Dodgers’ success fuels MLB’s looming labor showdown
Tongue in cheek or not, it was not supremely helpful for Dave Roberts to bellow, “Let’s go really ruin baseball,” into an on-field microphone during the Los Angeles Dodgers manager’s second consecutive pennant-clinching celebration.
Nothing Roberts might have said in that moment would have shaken any of the principals who need to sort through the wreckage of baseball’s coming economic war, but public pressure will be important. Whatever percentage of fans already rolling their eyes to the West undoubtedly grew, and the precarious balance that has kept Major League Baseball on the field for 30 years grows ever closer to tipping over.
There’s no reasonable argument that this World Series represents any meaningful clash in the economics of the game. The juggernaut Dodgers are opposed by the Toronto Blue Jays, who are owned by a telecommunications behemoth, considered handing Shohei Ohtani the exact contract the Dodgers gave him, and signed Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to a $500 million extension just months ago.
In good faith or bad, some will take this matchup as proof that the game’s economics are irreparably broken, and that belief alone forms the baseline for serious concerns.
MLB’s collective bargaining agreement with the players’ association expires after the 2026 season, and there is a mix of belief and fear on both sides that the game could be in for a protracted labor dispute. The lockout between the 2021 and 2022 seasons lasted 99 days and, while it did not lead to the cancellation of any games, spring training started a month late and a week of games was rescheduled.
That negotiation resulted in very few fundamental changes to the structure of the game’s economics. The Dodgers’ dominance in recent years—fueled in part by economic might unmatched since the New York Yankees dynasty of the late 1990s—has created a convenient scapegoat for profit-seeking owners who continue to try to squeeze every penny from their revenue-sharing checks.
If those owners view public dissatisfaction as a leverage point, they can hardly be blamed. MLB and its owners were able to enact a luxury tax temporarily in the late 1990s and then permanently after the 2002 CBA, establishing a soft cap that has become a hard guideline for more and more teams over the years.
The luxury tax became part of the game’s economics just as local television rights exploded in value, providing a significant windfall for ownership groups. Now, with those same rights seemingly scaling back locally but continuing to grow nationally, a push for a hard salary cap is sure to come from ownership, and the successful, high-spending Dodgers will find themselves under even more intense scrutiny.
A salary cap has long been anathema to the MLBPA, and if owners are intent on enacting one, it seems inevitable that at least some games in the 2027 season will be lost to a labor stoppage. When NHL owners pushed for a cap 20 years ago, the league lost an entire season. The impasse broke largely after prominent veteran players broke ranks and hamstrung union leadership in a gambit to resume their careers.
Leadership on the MLB side has changed drastically since the luxury tax was implemented. Bud Selig, first acting and then permanent commissioner, was a small-market owner vested in maximizing that group’s profits. Some vestiges of that influence still linger in the league office: Colorado’s Dick Monfort and Milwaukee’s Mark Attanasio have each chaired the league’s labor committee, and Monfort in particular has not shied away from public comments on the state of the game, even responding to individual fans’ emails.
Rob Manfred, however, is not a small-market owner. He is a New York management-side labor lawyer who understands his bosses—the owners—and has historically sought to please them above all else. He has also announced a planned retirement following the 2028 season, which may limit concern about reprisals for his negotiation tactics.
If there is a lockout that costs games—or, God forbid, a season—that will define Manfred’s legacy. As someone who has worked tirelessly to tweak the product on the field, largely for the better, to make it sleeker and more appealing to broad audiences, that shame would hang around his neck much like the lost 1994 season does Selig’s.
It may not matter, and Manfred may well be locked in as a loyal soldier for ownership. It’s also not a positive sign for the state of the game that any one person’s resolve could so heavily affect whether baseball maintains its prominence in national culture. If that is already true, then the outcome of the coming World Series might have nothing to do with the reckoning on the horizon.
Still, there is value in lowering the public temperature before the intensity is more broadly perceived. Roberts and the Dodgers haven’t ruined baseball, but they would do well not to pretend otherwise. Too much of the game depends on it.
