A lockout after the 2026 season, when the current Collective Bargaining Agreement ends on Dec. 1, is all but inevitable — and the Dodgers are guaranteed to be at the center of that argument.
MLB owners were reportedly incensed about the Dodgers’ Kyle Tucker signing, but it’s just the latest in a long list of grievances that both they and fans have for how the current system works.
The owners want a salary cap. The players don’t. The Dodgers’ powerhouse Guggenheim ownership group, headed by CEO Mark Walter, could be the lone dissenter among all of the owners, but it’s hard to believe that even they wouldn’t take the opportunity to pay players less if it’s presented to them.
That’s the cloud that’s hanging over the entire 2026 season. If baseball is played next year, when will it start? How many games will be lost? Will it all amount to the same thing the 1994-95 strike did: no salary cap, MLB free agency proceeds as usual?
The Dodgers also have a unique problem brewing that will certainly come up in CBA talks but will be a far more pressing problem even after a potential 2026-27 work stoppage: They have one of the most lucrative TV revenue streams in US sports.
All of it can be traced back to some scheming by former owner Frank McCourt, which has allowed Walter’s Dodgers to thrive since 2012. As MLB’s labor and broadcast issues start to come to a head, and as both a lockout and the potential consolidation of broadcasts under MLB’s ownership, the Dodgers have more than just a strike to worry about.
Dodgers might have to worry about TV revenue beyond a potential 2026-27 lockout
The LA Times’ Bill Shaikin broke down the issue, but it’s still a lot to digest. We’ll try to summarize here.
When he was in the process of selling the team, McCourt declared bankruptcy, which barred then-Commissioner Bud Selig and other MLB owners’ involvement in choosing a new owner. Selig had already rejected a $3 billion local TV deal between the Dodgers and FOX Sports. But McCourt wanted to be able to tell the new owner how much they would be making on a broadcast deal (though still yet to be agreed upon), so he and the league agreed to base a fair-market valuation on that rejected $3 billion deal.
A year after Walter took over, he sold what would’ve been $3 billion dollar rights to Time Warner Cable for $8.35 billion. But because the league had settled with McCourt on the assumption of $3 billion, their 34% cut taken from all broadcast revenue would be based on that initial figure. The leftover money would not be subject to revenue sharing.
And that’s the seed for all of this. The Dodgers have had a leg up to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars since 2013.
MLB’s national TV contracts expire in 2028, and Commissioner Rob Manfred “would like to offer traditional networks and streaming services the chance to bid not just on national broadcasts but on an all-baseball, all-the-time outlet where fans could watch any team, wherever they lived, and with no blackouts.”
That sounds pretty nice, right? Yes, but it would require the Dodgers to forfeit their ownership of SportsNet LA, which Shaikin theorizes Walter would be unwilling to do unless the league offers him something big in return — “exempt the Dodgers from sharing ticket revenue, or to secure the Japanese television rights now controlled by MLB.”
The Dodgers need to navigate a potential lockout first. But all of this will surely come up during CBA negotiations and are bound to persist until 2028.