to the sport would be to some extent proportional to the number of games missed. Fans would likely more easily forget a missed month than a missed season.
In recent years, some owners have been curious whether players might cave on a cap quickly, or at least, more quickly than expected. This is not a group of players that has been heavily battle-tested, in a labor sense.
Players, too, have differing interests. Some are close to free agency, some are far away, others might never get there. Maybe more of them find a cap appealing today than they did 30 years ago, although there’s no indication of that so far. Stars such as Bryce Harper, Manny Machado and Brent Rooker have spoken out against the change.
“It remains to be seen whether the union can do better by the rank-and-file players than they have in recent years,” Harry Marino, a former MLBPA lawyer who challenged union leadership during a 2024 mutiny, recently told The Athletic. “Do I think that that can be achieved without a salary cap? I do, but the priority of the union has to be the well-being of every single member.”
Once a stoppage begins, it’s a battle of wills: which side sticks together? The players’ union has held on to licensing-revenue checks to prepare for the possibility of a long work stoppage, amassing more than $500 million in total assets. The owners have put aside more than $2 billion.
What does a lockout mean again?
It means MLB is shut down. No trades, no signings. A freeze, essentially. A lockout operates similar to a strike: the key difference is that players initiate a strike and management starts a lockout.
If a lockout is still going when the regular season begins, games are canceled. The earliest a lockout can begin is December, when the current deal expires. Owners are not obligated to lock out the players at that point, but are expected to.
Who’s running this show?
Bruce Meyer is now interim executive director of the union, after leading the talks last round under Tony Clark. (AP Photo / Richard Drew)
Manfred’s office handles negotiations for the owners, with deputy commissioner Dan Halem leading the talks for management. This is Halem’s third go-around as the league’s lead negotiator, succeeding Manfred in that role.
For the union, Bruce Meyer is leading the process for the second time and for the first since he took over as the union’s interim executive director. Players put Meyer in the top job in February in place of Tony Clark, who was pushed out amidst scandal.
Halem and Meyer are both lawyers. Both sides have outside counsel as well.
The process is intended to empower constituents. Some players and owners typically attend bargaining sessions, sometimes in person, sometimes by video call.
What actually ends these talks?
Players have typically relied on a majority vote among a group of 38 players to ratify a new collective bargaining agreement: 30 team reps, and eight players who are part of a group inside the MLBPA called the executive subcommittee.
Those players today are: Chris Bassitt (Baltimore Orioles), Jake Cronenworth (San Diego Padres), Pete Fairbanks (Miami Marlins), Cedric Mullins (Tampa Bay Rays), Marcus Semien (New York Mets), Paul Skenes (Pittsburgh Pirates), Tarik Skubal (Detroit Tigers) and Brent Suter (Los Angeles Angels).
The subcommittee members serve two-year terms that end late this year, which means there could be changes during bargaining.
There was drama at the end of the last lockout regarding the subcommittee. When the players voted 26-12 overall to accept the 2022-26 agreement, all eight MLBPA subcommittee members were opposed, suggesting a disconnect in thinking with the so-called rank and file. The only holdover from the last subcommittee is Semien.
MLB, meanwhile, needs a 75 percent vote amongst the 30 clubs to seal a labor deal. Each team has a designated “control” person, a lead owner, who does the voting.
That three-quarter vote requirement for owners is consequential. If there is internal disagreement, a group of just eight owners could halt ratification.
Manfred also has an owner committee dedicated to labor, chaired by Dick Monfort of the Colorado Rockies, who was chair last time too. The other current members are: Mark Attanasio (Milwaukee Brewers), Ray Davis (Texas Rangers), Jerry Reinsdorf (Chicago White Sox), John Sherman (Kansas City Royals) and Hal Steinbrenner (New York Yankees).
Why does a cap matter so much?
Read this, please. But in short, it’s about money.
