When Major League Baseball’s franchise owners locked out the players over the 2021-22 offseason, they shattered a longstanding labor peace between themselves and the MLB Players Association. Although the resulting collective bargaining agreement has two seasons remaining, there are already indications MLB could again experience a work stoppage before Opening Day 2027 — especially with so much attention this winter being paid to the economics of the game.
To wit, here’s what MLBPA head Tony Clark said this week to USA Today’s Bob Nightengale: “When the commissioner suggests openly that the expectation is a work stoppage and that a lockout is the new norm or should be considered as much, that’s going to lend itself to some conversation even though we’re a year-and-a-half, two years away from the expiration of the agreement.
“We’ll continue to talk about it openly too. It’ll be in an environment where the game seems to be moving forward positively, while the other side keeps interjecting negativity into the conversation. But we’ll navigate it accordingly.”
Commissioner Rob Manfred, for his part, told The Athletic last month that a lockout can be a “positive.”
“In a bizarre way, it’s actually a positive,” Manfred said. “There is leverage associated with an offseason lockout and the process of collective bargaining under the NLRA works based on leverage. The great thing about offseason lockouts is the leverage that exists gets applied between the bargaining parties.”
More recently, Manfred told reporters this week that financial disparity “is at the top of my list of concerns about what’s occurring in the sport.”
Manfred added: “When I say I can’t be critical of the [Los Angeles Dodgers‘ spending] — they’re doing what the system allows. If I’m going to be critical of somebody, it’s not going to be the Dodgers. It’s going to be the system.” He declined to say whether or not he intended to push for a salary cap as part of the next CBA.
None of this should qualify as a surprise. The salary cap has been the defining fight between the owners and the players since the dawn of the MLBPA. That recent, decades-long labor peace? That’s a massive outlier in the league’s history. Mind you, the other eight work stoppages in modern MLB history occurred from 1973-1995 — or, more than one for every three years. While no one should hope for a return to that pace, an uneasy labor dynamic is a greater part of baseball’s essence than not.
