Coming off a fantastic World Series and a regular season of increased attendance and viewership, Major League Baseball is enjoying a renaissance it long sought. In the Fall Classic, Japanese stars Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto of the Los Angeles Dodgers took the spotlight opposite Dominican star Vladimir Guerrero Jr. of the Toronto Blue Jays, culminating in a winner-take-all Game 7 that the league said averaged 51 million viewers across the U.S., Canada and Japan.
“I’m biased, right? I devoted my life to this, but you see what we got to see in the World Series, and it just reaffirms why all of us who love the sport believe it’s the greatest game there is,” said Chaim Bloom, president of baseball operations for the St. Louis Cardinals. “It was an amazing showcase of what this sport is, what it can mean, what it can do. We all see that.”
For the next 12 months, the most important question in baseball will be how ready the sport’s leaders are willing to risk that momentum.
Baseball’s current labor deal expires in December 2026, and a work stoppage in 2027 over competitive balance, an issue owners are trumpeting, could undo or even reverse the goodwill the sport has accumulated. That possibility was not lost on executives at last week’s general managers meetings in Las Vegas. There, club officials both criticized the state of competitive balance in MLB while simultaneously praising the overall health of the game, a tension that will sit at the heart of talks between players and owners, which have already started preliminarily.
Some execs acknowledged that, ultimately, they fear a work stoppage could stymie the sport’s growth.
“Yeah, absolutely, I would worry about that,” said Matt Arnold, president of baseball operations for the Milwaukee Brewers, a smaller market team that was two wins from the World Series. “We have a great product right now, and I would be really sad if we didn’t find a way to keep it going, because I think we have great momentum and I hope we don’t lose it.”
“Look, nobody wants to see anything happen that would infringe upon the progress the game is making,” said Mike Hazen, general manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks.
For most of Rob Manfred’s 11-year tenure as MLB’s commissioner, he has sought the kind of momentum the game has now. All nine general managers or presidents whom The Athletic approached said that baseball appeared to be in a healthy place. Rule changes the commissioner instituted in 2023 drew much of the credit.
“The pitch clock was a tremendous success in terms of the entertainment product,” said Baltimore Orioles president of baseball operations Mike Elias. “We have a lot of talent right now that’s fun to watch, and a lot of good personalities. The international game both in Asia and Latin America really seems like it’s growing too.”
Manfred’s office has often touted the league’s recent success. Attendance, measured as tickets sold, grew this year for a third straight regular season, marking the first time baseball has seen an uptick in three consecutive years since 2005-07, the league said in a news release. Then, in the fall, the World Series produced the most-watched final round for the sport since 1992.
Overall World Series viewership was up 19 percent from a year ago, per MLB.
“If you watched the playoffs this year, it was a lot of fun,” said Arnold. “I was nervous, and I didn’t have anything invested in the World Series. That was great baseball. Just the quality of the product at the end of season I thought was electric. I mean, the fans loved it. As a fan myself, I loved it. I really did.”
The danger of a work stoppage is in turning fans away. They eventually came back after an ugly 232-day strike in 1994-95, but there are so many more entertainment options available today, in sport or otherwise — not only at home, but anywhere a cell phone gets service.
The sport’s owners are gathering today and tomorrow in New York at MLB’s headquarters for one of their regular meetings, where they will discuss labor issues. Manfred has repeatedly pointed to competitive balance and revenue disparities, a hint that a fight between players and owners could be just a year away — not just an offseason lockout, as was the case during the 2021-22 negotiation, but perhaps a shutdown that costs regular-season games.
“Despite the success of the World Series, we consistently hear from fans who want us to address competitive balance and fairness so that every team has a chance to compete,” league spokesperson Glen Caplin said.
Owners might push for a salary cap, something players historically have been willing to miss many games to avoid. GMs generally agree with the league office that competitive balance should be improved, although club officials with lesser resources also frame the task of outdoing big-market behemoths as a challenge.
