2026: Chapter 20

Major League Baseball is on track to have a lockout the collective bargaining agreement runs out on December 26th, 2026. MLB experienced its most recent lockout five years ago — which lasted from December 2nd, 2021 until March 10th, 2022 — but this one feels a helluva lot different. As Hunter S. Thompson once wrote: If I was a betting man, which I am, whenever possible, my money would be on actual regular season games being missed during 2027.

The last work stoppage that affected the regular season occurred all the way back in 1994, which went on from August 2nd until the following April. That year, there were no playoffs as there was no World Series champion. The 232-day work stoppage was the longest in the history of the sport and, unironically, was caused by the same issue that is overwhelmingly likely to impact the upcoming labor war of 2027: The owners’ interest in a salary cap.

Long has the Major League Baseball Players Association — MLBPA — been considered the strongest union in professional sports, and one can argue that the nonexistence of a salary cap is the reason why. For decades the MLBPA was run by labor lawyers such as, most famously, Marvin Miller — who drew the ire of the owners for so long that he was inducted into the Hall of Fame only posthumously — but since 1994 there has mostly been labor peace, and thus the pendulum has swung precipitously in favor of the owners.

What is a salary cap, anyway? It’s essentially an arbitrary made up number that theoretically evens the playing field, allowing small market teams (such as the Tampa Bay Rays, for example) to have the same amount of dollars available to spend as large market teams (such as the New York Yankees or Los Angeles Dodgers). It is a romantic idea: That every team has an equal chance.

But that is what is known as a hard cap. It means teams are not allowed to spend above a specific threshold. In MLB for the last thirty some odd years there has existed a soft cap, where any team who spends above the aforementioned arbitrary made up number is issued a luxury tax — labeled euphemistically as a Competitive Balance Tax. In other words, there is no salary cap. Teams can spend whatever they want. The more they spend, however, the more they get taxed.

In recent years the Dodgers have essentially broken the cap system, because they have been able to sign in free agency the best and highest-priced players in baseball while simultaneously deferring many millions of dollars to be doled out in future years. The best and most famous player on the planet, Shohei Ohtani, is on the books for only $2 million per year but is set to earn a mammoth $680 million in deferrals over a 10-year stretch from 2034-2043.

Many fans, and many owners of many teams, argue that this is not a fair practice. Maybe they are right. Or maybe they are a bunch of cry babies. At any rate, the Dodgers are not the only team capable of structuring contracts in such a way. It is always a choice for owners to spend money. The reason they (the owners) want to implement a salary cap starting in 2027 is the same reason they wanted one in 1994: Because a salary cap gives them a reason not to.

The main propaganda arm of Major League Baseball — the media, and/or the writers — are ninety percent of them locked and loaded to tell you why a salary cap is actually a good thing, and why the players are motivated by greed for not wanting one. How do you tell an Amazon warehouse worker making $40,000 a year that he doesn’t get to watch his favorite baseball team because the owners and players can’t come to an agreement? You tell him that a not-so-small band of millionaires want more money. It’s literally that simple.

Few and far between are the journalists who tell it like this: That the millionaires aren’t the greedy ones, but actually the billionaires. The millionaires, who are what the people come to see at MLB stadiums, are fighting tooth and nail for an extra million or two, here and there, over the course of their transient professional careers, while the billionaires are the ones who would pay happily a hundred million dollars annually to ten Ivy League graduates if it would save them a single penny.

Relaying this reality has been a problem for the MLBPA since their last strike, in 1994. Because these collective bargaining wars are really just media wars. They are messaging wars. The players union generally sucks at messaging and the owners are, in fact, really good at it. Not only is it easy for the owners to convince the average American worker that millionaires want too much, but they also have an entire network and every major well-known baseball writer at their disposal.

