The 2026 MLB season resumes later today.
That means we’ve got a bit less than half a season remaining, plus the postseason, until the collective bargaining agreement between MLB owners and players expires Dec. 1 and we will almost certainly experience another lockout by owners at that time.
What happens after that is really anyone’s guess. The game is at a high point in popularity and talent and almost everyone agrees that interrupting that with a season of missed games would be a bad thing. And yet,
we could be headed that way.
Here’s where players and owners stood as we hit the All-Star break, per this article by Evan Drellich in The Athletic.
Owners:
“I do know this: I think that I have an ownership group that is more united than any group in my entire time in baseball,” said Manfred, who started working with MLB as outside counsel in the late 1980s. “I think they are a group that believes in what I have been arguing for, and that is listening to our fans, trying to make changes to produce the best possible game that we can produce.”
Those changes, of course, are primarily connected to a salary cap, which owners have been trying to impose on players for nearly half a century. It’s what killed a third of the 1981 season and what killed the 1994 postseason. And they’re still at it. Commissioner Rob Manfred’s statement hints that fans want a salary cap, which… well, it’s true if you listen to carefully curated fan polls which had questions carefully crafted to the owners’ benefit. Which should not surprise you.
Players:
“Our union, the MLBPA, has been the most successful of the unions in professional sports,” said interim union head Bruce Meyer, who, like Manfred, spoke to members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America on Tuesday prior to the All-Star Game. “The other unions look to the MLBPA. I sometimes get asked about a salary cap, ‘Why does baseball not have one? Why is it the only one that doesn’t have one?’ The answer is very simple. It’s because our union has been the strongest.”
This is also true. I don’t think I have ever seen the MLBPA as united as it is right now against a salary cap. The cap isn’t designed to have a more “level playing field,” as owners claim. It’s designed to keep more of baseball’s $12 billion annual revenues in the hands of owners.
Players are the game. They are the ones who provide entertainment, thrills and the loyalty we feel as fans of a particular team, in our case, the Cubs. They should get paid commensurate with that. No one goes to a baseball game, or watches one on TV, to see owners own teams.
In fact, players were just as unified five years ago, when the last negotiations took place:
“What I think gets forgotten is — and I know the league leaves this part out — is that we started negotiating in April or May (2021),” Meyer said. “In our view, we didn’t get serious proposals from the league until February (2022). At the end of the day, in February, they started making real moves.
“At one point, they said … ‘We are going to miss games. That’s it.’ At that point, our players unanimously, the entire executive board, all 38, said that deal is not good enough.
“The league went back and they made their offer better. And again, they said, ‘All right, this time we mean it. If you don’t agree, then we’re going to miss games. That’s it. It’s too late.’ Again our players, and again unanimously — all 38 — rejected it.”
The third time, the owners’ offer had grown sufficiently, in Meyer’s view. He also said he did not recommend turning down the deal that turned into the 2022-26 collective bargaining agreement that’s about to expire.
“My point is, the players were completely unified and willing to miss games up until the point where the league finally put enough on the table,” Meyer said. “Some of the narrative leaves out the two steps before that, where all 38 were unanimous in saying, we are willing to miss games unless you make the deal better.
The same thing is happening now. As I wrote here two months ago, players and owners had already begun exchanging proposals in around the same time frame they did in 2021. As is often the case for negotiations like this, none of the early proposals from either side is likely to be adopted. A lot of early bargaining in these cases is posturing. As many of you know, I was a TV director and a member of the Directors Guild of America. I once sat in on a negotiating session between DGA representatives and reps of the producers and TV networks who the DGA’s contracts are with. At one point the lead DGA negotiator said, “This is the most insulting offer in the history of collective bargaining.” Hyperbole, of course, but you can see that’s the sort of thing that happens in these types of negotiations. I can tell you that no DGA-represented worker ever missed a single day due to strike or lockout. The deals were always hammered out — sometimes a bit after the last minute.
