The last season for a while?

After being a fan of the Astros for the last 60 seasons, this one feels a little different to me.

Usually, springtime comes with a little joy and a lot of hope. But this season is tinged with melancholy due to the elephant in the dugout.

Unless a miracle occurs, there will be no Major League Baseball season this time next year. And reading the tea leaves, there might not be any baseball at all in 2027.

Baseball’s Collective Bargaining Agreement will expire at the end of 2026. All parties know this. 

But will they start talking about the next agreement now? No. Will they start talking about it after the season ends? Not likely.

And what will be separating the two sides? Well, there are always minor disagreements that could be addressed and run to ground. But the big one – the “Iran is going to unconditionally surrender” equivalent is the one looming over negotiations. Salary Cap. 

Both the NBA and the NFL have salary caps, but baseball never does. 

Well, in truth, the way the owners ran things for decades, from the very start until free agency appeared in the 1970’s, was a type of salary cap. It was a take-it-or-leave-it salary cap. 

These days, getting players to agree to a salary cap is like trying to get the genie to go back into his bottle. 

This can be summarized as the owners saying, “Players, please save us from ourselves.”

Another way to look at this is that the millionaires (players) need to find a middle ground with the billionaires (owners) to figure out how to extort even more money from the thousandaires (us).

Can they find that middle ground before the agreement runs out? There is a chance, but as I read in an ESPN article on the subject, it is the same chance that Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) had with Mary Swanson (Lauren Holley) in Dumb and Dumber. Google It.

What will really happen? Well sometime, perhaps on December 1 2026 when the Agreement expires, the owners will lockout the players. They will all hem and haw until the end of March, when the teams and the players will start missing games. Then it is a matter of who is hurt the worst, who wants it worse, etc.

The wild card here may be that the players are no longer represented by the longtime head of the union, Tony Clark.  Bruce Meyer is the interim head of the union, and he had been the lead on previous negotiations of the agreement in 2020 and 2022. Would it make sense to replace him between now and the expiration of the current agreement? It sure would not make much sense to throw someone into this who has not been involved to date.

The bottom line is that we know the 2026 season will start this week and that we don’t know when or even if the 2027 season will follow suit.