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When the Milwaukee Brewers secured the final out of their World Series victory, MLB's offseason officially began — and the league's owners and the MLBPA were officially put on the clock. We have just over a month left until the current collective bargaining agreement expires, at which point the owners are expected to lock out the players unless they can come to terms on a new deal.
That seems ... unlikely, to put it mildly, which means we're careening towards the sport's second work stoppage in five years and potentially our first missed regular-season games since the mid-1990s. But just what is all this fighting about, exactly? If you've ever wanted to know just what the heck a lockout or a luxury tax is, what it means for MLB's offseason and why everyone's so angry, we've got you covered.
The collective bargaining agreement — otherwise known as the CBA, essentially an employment contract between MLB and the MLB Players Association that outlines everything from what money teams can spend to when players reach free agency — is set to expire at 11:59 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Dec. 1.
The current CBA was a five-year deal agreed to back in March of 2022, and itself came after a months-long lockout — the first work stoppage MLB had seen in nearly 30 years. If the league and the players union manage to agree to a new framework before the old one expires, the offseason can continue as normal. If they don't, we're almost certainly headed for a lockout.
The difference comes down to which party initiates it. A strike refers to employees (in this case, MLB players, as represented by the MLBPA) withholding their labor in an effort to force improvements in working conditions. A lockout, on the other hand, occurs when employers (in this case, MLB's 30 owners) do not allow their employees to report to work.
Both are simply negotiating tactics, an effort to utilize leverage. The last time MLB missed a World Series, back in 1994, was due to players going on strike. The most recent work stoppage, in the winter of 2021-22, saw owners lock out the players in an effort to extract the concessions they wanted. The latter is where we seem to be headed barring a last-minute change, as teams look to fundamentally reshape baseball's business model.
In short: a salary cap. MLB has never had one at any point in its history, a fact that — as ownership loves to point out — makes it an anomaly among the major North American sports leagues. For the uninitiated, the idea is simple: A salary cap puts a cap on how much any individual team can spend on salary in a given year. The Los Angeles Dodgers, for instance, would no longer be able to continue hoovering up big-time free agents and running payrolls north of $300 million.
Players look at small-market owners sitting on constantly growing investments while refusing to put most of that money back into building a competitive team. Owners, in turn, argue that it's time for baseball to fall in line with football, basketball and hockey, both to give smaller markets a fair chance to compete (not that the Brewers needed the help this year) and to rein in skyrocketing contracts like the 15-year, $765 million deal Juan Soto signed with the New York Mets two years ago.
The very suggestion of a salary cap has historically been a third rail for MLB players, so much so that it's hardly ever even come up in past CBA negotiations. It's not hard to see why: You wouldn't exactly be thrilled about the idea of your earning potentially being artificially capped at something lower than what the free market might otherwise bear. That's led ownership to pursue a number of other measures aimed at leveling the playing field, controlling costs and boosting their franchise values — from revenue sharing (MLB pools all baseball revenue centrally and distributes it evenly among all 30 teams) to the luxury tax to MLB Draft and international free agency penalties.
In recent years, though, the tide has shifted. Rob Manfred and the owners he represents have felt increasingly emboldened to finally go big, believing they have popular support on their side amid a Dodgers dynasty.
The salary cap is the headliner: a $245.3 million hard cap at the top end (which nine teams cleared in 2026), paired with a $171.2 million floor (which 12 teams, including both pennant winners, failed to reach). But that's far from the only thing that owners are pushing for, including changes to everything from contract structure and postseason format to the length of the regular season.
Here's a rundown of some other bullet points from the league's current proposals:
Of course, all of those changes are contingent upon the players accepting a salary cap, which remains a bright red line for the MLBPA.
The players contend that, if the league wants more competitive balance, there are plenty of ways to do it that don't involve depressing player earnings.
Would it suddenly give the Pirates as much money to spend as the Dodgers? Of course not. But it would ensure that even the smallest markets are receiving a healthy chunk of baseball revenue on a yearly basis, it would incentivize teams to be active in player acquisition and, most importantly from the MLBPA's perspective, it would limit the extent to which the league is able to artificially manipulate player salaries.
That's the big question right now. The owners seem determined to make this the moment for baseball to finally embrace a salary cap. The players are similarly determined not to be the ones to finally cede that all-important ground. What's so difficult about this situation is that it really is a binary — there's no middle ground between "salary cap" and "no salary cap". It's just a matter of which side caves first.
As far as missing actual games go, it all depends on how long this lockout drags on. Everyone expects the Dec. 1 deadline to pass without an agreement. From there, the two sides have until the middle of March to strike a deal before regular-season games get put on the chopping block. The 2021-22 lockout ended on March 10, which delayed Opening Day by a week but still allowed for a 162-game season after the league agreed to push the start of the playoffs back as well. No one wants to be playing baseball in the winter, though, so any further than that runs the risk of missing games.
Again, it's hard to say. Last time around, we saw a flurry of free agent and trade activity before the lockout began, including Corey Seager and Marcus Semien signing with the Texas Rangers on huge deals. Then again, the prospect of a salary cap wasn't on the table, so teams could largely use their own payroll figures to determine how much money they had available to spend.
Even if the league gets its way, there will almost certainly be a years-long phasing in to allow every team to become cap compliant; it's not as though the Dodgers will need to shed $100 million in salary overnight. But will teams be as willing to throw, say, $400 million at Tarik Skubal if they don't know what their financial future will look like?
Then again, players who aren't quite of Skubal's caliber might be a little more motivated to lock in a guaranteed salary now rather than wait to see what lies on the other side of a new CBA. So we could still see some movement, at least until Dec. 2 rolls around and everything goes into a deep freeze.
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