As a new MLB season started this week, the topic on the mind of many within baseball was not how many home runs Aaron Judge would hit or whether the Los Angeles Dodgers will win a third consecutive World Series.
It's this: When this season ends, how long will it take for baseball to return?
The expiration of the collective bargaining agreement between the league and its players union in December has turned the possibility — or even the given — of a work stoppage next offseason into the proverbial elephant in the clubhouse.
"A lockout is all but guaranteed at the end of the agreement," said Bruce Meyer, the acting executive director of the MLB Players Association,in February. "The league has pretty much said that."
More than a year earlier, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfredtold The Athleticthat a lockout during the offseason would be "actually a positive."
"There is leverage associated with an offseason lockout and the process of collective bargaining under the NLRA works based on leverage," he said.
Comments like these would suggest a stoppage is viewed as all but certain. Yet there have been nine previous stoppages in MLB history and no two are quite alike, making it difficult to predict how another could play out if in-season negotiations don't yield a deal. Would it be a repeat of 2022? A three-month stoppage that ended in early March curtailed spring training and pushed back opening day by a week, but didn't ultimately require any games to be missed. Or could it be as venomous as the 232-day stalemate of 1994-95 that cost that season's World Series?
In the short term, baseball itself takes center stage. But questions about the business of baseball already loom over the season.
Several people who work inside and around MLB spoke with NBC News and requested anonymity to speak candidly about the potential of a lockout.
The deadline
The key date is Dec. 1, 2026, when the CBA expires at 11:59 p.m. ET.
The big differences
In recent years, a few trends have emerged during MLB free agency. A few big-market teams have signed the best free agents to record-setting contracts — see: the Los Angeles Dodgers signingShohei Ohtani for 10 years and $700 millionand the New York Mets signingJuan Soto for 15 years and $765 million.Meanwhile, some of the top free agents have had to sit and wait on the open market for months, no one apparently wanting to meet their asking price.
The gap between the spenders and the nonspenders seems to be widening. On the high end, the Mets and Dodgers enter this season with payrolls projected to approach $400 million — about five times as much as the lowest-spending teams, such as the Miami Marlins and the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Some owners believe the solution is instituting a salary cap (and salary floor) to rein in spending at the top. The NFL, NBA, NHL and MLS all operate on a system that caps how much a team can spend on player salaries, with exceptions, making baseball the outlier. The owners pushed for a cap back in the '90s, and it led to the prolonged 1994-95 baseball strike.
The players argue that high-end spending isn't the issue. "The problem isn't the teams that are trying to win," Meyer, the interim director of the MLBPA, recently toldSports Business Journal. "The problem is the teams that aren't."
Meyer put it another way: "The Dodgers spending money isn't a reason why the [Pittsburgh] Pirates can't spend money."
Baseball already has a luxury tax in place that punishes big spending. It also has a revenue-sharing system that doles out millions to every team each year. The players will argue that the teams at the bottom should be forced to spend that money, rather than pocket it.
"Why couldn't we have a floor where teams are penalized if they don't reach?" one player agent told NBC News, suggesting that could be done without a salary cap.
A hard cap, he argued, "squeezes the middle class. The players at the top of the market are going to continue to get top-of-the-market dollars. If there's a cap in place, all it's going to do is just squeeze that middle class more and more. … It's just going to affect players down the line."
During negotiations, other issues will arise. But expect this debate to be front and center. The owners will be pushing for a salary cap, and the players for some sort of mechanism that forces the bottom-end teams to spend more, like a salary floor.
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The risk
When Manfred took over as MLB commissioner 11 years ago, baseball had long been surpassed by football as the country's most popular sport and was in an existential fight to stay relevant to younger fans.
Whether because of landmark changes to baseball's rules — such as adopting the pitch clock in 2023, which has dramatically sped up play — the international appeal of big stars such as Ohtani, or the success of big-market clubs like the Dodgers and the Yankees, baseball has seen its audience grow. The Dodgers' seven-game win over Toronto last fall was the most watched World Series since 2017. March's World Baseball Classic attracted more than double theaverage viewershipof the previous WBC, in 2023, and peaked when more than10 million people— the largest WBC audience ever — watched the final, according to Fox Sports.
There is serious concern that a stoppage that costs games could dampen the enthusiasm the sport worked hard to rebuild. InJanuary, Manfred saidthat "certainly, my goal is that we play 162 games next year."
"I just want to believe that there are enough smart people to look at the global momentum," said one baseball broadcaster. "They would be absolute idiots and fools to mess that up with another work stoppage."
The MLBPA's leadership
In February, about five weeks before opening day, Tony Clark abruptly stepped down as executive director of the MLBPA.
The move did not come completely out of nowhere. Back in November 2024, a whistleblower filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board alleging, among other issues, misuse of resources and abuse of power at the union. A federal investigation was opened and the MLBPA launched an internal inquiry.
The internal inquiry found, according to ESPN, that Clark had aninappropriate relationship with his sister-in-law, whom he had hired to work at the union.
Now, Clark was out right before the season, right before these pivotal CBA talks began. In his place stepped Meyer as interim executive director.
Meyer is a sports labor attorney who previously worked alongside Jeffrey Kessler, the influential attorney whom he considers a mentor. Meyer also worked briefly with Donald Fehr at the NHL Players' Association before arriving at the MLBPA in 2018.
Before Clark's resignation, Meyer had already been expected to lead CBA negotiations on the union side. Now, he's simply leading the union, too.
"I think the public perception when you lose someone at the top of the chain is there could be some sort of, 'Oh, gosh, we're panicked,'" a player agent told NBC News. "That couldn't be further from the truth. They're extremely confident in Bruce as the negotiator."
"I don't see that Tony being removed from the equation affects our negotiating position whatsoever," he added.
The TV impact
Since team owners locked out players in December 2021 and kicked off a stoppage that lasted three months, the business of baseball has changed dramatically in how games are watched.
Regional sports networks that handled the technical know-how of producing and distributing games across a home team's market have largely collapsed. Nearly half the league's teams now have their games produced by MLB itself, which has centralized streaming production.
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Meanwhile, the Angels and Braves decided to strike out on their own after their networks collapsed. That shift affects the bottom line because regional sports networks paid teams fees for the rights to carry their games, leaving some teams scrambling to make up revenue, with the Cardinals in particular missing out on as much as $20 million,Sports Business Journalreported.
But there's a wide disparity in what teams earn. The Dodgers and the Yankees each own a portion of their networks, which has yielded huge paydays and, in turn, greater spending power.
The ripple effect
What happens in 2026 and 2027 could also affect MLB players' inclusion in the 2028 Olympics, when the competition will unfold inside Los Angeles' Dodgers Stadium.
This is the first Summer Games to include baseball since 2021, and the union is still in negotiations to include active MLB players. But Meyertold reporterslast week at the World Baseball Classic that "if we're in a situation where games are being missed in '27, that could have an impact on playing the Olympics after that."
Meyer added that "if we don't have a season, we're not going to play in the Olympics."