“It’s the same thing we’ve always said: Payroll is not prohibitive to being successful, I do think it has its advantages,” Hazen said.
Like the New York Yankees at the turn of the century, one team powers much of the conversation. The deep-pocketed Dodgers, with their estimated $415 million payroll — a record for the sport — just became the first team to win back-to-back championships in a quarter century.
“I do think it is one of the bigger concerns that the sport has, but that has nothing to do with who won the World Series,” said Bloom. “Certainly you can look at the Dodgers and say they have some advantages. They also operate at a really high level, and I think all of us who do this understand that and appreciate the things, all the things, that have to happen behind the scenes regardless of what your payroll is to win.”
The Dodgers’ dramatic World Series win was great for ratings, but also bolstered concerns about competitive balance. (Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)
The Brewers, who were knocked out of the playoffs by the Dodgers, won a big-league best 97 games in the 2025 regular season. Milwaukee’s success is sometimes used as evidence that smaller-market teams have a reasonable opportunity.
“Our game is achieving records in attendance, ratings, and revenues, and the smallest-market team had the best record in the league,” said Players Association executive director Tony Clark. “Baseball is doing great, and the league should be focused on keeping that momentum going.”
The Brewers’ Arnold, however, said that “it’s getting harder” to achieve those results.
“It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of work to get to where we are, and a really good team of people,” Arnold said. “It’s the combination of working around the clock in every space to make sure that they’re very good. When you stare at just the payroll itself, I think that that can make you feel uneasy. But there were also a lot of teams that didn’t even get in the playoffs that spent a lot of money. So it’s not just the money, it’s how you use it.”
Manfred’s position is that, at the least, the sport has a perception problem that causes fans in smaller markets to doubt their team’s chances. One club executive went further.
“If the goal is to have success determined by things other than your revenue, we are far from that right now,” said a National League GM who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Baseball is famously random. In other sports, the NL executive pointed out, the best players have greater influence.
“You have LeBron (James) on your team, you can win a title. You don’t, you probably can’t. If you have Lamar Jackson on your team, you’re good. If you don’t, you’re looking for Lamar Jackson,” the GM said. “There is no equivalent in baseball, and so it’s hard to disentangle the inherent structure of the economics from the actual game itself, where the best player in baseball is worth, what, 10 wins?
“But if we really want to ensure true parity, and truly everybody having a chance to win — not equally, but based on things other than how much money you have to spend — I don’t think we’re in that situation.”
The Pittsburgh Pirates spent about $85 million last season, good for the fifth-lowest payroll in the sport, and are an easy example of small-market plight. They haven’t won a World Series since 1979.
“Wish it was different, right?” Pirates general manager Ben Cherington said of the sport’s competitive balance. “If I’ve got my Pirates hat on, obviously, there’s things that we’d love to see different in the economic model of the game. But there are ways to win baseball games, whether you’re the Pirates or the Mets or any other team. That’s the job, you got to figure out a way to do it. It’s proven you can do that. We got to do our jobs really well, and that’s the fun of it.”
The big-market New York Mets, whom Cherington referenced? They haven’t won since 1986.
Clark, the union head, has often said he believes many teams can spend more than they do. All club finances are disclosed to the union but not to the public — save for those of the publicly traded Atlanta Braves — making league and union arguments over revenues difficult to vet. Owners have also long had economic incentives to push for a cap, which would instantly boost franchise values. The Braves reported $671.2 million in revenue through the first nine months of this year, a 10 percent jump over the same period last year.
Some analyses show little difference in parity in baseball compared to other sports. A year ago, when the Dodgers and the New York Yankees were in the World Series, Manfred told The Athletic, “Our record on competitive balance is darn good.”
No one would contest, however, that the Cincinnati Reds make less money than the Dodgers, and thus have less to spend. Baseball has a longstanding system for revenue sharing between owners, but does not have a salary cap and floor the way most professional sports leagues do.
“We’re in a market that, hey, we do the best we can with the resources we got,” Reds president of baseball operations Nick Krall said. “We got to keep trying to grind it out.”
