Labor Strife Looms Over MLB Opening Day
Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! May your baseball-related hopes spring eternal this week—for lo, the winter is past, Opening Day is almost here, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
We’re talkin’ baseball today, but we haven’t forgotten about March Madness, we’ll take a stop in golfland, and there’s also a hockey goal that you’ve got to see to believe.
Before we start, a Reason Friends and Family Bracket Contest update: Mark S. has a narrow lead on the men’s side with 550 points, putting him in the 99.9th percentile of brackets on ESPN. You deserve a waffle party, Mark S.! On the women’s side, we have a three-way tie of people at 570 points, but only in the 99th percentile—close, but not quite waffle party material, sorry friends.
Locker Room Links
- Our resident Los Angeles Angels superfan, Matt Welch, gets mentioned in the Los Angeles Times‘ rather dour preview of the Angels’ season.
- College basketball’s sweatiest coach is heading to Texas.
- A great defense of sports betting from Ben Domenech.
- The best team in a bracket this month might not be a basketball team—it might just be Wisconsin women’s hockey. (They won the title in dramatic fashion on Sunday.)
- But this is the most important bracket news this month.
- Elsewhere in Reason: “Trump and Congress Have a Right and a Duty To Kill the Department of Education“
- RIP George Foreman:
In honor of the late George Foreman (R.I.P.), here is one of the greatest posts of the early blogosphere: https://t.co/gTSgFez9vo pic.twitter.com/RLzgs6kBKB
— Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) March 22, 2025
Labor Strife Looms Over Opening Day
Things are going pretty well for Major League Baseball right now, which means they’re probably about to badly screw it up.
Attendance is trending upward, game times are shorter and more digestible, TV numbers are promising, and the league has approximately 1 billion fans in Japan (but seriously, the Tokyo Series games averaged 24 million viewers there, or roughly one-fifth of the country’s population). The rule changes of 2023 seem to have accomplished their primary goals (despite my disapproval at the time).
Yet a potential player lockout before the 2027 season looms over the sport, and there’s a good chance a lockout goes a lot more poorly than the last one, which only narrowly avoided any lost games. Commissioner Rob Manfred is already playing a very weird expectations game, saying offseason lockouts should be the new norm: “It’s actually a positive,” because of the leverage. MLB Players Association Executive Director Tony Clark is already saying he expects a lockout too: “Unless I am mistaken, the league has come out and said there’s going to be a work stoppage,” seemingly referring to Manfred’s comments.
Baltimore Orioles owner David Rubenstein is asking for a salary cap, and there’s no doubt other owners of midmarket teams agree. Fans and owners might call even louder for parity if the Los Angeles Dodgers win the World Series again with their $322 million payroll this season and Shohei Ohtani’s $722 million contract. How are the Detroits, Baltimores, and Cincinnatis of the league supposed to compete with that? Betting odds imply the Dodgers have a roughly 30 percent chance of repeating as champions—thankfully, baseball is still pretty random, and high payrolls don’t guarantee success (as the Yankees and Mets have shown with varying degrees of schadenfreude).
But even if the big-payroll teams strike out and midmarkets dominate the playoffs, owners are still going to seek a salary cap. A ceiling on their payroll expenses would boost the value of their teams, probably e
Article from Reason.com
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