The price of baseball: Why is a lockout looming?
By Riley Kelton ·
The price of baseball: Why is a lockout looming?
by Riley Kelton, Cronkite News
November 9, 2026
(Audio by Riley Kelton/Cronkite News)As the 2026 MLB season comes to a close, baseball faces a major question: Could a labor dispute disrupt the 2027 season?
The league’s collective bargaining agreement expires Dec. 1, 2026, and MLB and the Players Association remain divided over fundamental economic issues. At the center of the dispute is the league’s push for a salary cap and floor, a proposal the union strongly opposes.
Using reporting and analysis from USA Today baseball insider Bob Nightengale and ESPN’s Jeff Passan, this episode examines the arguments behind the owners’ proposal, including competitive balance, rising franchise valuations and the appeal of more predictable labor costs.
But the fight goes beyond how much teams can spend. Owners argue a cap-and-floor system could reduce the enormous payroll gap between clubs and create greater financial certainty. Players argue a cap would restrict earning potential and question whether competitive imbalance is severe enough to justify such a system.
MLB has offered concessions in other areas of the CBA, but many of those proposals are tied to the adoption of a salary cap and floor. The league’s latest proposal would delay that system until 2028.
If the two sides fail to reach an agreement, baseball could enter another work stoppage. The last labor dispute to cost MLB regular-season games was the 1994-95 players’ strike.
TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI and may contain errors, omissions or misspellings. The audio is the authoritative version. If you notice an error please contact [email protected].
Riley Kelton: The crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd, the pop of a mitt, the organ player playing a tune. These are all things that baseball fans know by heart.
But once MLB crowns a World Series champion this season, nobody in the world knows when we'll hear these sounds again.
The MLB Collective Bargaining Agreement is set to expire on December 1st of this year, and neither owners nor players are close to an agreement. If an agreement isn't made, baseball is in trouble.
Chicago's north and south sides will go quiet. Yankees and Red Sox fans will flip from bitter rivals to worrying about the same thing: When does America's pastime come back?
For some fans, it'll sound familiar. For Rays and D-Backs fans, it's uncharted waters. The last work stoppage that resulted in missed regular season games was prior to their existence in 1994 and '95. That stoppage resulted in no playoffs, no World Series and 252 total games missed in the next season.
And now, three decades later, one word returns and hangs over Major League Baseball's head as the playoffs unfold: lockout.
Welcome to The Price of Baseball, a three-part audio series on the future of Major League Baseball.
In this episode, we will talk about why this lockout is looming and why both sides have not come to an agreement.
As most of us know, the salary cap is the big overlying issue. Owners want to control how much money goes out, and players don't want to minimize how much money they can rake in.
According to a survey done by The Athletic, the majority of fans lean toward wanting a cap in place, but at the end of the day, they just want a full, on-time 162-game schedule.
The owners say that there needs to be a competitive balance in the sport. A small-market team has not won since the Kansas City Royals in 2015. The last 10 World Series winners are all from top-10 markets.
Even when you look at it just being in the Fall Classic, only six of the 22 teams were in the bottom half of payroll. That includes this year's World Series. The other 16 teams were not in the top half, but in the top 10.
There are clear spenders year in and year out that they're trying to neutralize: the Dodgers, the Mets, Yankees and more. There are teams that are passive when it comes to writing the big checks, teams like the Brewers, the Rays and the Pirates.
At the All-Star Game in July, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said, per ESPN's Jesse Rogers, that the gap between the highest- and lowest-spending clubs was $441 million.
Owners say that a cap would allow big stars to not all funnel to large-market teams that can pay the big bucks, which ultimately benefits fans, allowing them to have hope every year that they could land a superstar.
Manfred also said that this ownership is, quote, more united than any group in his entire time in baseball.
However, the salary cap is not a brand-new idea that the owners just came up with for the balance of the game, says USA Today baseball insider Bob Nightengale.
Bob Nightengale: The owners have been talking about a salary cap for ages. You know, probably back in the '94, '95, you know, with the big... when the players went on strike and cost the World Series and postseason in October '94. But now they seem more adamant than ever trying to push for it.