To one player agent, ultimately, neither Manfred nor Clark has a good reason to allow canceled games in 2027.
“Everyone else in baseball seems to be kicking ass,” said the agent, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “If we miss games they should both step down.”
Scott Boras, the most famous player agent in the sport, said that he has “never seen the momentum” the game has today.
“I think the NFL and NBA wishes that they had such a following,” Boras said. “As far as what they do to continue that flow, I would suggest that the parties understand that the real value and rights in this game is about what media rights the league receives.”
But the debate over parity is also informed by decades of labor fights. These issues aren’t new, Elias of the Orioles pointed out.
“I don’t think it’s a secret that there are disparities between the way that franchises tend to run based on the size of the media market and metropolitan area and the business climate in those cities,” Elias said. “It affects the way that baseball teams run their businesses in a way that doesn’t apply in the NFL or the NBA as much, just because of the labor landscape, but also the media landscape.”
MLB offered a few figures: this year, a top-10 payroll club won the World Series for a fourth consecutive year, and the sixth time out of the last seven seasons. A bottom-15 market hasn’t won since the Kansas City Royals in 2015.
In that same period, MLB said that a combined 15 bottom-half teams by market size have won in the NFL, NBA and NHL. And payroll disparity, which the league defines here as the ratio of top-five to bottom-five payrolls, is 4.7, “the largest on record, dating back to 1985,” per MLB.
Ratio of top-5 vs. bottom-5 MLB payrolls
YearsRatio
2025
4.7
2022-2024
4
2017-2021
2.9
2012-2016
3
2007-2011
3.3
2003 – 2006
3.4
1997-2022
3.4
1995-1996
3.2
1990-1994
2.4
1985-1989
2.2
*Data provided by MLB
From 2022-24, the first three years of this collective bargaining agreement, the ratio was 4.0. During the prior CBA, from 2017-21, it was 2.9, the lowest clip since the 1994-95 strike, per the league’s numbers.
The union took umbrage with those calculations, however, because they’re based on salary figures that include what teams pay in luxury tax — the additional money they have to pay to exceed certain salary thresholds. This year, for example, the Dodgers totaled $509 in MLB’s calculation, with $168 million of that being paid to competitive balance tax.
“Those numbers are misleading on their face because they include as ‘payroll’ luxury-tax amounts that are not paid directly to players on those teams,” the Players Association said in a statement. “In fact, about half of the luxury tax proceeds are rerouted directly to small-market clubs as a form of revenue sharing. And the other half are used to fund benefits for players on all 30 teams.”
The union offered its own facts and figures, noting that since 2000, MLB has had 16 teams win a championship, compared to 14 in the NHL, 13 in the NFL and 12 in the NBA. Although the NBA and NFL have had caps for decades, 22 active teams still haven’t won a championship between those two sports, including several small-market clubs, the union added.
Cherington has been in big-league front offices since 1999. Of late, he’s been impressed by MLB’s focus on the sport’s health.
“What does the game on the field look like? How strong is it? What do fans think about that? And how do we keep making it better?” Cherington said. “I can’t remember a time where that conversation has been as thoughtful as it has been the last few years, and continuing now. Net-net, feels like a better game than it was 10 years ago.”
The question now: how will the same decision-makers inside MLB weigh change against the potential for missed games? An offseason lockout that ends in March is damaging, but less so than one that wipes out regular-season contests.
“Baseball just has a way of consistently being there for the American people,” Elias of the Orioles said. “It’s very resilient. I think the game is in a healthy spot. But people are rightfully going to continue to look at ways to improve competitive balance.”
The danger comes when baseball isn’t there at all — at a time when there has never been more competition for fan engagement.
“You just don’t want to remove yourself from the stage for any length of time,” Bloom said. “We also know that there’s definitely a lot of issues and concerns on every side of this.”
Would some number of missed games be worth it?
“I truly don’t know,” said the anonymous National League GM.