David Lennon: Baseball fans better enjoy 2026, because there might not be anything in '27
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, left, and MLBPA interim executive director Bruce Meyer. Credit: AP
FORT MYERS, Fla. — It’s a partly cloudy, high-70s, mid-March morning behind JetBlue Park, the spring training home of the Red Sox.
The relentless thumping of bats echoes from the nearby cages. Pitchers loosen up along the bullpens. Just a typical day in the routine preparation for the upcoming 162-game season, unremarkable when stacked among the six weeks.
Easy to take for granted, too. Until you remember that this could all be empty at this time next year, along with every other spring training site in Florida and Arizona.
Actually, many people anticipate that nightmare scenario, thanks to the looming war between baseball’s owners and the players.
The doomsday clock doesn’t strike midnight until Dec. 1, but it’s already become impossible to have a conversation about this season without mentioning the very real possibility of missing a sizable chunk of the 2027 schedule.
Which is why on this particular sunny March morning at JetBlue Park, the subject was raised with Bruce Meyer, the newly appointed interim executive director for the Players Association. Meyer holds the top spot now only because the person who previously held that title, former major-leaguer Tony Clark, resigned last month after allegations of an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate staffer, reportedly his sister-in-law.
Hardly ideal, 10 months away from the CBA expiring. But Meyer's name is going to be mentioned seemingly as much as Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani as this worrisome countdown continues. Along with commissioner Rob Manfred, Meyer is now the face of baseball’s volatile labor situation, and he’s not sugarcoating the turbulent waters ahead.
The last time the sport went through this process, in 2022, the owners imposed a 99-day lockout before an agreement finally was reached. It delayed the start of an abbreviated spring training, but MLB still maneuvered a way to complete a full 162-game schedule.
Few see that happening this time around. Many fear a nuclear winter that stretches into the summer, too.
“First of all, it’s the owners who are likely to be doing a lockout, which obviously they control,” Meyer said. “Secondly, nobody wants to miss games. Certainly players don’t want to miss games. I think players understand, though, that everything they have in their system results from some previous generation of players either missing games — or being willing to miss games — to fight for what they believe was the right thing.”
Ah, yes, the “right thing,” which in this case boils down to the union’s zero-tolerance policy for anything that looks, sounds or smells like a salary cap.
That pretty much has worked for the past six decades. MLB remains the only one of the big four North American pro leagues that does not put hard limits on payrolls or salaries. But Manfred & Co. now appear serious about drawing a line in the sand over precisely that issue, citing what they insist is an economic crisis widening the gap between the large and small markets.
Exhibit A for Manfred? None other than the Dodgers, who have the distinction of being back-to-back defending World Series champions and baseball’s most lavish spenders.
The Dodgers again will begin this season with the sport’s highest payroll, at $396 million, and not surprisingly are the Vegas favorite to three-peat.
The Yankees, routinely in the top three when it comes to payrolls, haven’t won a title since 2009. Even the Mets, who have the sport’s richest individual owner in hedge-fund titan Steve Cohen, couldn’t buy their way into the playoffs last season at a cost of $360 million. History has taught us that merely writing the biggest checks hardly guarantees a World Series ring, but if Cohen can’t catch the Dodgers by throwing more money at the problem, what chance does the bottom half of the league have?
Manfred maintains that spending has to be reined in at the top levels with a cap but also elevated at the lower end with a payroll floor, believing that to be the fairest method of financial competition. Even some owners aren’t so sure.
“I’ve always been a league-first owner, so I’m listening to all the sides,” Cohen said. “I haven’t made up my mind yet, but we’ll see where it goes. Sometimes I put the league interests above my own interests.”
Getting Cohen on board would be a significant coup for Manfred. He’s been held up as the ideal owner by players and agents alike, primarily because of the fact that he’s eager to (over)pay for talent in pursuit of a championship. The union believes that’s the mentality every owner should have, and it's why the players almost unanimously approve of what the Dodgers are doing.
“I love what the Dodgers do, obviously,” Bryce Harper told reporters during spring training. “They pay the money, they spend the money. I mean, they’re a great team. They understand how to run it. They run their team like a business and they run it the right way. They understand where they need to put their money into.”
In 2019, when Harper signed a 13-year, $330 million pact with the Phillies, it set the record for the richest free-agent contract in total value at that time (excluding contract extensions). Harper held the title for three years until Judge got his nine-year, $360 million deal with the Yankees, followed by Ohtani’s 10-year, $700 million contract in 2023 and Juan Soto’s 15-year, $765 million deal in 2024.
These contracts would be virtually impossible under a salary-cap system, although you could argue that the current economic model favors the small percentage of players at the very top percentile and not the vast majority of union members who must wait six years to become free agents.
Either way, it’s easy to understand why the richest segment of the industry is just fine with the status quo and doesn’t plan to budge when it comes to preserving the pure capitalist nature of the baseball business. Business seems good from their vantage point.
Last season, MLB’s attendance was up on average. TV ratings were higher. The Dodgers and Blue Jays played an epic World Series considered among the best ever, if not the best. The World Baseball Classic, created a decade ago to grow the game globally, was a smash hit this month, with the game’s biggest stars lining up to compete for their countries.
And yet baseball can’t escape the gathering labor storm that threatens to wipe out the 2027 season and perhaps inflict incalculable damage beyond that.
“Franchise values are going up. We’re making strides with younger fans worldwide,” Meyer said. “It seems an odd time for the owners to say 'we want to blow it all up and miss games.' Hopefully the majority of the owners don’t want to do that.”
We probably won’t know their true intentions for a while, certainly not before MLB goes the lockout route on Dec. 2.
Until then, enjoy this baseball season. No one can say with any degree of certainty when the next one will begin, or if it even will be played at all.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
