The MLB Lockout Nobody Wants, But Everybody's Bracing For

The MLB Lockout Nobody Wants, But Everybody's Bracing For

Entertainment — September 10, 2026

Slide 1: Baseball might be about to do to itself what it took a home run chase and an asterisk-filled era to fix the last time. Slide 2: Major League Baseball's collective bargaining agreement expires in December, and owners appear all but certain to lock the players out. Legendary sports agent Leigh Steinberg calls this the murkiest environment the sport has faced since 1994. Slide 3: The number worth remembering is 40. That's the percentage drop in gross receipts baseball suffered the year after the 1994 strike wiped out the World Series. Fans stayed away, and it took a controversial home run race to lure them back. Slide 4: Owners are pushing hard for a salary cap, something the players' union has fought against for decades. Steinberg points to the Dodgers' contracts for Kyle Tucker and Edwin Díaz as the moment that convinced owners to fight for a cap, and both deals have badly underperformed this season. Slide 5: Watching two superstar contracts flop publicly seems to have convinced ownership that spending is out of control, even though revenue from TV money, attendance, merchandising, fantasy, and gambling has never been stronger, and owners can't credibly claim economic hardship. Slide 6: This isn't just a baseball story, it's a negotiation story. Steinberg's advice is that you need to see the deal from the other side's perspective, or the two sides can get deadlocked. Slide 7: When two sides who don't need the deal to survive both believe they're right, that's exactly when negotiations get dangerous. Millionaires and billionaires rarely blink first, and rarely blink at all. Slide 8: Watch the coming months closely. Preliminary talks haven't produced serious progress, and the last lockout in 2022 dragged on for 99 days before a new agreement was ratified. Slide 9: A game doesn't need a villain to get hurt, it just needs both sides convinced they can't afford to lose. Slide 10: If both sides are this dug in this early, who's actually negotiating for the fans?