For the better part of the last 30 years — since the strike of 1994 — the MLBPA has lost much of its luster. They replaced labor lawyers (such as Marvin Miller, Donald Fehr [1985-2009], and Michael Weiner [2009-2013]), with a former player, Tony Clark (2013-2026), who within the last year resigned from his post as President of the Players Union over a scandal allegedly involving him sleeping with his brother’s wife.

Someone such as I, who has no dog in the fight and is writing on a little blog on some obscure corner of the Internet, might speculate that the call to remove Tony Clark came from inside the house. After all, the MLBPA went back to their roots and replaced Clark with a union lawyer — Bruce Meyer — whom according to all reports is not in any mood to strike a deal with the owners.

No matter the industry, labor peace is bad for workers. That’s just it. After fighting for a better deal, once accomplished workers (and unions) have a way of going back to sleep. It’s almost natural for it to play out that way. The owners and the capitalists, however, do not believe in winning a single collective bargaining agreement; they believe in winning everything, at all times, to ensure that they maintain the upper hand. As such, labor peace is really another way of saying that the owners have pulled the rope slightly, day-by-day and year-by-year, back to their own position.

Which is where we are currently in Major League Baseball. Under the tutelage of Tony Clark, owners have attached draft pick compensation to the highest-paid free agents — meaning teams who sign good baseball players are forced to forfeit their first-round picks in the amateur draft. Under his reign the Competitive Balance Tax has increased, punishing teams who spend money to win. All of this goes without mentioning that the worst teams in baseball are rewarded with more money to spend in the amateur draft, and more money to spend in international free agency.

This has contributed heavily to why so many teams are every year in a race to the bottom. The teams who spend the least, and try to win the fewest amount of games, reap the rewards of failure. Meanwhile the best teams, the ones who do spend money in hopes of competing for a World Series, are punished via draft picks and the amount of money they are able to spend to procure the services of said draft picks.

So when people say baseball is broken, they are right — but not for the reason they think. A majority of fans believe it is unfair for the Dodgers to spend boatloads of cash. Most people believe something is inherently wrong with deferring tens of millions of dollars to the future to sign players. But to criticize the Dodgers is, in my view, merely an admission of jealousy. Because like I’ve written: Literally nothing is keeping other organizations from doing the exact same thing. Every owner is a billionaire. Every owner has the money to spend. If you are mad about the Dodgers, what you are really mad about is that the owner of your favorite team isn’t doing something similar.

The same reason owners want a salary cap is why they love so much having a draft, because as cool as drafts are to watch and consume they are actually quite terrible for the draftees — or the labor. When a player is only allowed to sign with one team — the team that drafts him — they automatically lose leverage. If every talented 18- or 21 year-old coming into professional baseball was a free agent, they would (theoretically) have 30 different teams bidding for their services. They would have real choice on where they signed.

Billionaires, ironically, hate competition even though they preach that competition is what built, and what drives, American industry. The truth is capitalists love having a monopoly; they do not like having to actually compete. Amazon and Wal-Mart do not want to compete with mom and pop shops, so they charge cheaper prices to eliminate the mom and pop shops who can’t afford to operate on such small margins. Once momma and papa are gone, Amazon and Wal-Mart can charge whatever they want because they are the only game in town.

The owners of Major League Baseball teams are no different. They don’t want to compete on the open market for free agents, and they don’t want to compete on the open market for 18 year-olds from the United States or 16 year-olds from Latin America. That’s why they want a salary cap. That’s why they love having a draft. That is why they do everything that they do: To suppress labor costs such that they can pocket as much money as possible.

Another sticking point for the Players Association, of comparable import, is the matter of service time. Every player upon entering the big leagues is subject to three pre-arbitration (pre-arb) years where essentially they earn the minimum salary (which we’ll get into a bit later). After those three pre-arb years are concluded they are then subjected to three more seasons with that same team where, only then, are they eligible for arbitration — meaning they are able to negotiate on an elevator-like scale (based on which arbitration year they are in) on a one-year contract.

