On an earnings call Wednesday, Atlanta Braves executives made no direct mention of the elephant in the room, the looming lockout that could threaten the 2027 Major League Baseball season. But the Braves nonetheless shared information relevant to baseball’s future and its labor dispute, including a big increase in the team’s revenues from businesses around its ballpark.

For the first six months of 2026, the team said its overall revenues had reached $377.1 million, an increase of about 5 percent from the first half of 2025, when it took in $359.7 million. The Braves played 39 home games in the first half of this year, one fewer than they did a year ago.

The team also reported an overall $5.8 million loss in adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization for the first half, compared to a $37.2 million gain the year before.

While negotiating the next collective bargaining agreement, MLB players and owners will continue fighting over the economics of the sport, including whether the league should have a salary cap. The current deal expires on Dec. 1, and a central issue is how teams are faring financially. As a publicly traded entity, the Braves play a unique role in that conversation because they provide more regular financial information to the public than any other team.

The overall revenue figures the Braves provide combine two buckets. “Baseball revenue,” which includes ticket sales and game-related income, was up 2 percent for the first six months of the year, to about $322.2 million.

Meanwhile, “mixed-use development,” which covers The Battery, the team’s real estate project around its home stadium, Truist Park, was up much more: 26 percent, to about $54.9 million.

The Battery is considered the gold standard in the sport for expanding a baseball team’s income beyond games, and other owners have sought to emulate the Braves’ setup. During this year’s World Cup, which included matches in Atlanta, the Braves held watch parties at The Battery that brought in more than 35,000 fans, said Mike Plant, who heads the Braves’ development company.

“The Battery Atlanta saw 4.7 million visitors through the first half of 2026, a 6 1/2 percent increase from last year, as our expanded offerings continue to drive visitors from across the Southeast,” said Plant, who added the team is “building a more balanced and resilient business around our core baseball operations.”

Under MLB’s salary-cap proposal, which players oppose, players and owners would formally divide up the industry’s revenues between themselves. A key issue in a cap system would be how much money MLB owners would share with players from their real estate projects around stadiums, such as The Battery.

In the owners’ initial proposal for a cap, they largely walled off mixed-use developments from the pot of money to be shared, aside from parking when games are played.

On a per-game basis, the Braves are faring slightly better in baseball revenue than they did through the first six months of 2025. The team has taken in about $8.3 million per game on average this year, compared to about $7.9 million.

Costs, though, have gone up: the Braves reported about $308.7 million in “baseball operating costs” for the first half of the year, compared to $259.6 million in the same time last year, a 19 percent jump. At about $258.1 million, the Braves have a larger payroll than last year’s $238.6 million, per Cot’s Contracts.

Some of the increase is also owed to the team’s launching of its own local media operation, BravesVision.

“That is a new set of expenses that we have on our books this year that we haven’t had before,” said Jill Robinson, the team’s chief financial officer. “It’s going to be an ongoing expense with expenses being slightly elevated during the season and some expenses (higher) in the off-season quarters as well. But you can expect this to be a go-forward trend.”

How BravesVision is doing overall, however, is hard to decipher.

Media money

Inside of baseball revenue, the Braves report a line item for “media-related” income, which they said dropped 12 percent in the first six months of this year, to $75.4 million from $85.4 million.

There are two caveats, however. As the Braves list it, media-related income doesn’t represent BravesVision alone: it also includes the team’s slice of national media deals.

MLB has rights agreements with companies like Fox and TBS, which broadcast the postseason, and the fees from those arrangements are split equally between the 30 clubs. The current national media deals are estimated to be worth north of $2 billion annually.

In their earnings release, the Braves acknowledged some of the drop was tied to “changes in certain national media rights arrangements.”

But during the earnings call, the Braves said the primary issue is that they set up BravesVision in a way where the team is paid at different times than it was in the past, when the Braves had a third party handle its local broadcasts.

“We remain very encouraged by the early success of BravesVision, and are confident that we will replicate or exceed revenue from our prior third-party local rights partner on an annualized basis,” Robinson said. “Distribution-revenue payments will come in on a slower cadence than our traditional rights-fee-model payments were received, creating a sizable shift in the timing of cash receipts. Advertising revenue will be paid following the month when the ad airs.”

Even by the end of this year, how well BravesVision did might be hard for the public to sort out.

“Since BravesVision effectively launched on April 1, the 2026 fiscal year will not reflect a full year of distribution revenue,” Robinson said.

Braves chairman Terry McGuirk said he expects the next round of MLB’s national media deals will produce contracts that will last “well into” the 2030s, possibly late into the decade.

The current deals are set to expire Jan. 1, 2029, McGuirk said.

“The NBA just concluded (a new set of rights negotiations), and went from approximately $2.7 billion a year to $7.7 billion a year, midpoint to midpoint of deals,” McGuirk said. “Obviously those negotiations are led by the commissioner, and I think he would also agree that there is a lot of untapped growth in the popularity of baseball, and we’re looking to achieve that growth when we get to that deal.”

Under MLB’s cap proposal, the owners would share all local broadcast equal money among themselves, just like they do the money from national media, a potentially huge change. Teams with rich TV contracts, like the Los Angeles Dodgers, would put their rights fees into the pot along with teams that have much less broadcast income.

The union has also proposed that teams share much more local media money, although not quite all — and that there would be no payroll cap.

Whether MLB teams would agree to make big changes to local media without a cap is unclear.

McGuirk didn’t offer much when an analyst on the earnings call asked about the importance of sharing local TV money going forward.

“The status quo is … very strong local media offerings in the major markets,” McGuirk said. “I would suggest that should there be changes to where we all are at the present, it would be a 30-team activity, and all 30 teams would be involved.

“As far as the present, until there are changes, we remain very bullish on what we’ve created.”