Welcome to the first installment of Bottom of the Ninth! With Spring Training\u00a0in full force and opening day\u00a0now less than a month\u00a0away, baseball season is officially back, and fans are preparing for the six long months\u00a0it takes to determine if 2026 will be their favorite team\u2019s year. However, one important question looms over the upcoming season: What will baseball look like after it concludes?<\/p>\n
With the collective bargaining agreement for the Major League Baseball\u00a0Players Association set to expire\u00a0on Dec. 1, the union will have to negotiate new terms that satisfy both owners and Commissioner Rob Manfred. This daunting and lengthy task will likely lead the league toward a lockout in 2027, making the future of the sport beyond this season uncertain. Since this reality is widely\u00a0known around the league, it will likely have a noticeable impact on the 2026 season, the last\u00a0that will be played under the current agreement.<\/p>\n
Thus, I will be using this column to analyze the top stories around MLB as they arise throughout the season and discuss what they might mean for the future of baseball. No matter what your level of baseball knowledge may be, I invite you to follow along and hope you learn something interesting along the way. To begin, let\u2019s explain how the league got in this precarious position in the first place.<\/p>\n
MLB is certainly no stranger to lockouts or labor disputes. The most infamous example is the 1994\u201395 players\u2019 strike, which forced the cancellation of the World Series for the first time since 1904. More recently, the league experienced a lockout during the 2021\u201322\u00a0offseason after the previous collective bargaining agreement expired. That dispute lasted 99\u00a0days and delayed the start of the 2022 season before the two sides finally struck a deal in March. While the league did manage to play a full schedule that year, the lengthy delay revealed how wide the gap has become between ownership and the players\u2019 union.<\/p>\n
Those same underlying tensions remain today, and they help explain why next year\u2019s round of negotiations could take even longer. Overall, the current dispute centers on money and how it should be most fairly distributed. Players have grown increasingly frustrated with what they view as low salaries, particularly for younger players who make up the majority of MLB rosters but earn near the league minimum during their first several seasons. The current bargaining agreement introduced measures like a pre-arbitration player bonus pool\u00a0and higher minimum salaries, but many players believe these steps did not go far enough.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, owners have their own concerns about the sport\u2019s economic structure. Small-market teams argue that rising payroll expectations make it difficult for them to compete with wealthier franchises. Many are pushing for a salary cap\u00a0system similar to what is used in the NFL and NBA, which the players association has historically rejected outright.<\/p>\n
Another likely flashpoint is the competitive balance tax, often referred to as the luxury tax. This tax penalizes\u00a0teams that exceed certain payroll thresholds by requiring them to pay an additional tax, which players argue\u00a0discourages teams from signing free agents and suppresses the overall market for veteran talent. However, many owners and fans of lower-spending teams view the tax as a necessary mechanism to prevent runaway spending by the richest clubs.<\/p>\n
The upcoming season will be about more than just wins and losses, as the direction of the sport itself may soon be on the negotiating table. Preseason projections indicate\u00a0that the gap between large- and small-market teams\u00a0will only continue to grow, but I will be keeping an eye on this narrative as the season unfolds. Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for future editions, which will be published biweekly on Tuesdays.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Welcome to the first installment of Bottom of the Ninth! With Spring Training\u00a0in full force and opening day\u00a0now…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":526318,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[49,48,462,82],"class_list":["post-526317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526317\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/526318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}