Television could play an outsized role in ending a protracted lockout in Major League Baseball. (Photo by Joseph Weiser/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
Saber-rattling between Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association over the league’s push for a salary cap could lead to a protracted lockout. While fans have worried that an entire season could be lost, media rights could play an outsized role in ending the lockout.
When the players went on strike in August of 1994, it ran 232 days and cost the postseason with the cancellation of the World Series. It wasn’t until April 2nd of 1995 that it finally ended, and the owners’ push for a salary cap was put on hold. All told, a total of 948 regular-season games were canceled, and the 1995 season had to be shortened from 162 to 144 games.
It might be easy for fans to think that with owners, once again, seeking a salary cap, the extensive loss of regular-season games in 2027 due to an owners’ lockout is possible. The sides in the battle have increased their rhetoric.
“I do know this: I think that I have an ownership group that is more united than any group in my entire time in baseball,” said MLB Commissioner Manfred during a press conference as part of this year’s All-Star Game. “I think they are a group that believes in what I have been arguing for, and that is listening to our fans, trying to make changes to produce the best possible game that we can produce.”
“Our union, the MLBPA, has been the most successful of the unions in professional sports,” said interim MLBPA Executive Director Bruce Meyer, who also spoke to members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America prior to the All-Star Game. “The other unions look to the MLBPA. I sometimes get asked about a salary cap, ‘Why does baseball not have one? Why is it the only one that doesn’t have one?’ The answer is very simple. It’s because our union has been the strongest.”
For now, there’s nothing to say that a lockout is avoided before the Dec 1 deadline, but Manfred has said the lockouts are the “new normal” and given the league saw a lockout in 2021 that shortened the season by one week in 2022 but got all 162 games in with doubleheaders, the odds grow longer by the day that a compromise avoids a work stoppage.
Initially, such a move gives the owners’ leverage. Players start missing paychecks, free agency and trades are frozen, and no baseball is played in the winter.
The dynamic shifts once Spring Training, and more importantly, regular season games are missed. Manfred’s claim that the “ownership group that is more united than any group in my entire time” in baseball, but there’s a significant difference between 1994 and now: changes in media rights.
With the COVID shortened 2020 season, and the lockout in 2021, media rights partners have put in safeguards. Based on interviews with multiple broadcast insiders, and confirmed by the league, contract language is now in place that will place extreme pressure on the sides to end any protracted lockout.
Initially, there are some factors that weigh in favor of the owners. Early on, when games are missed, media rights partners continue to pay even if games are not broadcast due to a lockout. The league has to rebate these payments back once the lockout is settled, but rights fees flowing in buffer the owners in a war of attrition with the players.
Yet, now looming is contract language that would push current media rights out past 2028 for an additional year should a certain threshold of games be missed. None of the sources, nor officials at Major League Baseball, would comment on what that threshold is.
The owners may decide to ignore these provisions, but in doing so they would miss increased revenues for an additional year by not being able to get these new media rights deals in.
Major League Baseball just released the 2027 season schedule. And while Spring Training broadcasts would be the first hit with a lockout, the league’s start date for the regular season is slated for Weds, March 24. The clock starts ticking in earnest then for how many games could be missed before these important contract provisions kick in.