In the group chat with my friends from high school, there’s no more polarizing topic than baseball.
We’re divided pretty evenly between loyal diehards, and those who see baseball fading in relevance — a sport where only three or four teams are trying to win the World Series, and everyone else is just developing players to eventually trade to them.
If you can’t tell, I fit squarely into the latter camp. I can’t watch a game without getting bored within five minutes. The gameplay is just too slow.
So you can imagine my joy when I came across a research note from financial analytics firm S3 Partners that said short sellers are increasingly betting on a Major League Baseball lockout starting in December.
The proxy S3 used was short interest in class C shares for the Atlanta Braves — the only publicly traded MLB club. The chart below shows that short interest as a percentage of equity float has surged since late May.
The inflection point came on May 28, when MLB owners proposed a salary cap, which was a nonstarter for the players union and ratcheted up tension ahead of upcoming labor negotiations. (h/t Bloomberg for flagging that date.) Short-sellers have since piled into bets against Braves shares, which could suffer if a prolonged lockout hits next season.
“Every week without a deal between December and spring training is the shorts’ friend,” the S3 research team wrote.
To get into specifics, S3 found that there’s been a record-setting 142% rise in total Braves shares shorted since the start of 2026. That includes a 14% increase in the last 30 days.
It’s also worth noting that Braves shares are sitting near record highs. The stock has benefited from soaring sports-franchise valuations, particularly following the record $12.5 billion sale of the LA Lakers. It’s common for stocks at highs to attract short interest from investors looking to hedge. Still, the timing of the move makes the MLB labor standoff hard to ignore.
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So with their precious MLB potentially on ice into next season, my diehard friends would have nothing to counter non-baseball programming. Visions are dancing in my head of incessant, unopposed Major League Soccer updates.
Now if you’ll excuse me, one of my baseball friends just sent another video of Pete Crow-Armstrong hitting a home run. I have to go and pretend that I watched it by giving it a “like.”
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