MLBPA interim director Bruce Meyer: 'Lockout is 100% guaranteed' if there's no deal before CBA expires

TAMPA, Fla. — Words such as “Armageddon,” “apocalypse” and “doomsday” have been liberally used to describe what is coming when the active collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association expires in December.

For good reason.

The worst-kept secret in the sport for several years running, even as commissioner Rob Manfred makes sure in his public discourse not to use the exact phrase, is the united front that owners — with maybe the exception of those running the Mets and Dodgers — have formed behind the scenes in wanting a salary cap to be part of the next CBA.

If a new agreement isn’t reached by the time this one expires, “a lockout is 100% guaranteed,” Bruce Meyer, the interim director of the MLBPA, said Thursday morning after he and his staff met with Yankees players.

Every other professional sports league has a cap system of some kind, and MLB wants one, too. It has for years.

But the MLBPA, the strongest union in pro sports pretty much since Marvin Miller established it in its current form in 1966, has always successfully staved off a cap, even as plenty of proverbial blood has been shed in MLB’s pursuit of one over the years.

The most recent example was the 99-day lockout that ended in March 2022, a  dispute that cost three weeks of spring training but no regular-season games. The most extreme example was the 1994 strike by the players that led to the cancellation of that year’s World Series and extended into 1995, when the courts essentially put the players back on the field.

Manfred, the commissioner since 2015, is rightly proud that no regular-season games have been lost to a labor dispute during his tenure. But  if Manfred and the owners are as insistent on a salary cap as they appear, it is difficult to see how that streak will remain intact.

“Players are aware from the rhetoric coming from the other side, and I guess all I’ll say is we’re more than well prepared for it,” Meyer said. “We’ve been preparing for this fight for years and, to some extent, the fight has been fought for decades on this particular issue.”

Manfred has spent the last several summers addressing teams individually in-season, never using “salary cap” in his talks with players.

“The strategy is to get directly to the players,” Manfred told The Athletic in June 2025. “I don’t think the leadership of this union is anxious to lead the way to change. So we need to energize the workforce in order to get them familiar with or supportive of the idea that maybe change in the system could be good for everybody.”

Unsurprisingly, players have been cynical, not quite buying that management has the best interests of its workforce in mind. The Phillies' Bryce Harper spoke for many of his brethren when, during one such meeting last July, he somewhat indelicately told the commissioner to “get the [expletive] out of our clubhouse” when Manfred toed close to the line of saying “salary cap” without actually saying it.

Meyer — who joined the MLBPA in 2018 after serving as a senior legal adviser with the National Hockey League Players' Association and who took his current position mere weeks ago when union leader Tony Clark resigned in scandal — is well-versed in his association’s longtime objection to a salary cap, even as the other leagues have adopted them.

Miller, who led the MLBPA from 1966-82 and who died in 2012, told Sports Illustrated in 2011: “No legitimate union could ever agree to a salary cap. In my mind, if a union did that, it would be grounds for decertification, for membership to go to court.”

Given a part of that quote Thursday and asked if his union is as entrenched on the issue as it always has been, Meyer said: “I’ll just say our historical position on this issue has been more than clear . . . I think it’s important to understand the historical perspective in the other sports. None of the unions in the other sports ever said, ‘Oh we want this kind of system, we think this is the best system for players.’ They were more or less forced into it in one way or the other. None of these sports unions have ever said, ‘We’ve evaluated all the systems and we think a salary cap is the best one for players.’

"Again, we’ll look at what they propose and we’ll analyze it for players and explain it, but at the end of the day, there are reasons why we’ve never felt this is the best system for players, and those reasons have never really changed.”

By Erik Boland

erik.boland@newsday.comeboland11

Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.