MLB will argue that a cap improves the competitive balance of sport. The Los Angeles Dodgers have a payroll over $400 million and some teams are below $100 million, which creates poor optics, at the least. Money doesn’t guarantee a World Series championship — just look at the high-spending New York Mets, who haven’t won since 1986 — but it does improve a team’s chances.
“I’m a firm believer that a healthy sports league has to have balance and parity,” Johnson of the Giants said. “It doesn’t mean the big-market teams aren’t going to always have an advantage, but the gap has gotten far too wide.
“If anybody would argue that we have parity in baseball, they’re not being honest. You can have exceptions every now and then that make the playoffs, but we’re not in a healthy place as far as I view a healthy sports league.”
Unsurprisingly, the state of parity today is something the sides disagree on.
But a cap is also a major economic change.
Boras, who represents many high earners, says some large-market teams would be giving up an advantage they built and paid for.
“We want owner geniuses in our game,” Boras said. “New Dodger ownership has taken a team from bankruptcy court and a $2 billion valuation to a value over $10 billion because they made it the most productive in the game on the field and economically, by doing what? Using the freedom to attract and sign talent. That’s the difference with the Dodgers: same market with new owners and a different approach.”
Forbes this year said the Dodgers’ value has risen to $7.8 billion, while Sportico estimated it to be over $9 billion.
But even Mark Walter, the CEO of Guggenheim Partners who runs the mighty Dodgers, is stumping for change.
”Here’s what the problem is: Money helps us win,” Walter told the Los Angeles Times. “We can’t win all the time. We’ve got to have some parity.”
What else is at stake?
Mostly everything for the presumed five-year duration of the contract.
Even if there’s no cap in the end, there’s likely to be some changes regarding competitive balance. Modifications could be made to the luxury-tax system and the incentives small-market teams have to spend.
Importantly, Manfred wants to revise the sport’s media-rights structure and the way teams share TV money between themselves — revenue sharing, as it’s called. Manfred believes the answer to the local-media problems is to divide local TV revenues more evenly and to ultimately sell more games nationally.
A cap makes it easier for the commissioner to get all his owners on board with such changes. Large-market teams probably won’t be willing to share significantly more TV money with small-market teams unless a cap arrives.
Indeed, what revisions Manfred could build owner support for in the media-rights and revenue-sharing buckets without a cap is one of the most fascinating questions entering bargaining.
During the last round, players and owners were on board with the idea of an international amateur draft, but couldn’t agree on the dollars and other specifics.
The international market is rife with corruption and rule-breaking, and a draft could eliminate some of the problems — teams have verbally agreed to deals with youths years before they’re technically eligible to sign at age 16, for example. But it’s unclear how a draft would solve other major problems, including the prevalence of trainers who take obscenely large cuts of player signing bonuses.
Anything else?
In 2022, the league and the union agreed on a bonus pool for pre-arbitration players. They’ll have to figure out what the money for that program looks like going forward.
Manfred would like an offseason free-agency signing deadline, but players oppose one.
Salary deferrals have been a controversial topic, mostly because of the Dodgers, who are delaying payment on all but $2 million of Shohei Ohtani’s annual $70 million salary for the life of his 10-year contract. The owners could look to eliminate or at least limit delayed payments in new contracts.
Player participation in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics will continue to be discussed. That topic, like others, has already become part of leverage theater.
Meyer, of the union, said last month that big leaguers might not head to the Olympics if a lockout cancels games next year.
“If we don’t have a season, we’re not going to play in the Olympics,” Meyer noted. “If we’re in a situation where games are being missed in ’27, that could have an impact on playing the Olympics.”
But major changes in labor relations rarely come without a fight — and lots of leverage building.
“I think the whole industry, the whole league and the players and the ownership will be much better served if we can figure out a way where we all grow together and share together,” Johnson said. “That’s my ultimate goal in all of this. It just doesn’t serve anyone with how we’re structured today.”