And that’s what we all hope happens here, in time for no games to be missed in 2027. It would, as I wrote earlier, be the worst thing that could happen to a sport that seems on the upswing — especially with MLB’s national TV contracts coming up for renewal after 2028, and Manfred’s professed desire to perhaps have most, or all, local TV rights bundled with the national deals to make more money. A lockout that costs games in 2027 would almost certainly cost MLB owners a lot of money on those TV deals. And they know that.
Let’s hope they can reach a deal where the 2027 season goes off as scheduled, with no games lost.
And speaking of 2028, that is when the next Olypmics will be held, hosted in Los Angeles. And there’s been much talk about MLB players participating, which would obviously raise the Olympic baseball competition to a very high level.
Drellich writes in The Athletic that MLB has proposed penalties for players who are chosen for Olympic baseball teams but who later back out:
In a May proposal to the union, Major League Baseball said it wants big leaguers to face an effective suspension longer than three weeks — a period that would last into the second half of the regular season — if they are chosen to participate in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles but skip out without an approved excuse.
From as early as July 10 through Aug. 3, 2028, players who choose not to play in the Summer Games would be on the restricted list without pay or service time, per a copy of the proposal reviewed by The Athletic. Placement on the injury list would technically be an approved excuse, but with a wrinkle: such players would get pay and service time, but would not be able to return to regular-season action until after the same day, Aug. 3.
Bruce Meyer, the head of the Players Association, on Tuesday called the league’s proposal “extreme.” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, meanwhile, said the proposal was made on the premise that the 2028 Summer Games are “a unique opportunity to market the sport with our very, very best players.”
Again, as you can see, there’s a lot of posturing going on. Meyer’s comment isn’t entirely wrong, but calling it “extreme” isn’t going to push owners to come any closer to a deal on this.
Here’s how the proposed Olympic baseball competition would work with MLB players:
To accommodate the baseball portion of the Olympics, which is set to run from July 13-19, 2028, the usual midseason All-Star break would be extended. The first half of the regular season would wrap up July 9, and the All-Star Game is then set to be played July 11, likely in San Francisco. The regular season would resume on July 21.
So that would make the extended All-Star break 11 days, instead of the current four, but seven of those days would have Olympic baseball, which presumably would be of high interest. It would be like the World Baseball Classic, only compressed into one week instead of more than three, and with players who are in mid-season form instead of guys still trying to get ready for the season in March. Could be a lot of fun. Also, this is the first time I’ve seen any mention of the All-Star Game site for 2028. It should be noted that the Cubs have supposedly been told that if the 2027 season misses enough games due to a labor stoppage that the Wrigley Field All-Star Game wouldn’t happen next year, that the Cubs would host in 2028 instead.
Here’s what will happen next on this topic, per Drellich:
An MLB official who was not authorized to speak publicly said the union has not responded to the league’s participation proposal. A union official who was not authorized to speak publicly said that the MLBPA has informed the league that it would respond once players have a broader set of proposals on all the other issues.
A slew of additional things need to be worked out, including player accommodations and compensation for participation, as well as how many tickets are available to players and their guests. In the union’s proposal on those matters, it pushed for big leaguers to have many of the same accommodations that National Hockey League players are afforded for their participation in the Olympics.
The negotiations are complicated by the number of parties at the table: beyond just MLB and the MLPBA, the International Olympic Committee and LA28 are involved as well. The World Baseball Softball Confederation is also part of the process.
So there are a lot of moving parts here, and of course this discussion is going on at the same time as labor negotiations, so everyone’s got a full plate.
Lastly, here’s an early look at which countries would participate in Olympic baseball:
The U.S., the Dominican Republic and Venezuela have already secured spots in the 2028 Olympics’ baseball tournament. The latter two clubs qualified during the WBC, and the U.S. has an automatic bid as the host country. The last three spots will be determined at upcoming tournaments.
It’s not clear which tournaments these are, but I would imagine Japan would be one of the other countries who would come out of any qualifying tournament. Presuming MLB players participate, that would add huge star power to Olympic baseball.
Again, as always, we await developments.