Only when a player has fulfilled six years of service time with an organization — assuming they haven’t been traded, non-tendered, or released outright — are they eligible for free agency. That is where, of course, they are able to shop their talents on the open market and sign with a team of their choice.

Naturally, six years can be a long time in the career of a professional baseball player. Even the best of the best are usually 22 or 23 by the time they reach the majors, meaning they aren’t able to hit free agency until they are 28 or 29, giving them, typically, just one real chance at a massive generational-wealth-type of contract. And that is only for the very best players on the planet.

A far more common path, particularly for pitchers, is that they toil in the minor leagues for a handful of years and pitch in the big leagues for the first time when they are in their mid-to-late twenties. Players such as those are basically grinding away the bulk of their best years making league-minimum salaries only to hit free agency at some point in their thirties when their prime is already behind them.

Owners of certain teams — such as the Dodgers, and Yankees, and a few others who can spend money regularly — are more than happy to open their checkbooks and give 10-year contracts worth $300 million to the apex predators of the sport. When it comes to rounding out a roster, however, the overwhelming majority of teams are only content fielding clubs where most of the players are in their pre-arb or arb years. Where they are cheap, in other words.

The Players Association would much prefer to fast track the process from Day One to Free Agency. Because the goal is for players to earn more money over the course of their careers. It would make a substantial difference if it did not require six years of service time before a player is able to hit free agency. Imagine if the same 22 year-old rookie hit free agency after four years; he would get a big contract at age-26, then he could potentially hit free agency again and earn another big contract at age-32, for argument’s sake.

Talk of a salary cap is the major issue of the impending labor war between the MLBPA and owners, but service time, or the service clock — whichever way you prefer to describe it — is a big one. Whether one is being paid at the upper crust of MLB’s economic pyramid, in the middle, or somewhere closer to the bottom, each and all would welcome a system where their prime years were not being wasted earning peanuts in comparison to what they are worth in a true open market. The shorter the time it takes to get to free agency, the less control the owners have, and thus the more control that the players have over their careers.

The MLBPA is and always has been in rough shape over these matters, because running parallel to how much they stink at messaging, and winning the media wars, is getting everybody on the same page. How does a union get players making $40 million per year, or $25 million, or $10 million, or a bunch of kids getting drafted out of high school, to come up with an equitable plan that works for everyone? Every business transaction is about leverage; thus is every CBA. And the players don’t seem to have a ton.

These natural divisions create a constant game of tug-of-war within the union itself, which is then asked to arrive at the bargaining table to negotiate with the owners. Every team has one player representative — 30 teams, so 30 players — yet every Major League roster consists of 26 players. Meaning 30 guys are effectively speaking for 780 active Major Leaguers, and if we consider that each team has a 40-man roster the number actually balloons to 1,200. That’s a lot of mouths to feed, a lot of voices to account for.

The owners don’t have such a problem because there are only 30 of them, and they are all incredibly wealthy, and thus they, for the most part, share similar interests on every issue. The main one is and always has been money — how to make more of it, and how to retain more of it. Just as the players rightfully are against a salary cap, the owners are in union with themselves on being for a salary cap. Both sides are dug in, which is why I don’t see right now a resolution that doesn’t involve missing significant time during the 2027 season.

I’m not a goddam fortune teller, and no one ever went broke betting against the labor in a fight against ownership, but what I will say is baseball players are in a much different position currently, in 2026, than they were when the union was originally recognized in 1966. Money is not so much of an object nowadays as it was before the union was necessary, when it was not uncommon for players to have second jobs during the offseason to help pay their bills, and so on.

In other words, even a player making the league minimum of $780,000 annually ought to have enough stored in his coffers to withstand a lockout. Certainly the $40 million average annual value guys, and those earning $20 million AVV, all the way down to those making $5 million AAV, do not have to start selling insurance to get by if there was, indeed, no baseball.

If an argument were to be made that the players do in fact have some leverage in this ensuing collective bargaining agreement, it’s that. While it is a romantic observation only to be made from a bird’s eye view, I do not see a better defense to keep the MLBPA from doing what they typically do during collective bargaining negotiations — by caving in to the owners’ desires.