Riley Kelton: The biggest incentive is setting a dollar amount on how much money leaves their pockets.
Here's what ESPN insider Jeff Passan had to say on his series, Sources Tell Jeff Passan.
Jeff Passan: Currently, a team's labor costs are undefined. You can go out in free agency, you can make trades, you can do whatever you want up to a limit. The certainty that comes with the cap is what's so appealing to investors and to people who could be buying the team from the owners right now, year in and year out.
Riley Kelton: No matter who is on the roster, they will be limited on spending.
The salary cap proposal also comes with a salary floor, giving a minimum for owners to spend. And that is another giant incentive for them, giving potential suitors a minimum dollar amount that has to be spent each year.
This season, two franchises were sold. The Los Angeles Angels agreed to a sale valued at about $4 billion, and the San Diego Padres sold for $3.9 billion, the two largest sales in MLB history.
Heading into the season, NBC New York reported that the Padres were worth $3.1 billion and the Angels were worth $2.7 billion. That is a 48.15% increase for L.A. and a 25.81% increase for San Diego.
For owners and potential buyers, a cap would make player costs more predictable by putting a ceiling on how much a team can spend on its rosters.
That brings the question: What are owners willing to give up to make it happen?
Bob Nightengale: They'll raise the minimum salary. They'll let players get to free agency a year early if you're 30 years old, more salary arbitration guys. They're even willing to share all their TV money, which has never happened.
But in exchange, they want a salary cap, and the players continue to push back against that.
Riley Kelton: On October 8, the owners proposed their newest agreement, which included shortening the regular season from 162 games to 154 and a 50-50 TV revenue split.
They also added changes to the playoff format, including expanding the divisional series from a five-game series to a seven-game series, as well as higher-seeded opponents picking their competition in each the wild-card and divisional series rounds.
But all this is contingent on one thing: a salary cap of $245 million and a floor of $171 million.
Bob Nightengale: I'm not sure, as long as there's the word "cap" involved, that they would agree to anything. I don't care if you say it's a billion dollars a year. I'm not sure they would do that.
Riley Kelton: Why are players so adamantly opposed to a salary cap?
Well, for starters, they do not see the competitive balance as a problem. Yes, it has been over a decade since a small-market team has won the World Series, but that will change this year with Milwaukee or Tampa Bay taking home their first.
In the last 10 years, 13 different teams have played for a World Series. In those same 10 years, the NFL has only had 11 different teams play in the Super Bowl. The NHL and NBA have had 14 different teams. Three leagues that all have salary cap systems.
A cap and floor would level out the dollars being spent on rosters, but there is no guarantee that roster construction results in wins.
Bob Nightengale: So obviously it's worked for the Dodgers. It has not worked for the Mets. You still have teams like the Milwaukee Brewers win year after year with a low payroll.
The Tampa Bay Rays, you know, they won the AL East, you know, with a tiny payroll. But I think they're just trying to curb the spending.
Riley Kelton: For players, baseball is their job. They're going to fight to make every dollar they think they deserve.
The guys making $30 million a year on contract, they're going to continue to get paid, and the guys on minimum deals, they are going to stay near there.
What about the guys in the middle? Those players are a big part of who the MLBPA says they're fighting for.
As it stands right now, neither side is close. Passan reported on Oct. 14 that the owners said despite the Rays, Guardians and Brewers being three small-market teams in the Championship Series with the Dodgers, their stance is not changing.
Even though the Dodgers were eventually swept by the team with the smallest market in baseball, they are still going to hold strong.
The owners believe if they are going to get a salary cap ever, the time is now.
The CBA ends on December 1st. Pitchers and catchers are supposed to report in early February, but this upcoming season we could be stepping into the time machine and headed back to '94.
And that's exactly where we'll pick up in the next episode as we take a look back to the 1994 season, where there were no playoffs, no champion and 252 games canceled to start 1995.
I'm Riley Kelton. Thank you for tuning in to The Price of Baseball.
This article first appeared on Cronkite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Originally published by Cronkite News Sports