Because from my perspective a salary cap would be the death of the players union. It would eliminate the only tangible economic tool that differentiates itself from America’s two other major sports — the NBA and the NFL — which both of them have some form of a hard cap. Imagine if LeBron James, or Patrick Mahomes, arguably the most famous and accomplished athletes currently playing in their respective sports, were not confined by arbitrary made up numbers. They could ask for the world, and the world is exactly what they would receive.

Of course my bird’s eye view observation, arguing that the players actually do have more leverage than they might realize, is easier to opine in theory than in practice. After all, the lifespan of an MLB career is, on the generous end, only 5.6 years, though ‘some modern estimates put the average closer to 2.7 to 3 years due to high early-career turnover,’ per The Princeton Review. That means effectively it is always time to strike while the iron is hot, since there are no guarantees.

This will forever be the reason ownership has the advantage over players: Because ownership is loaded beyond imagination with capital, and there exists no lifespan for MLB owners. They are old and they are rich, and when they die the business gets handed down most of the time to their children, and then when their children get old it is handed down to their children, and so on. They have unlimited sums of money, and no expiration date on their careers. That generates more leverage than any labor organization will ever be able to conceive.

So it is a seemingly impossible task for the players to win this labor war. Not only must they come to terms with themselves — with the richest and the poorest among them, as well as with the veteran class v. amateurs and minor leaguers who will not reap the benefits of the CBA for multiple years, if ever — but then the MLBPA must turn around and compete against an ownership group that always has the nuclear option on the table. The players have short careers and are forced to do what they will to collect every dollar they can, while the owners have nothing but time, and nothing but money.

I don’t know what this collective bargaining agreement is inevitably going to look like, but I’m confident in saying it will be an ugly fight. Based upon everything I have written it would be foolish to expect the players to magically get a win out of it; what will actually impress me most is if they are indeed able to draw their lines in the sand and dig in their feet and force the owners to explain themselves in front of the baseball-fan public as to why they, the owners, are right, and why it makes more sense to have no baseball.

What may be most important to note is that the MLBPA, which has now been around for 60 years, once fought so hard not to have a salary cap; they even went on strike over it in 1994; they were strong enough and diligent enough to arrive at the year 2026, where every Major League Baseball player is able to earn as much as $780,000 per year; they were able to accomplish all of these things through the strength of their union.

And now is the time where the fruits of these decisions, which were collectively bargained over the course of baseball history, should work absolutely to their benefit and not against them. The union brought them here, and so the solidarity of the union ought to deliver them once more.

Because no ownership group ever voluntarily gave away the farm such that their workers could have control of it. They never out of the goodness of their hearts believed their subjects deserved more. They, the owners (or capitalists), only give an inch because they are afraid, or are confronted by a credible threat, of what will happen if they do not.

What I dream of as it relates to the Players Association isn’t that they go full communist and hold out until they are in control of the means of production. I am not seeking of them to enter into a co-op where they divvy up all the monies and split it equally amongst themselves and the owners alike — even though that would be pretty fucking cool. My aspirations are merely that they find the strength to reject in every way, shape, and form, a salary cap. It’s that they drive fear into the hearts of their owners. And I would not at all be disappointed if it eliminates a few months off the 2027 schedule.

I say this only because the owners, while they do have an insane amount of leverage, do need the show to keep going on. They need the ticket sales. They need the parking fees. They need the merchandise to go off the shelves. They need the outrageously overpriced concessions to be bought. The players stand to lose several thousands of dollars for every game they miss. The owners stand to lose millions, or tens of millions, for every home game that is not played at their ballpark.

The battle is always uphill for the labor. Getting any two men in any walk of life to agree on politics, or sports, or taste in music, is difficult enough. Getting 30 different players earning 30 different salaries representing 30 different teams which account for 26 active players apiece and 40, if you consider 40-man rosters, is an extremely unenviable task. The CBA will not please everybody today, it will not please everybody tomorrow, and regardless of how it plays out when the dust is settled there will arise unintended consequences and some group of players — depending on how old they are, or how much they money they make — will ultimately become collateral damage.

The owners, on the other hand, have almost everything in common. All of them are unimaginably wealthy, and all of them own one-of-thirty Major League Baseball franchises. Their interests are aligned entirely: They have money, and they want more of it. In that way they are a union unto themselves, only theirs (in comparison to the players) is significantly smaller and significantly more powerful.

And they’ll probably win. The owners, I mean. They just have too much going for them. They have the enormous amounts of capital to withstand any game of chicken that the MLBPA is willing to play with them; they have the media on their side, who in 2026 care more about access — as in access to the information that trickles down from the owner’s mouths, to the front office, and so on — thus any media member who tells the truth and/or sides with the players will be blackballed in many circles; and then, finally, when push comes to shove, if the day comes when regular season games are missed, the owners will have the American public, the paying customer, whom most of them, or us, do not earn minimum salaries bordering on a million dollars annually, on their side as well.

That’s why when I say this collective bargaining war is actually a media war, or a messaging war, what I mean to say is it’s incumbent on the Players Union to stand up for themselves in public. They cannot play nice, and they should not play nice. Because the owners will use every trick in the book, every trick that has worked since the dawn of time, or at the least the dawn of unions. The owners’ tactic is to divide and conquer. It is to use the media to their own benefit. It is to convince the everyday working man (and woman) that the players are motivated by greed.

The Players Union has the money to withstand a lockout for as long as it takes, and in turn it has more leverage than it probably realizes. Whether or not they mean to take full advantage of that fact is and will be the question. How does one union find the strength to care about future generations — i.e. future players — when its main priority is making as much money as possible right this second? How did the Players Association in 1966 find a way? Did they ever envision how successful the Union would become? Did they have any idea how much fucking money players would make annually some sixty years later?

* * * * *

About a decade ago I was doing work release for the city of San Bernardino CA, stemming from the DUI I got in November, 2015. On the second weekend I was cleaning this alleyway with a black dude, and he and I were talking about how he once worked for a union. He said he worked for a construction union in Southern California for several years, but now he was working for a private company in Las Vegas NV. And he told me he hated unions and loved working privately.

I was flummoxed by his hatred, or betrayal, of unions, for I was in the heart at that time — I believe it was 2017 — of my Bernie Sanders Era. I may have appeared on the surface as the 27 year-old average-average white guy that I was, but in my heart was a hammer and sickle. Leon Trotsky. Vladimir Lenin. Solidarity forever. I was on the forefront of what would inevitably dictate my worldview for the years to come.

And so this black dude told me this and that, about paying dues, and how he disliked very much paying those dues, and that the union never did anything for him, personally. I was curious sort of guy (as I always am) so I pressed him further, asking this and that about such and such. Where I happened to arrive at, once he was done shitting on unions generally and basically divulged that he was a black republican, was, well, ‘how much money were you making while you were in the union?’

Only then was I sort of able to crack the facade, because he lit up and told me the money was great. He said he had no education whatsoever and started out at $29.50 (USD) an hour and that every year he got a raise of a few dollars and that after a handful of years he was doing over $40 an hour an was able to buy a house and that his wife and kids never wanted for anything, and so on.

Even though I am a curious guy, and even though I have never struggled truly, and even though on most occasions I am a peacemaker who does not look for conflict and who does not look to fight, who really only ever looks to be a problem-solver when such conflicts or fights do arise, I had to ask him: ‘What do you think was responsible for why you had such good starting pay? Did it just, like, magically appear that way in your bank account?’

But he was a solid dude, so he was straight up. ‘It was the union,’ he said. ‘Obviously it was the union.’

I still don’t think he really understood the point I was trying to make. The point was this: No shit.