A looming lockout could test whether baseball players can hold the line against billionaire team owners.
Anti-union MLB commissioner Rob Manfred shakes hands with Team United States manager Mark DeRosa following the game against Team Venezuela at loanDepot park in Miami, Florida, March 17, 2026.(Megan Briggs / Getty Images)
Rob Manfred, the Major League Baseball commissioner, thinks this is the year to break the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), perhaps the country’s strongest union. Manfred represents the owners of the 30 major league teams, while the players association represents the 780 major league players and, since 2022, the approximately 5,500 minor leaguers.
Even before the new baseball season began in March, Manfred was employing his union-busting strategy. He hopes to divide the union members between the star players who, he argues, take in the lion’s share of total salaries, and the lower-paid players who he says are being shortchanged. Manfred and the owners are demanding a salary cap—which is actually a total payroll cap for every team, not a limit on individual players’ compensation—a move that the union has always opposed and insists it will not accept.
Among MLB’s team owners, 29 are billionaires. The wealthiest is the New York Mets’ Steve Cohen, whose net worth is $23 billion. The sole non-billionaire owner, the Miami Marlins’ Bruce Sherman, is worth $500 million. Both earned their fortunes in finance.
Baseball’s moguls, who made or inherited their wealth through the workings of free enterprise capitalism, want to limit what players can be paid. This apparent contradiction will most likely lead to a shutdown of baseball at the end of this season.
Bruce Meyer, the MLBPA’s new interim executive director, met with players on each team during his tour of spring training camps in February. He told The Nation that Manfred’s divide-and-conquer approach was “really nothing new.”
“This is something that’s been going on for decades, including in baseball,” said Meyer, who has worked for the union since 2018 and led several recent negotiations. “This is standard management-labor tactics.”
In anticipation of negotiations over a new five-year contract, Manfred sought to talk directly with players. This is like the CEO of General Motors demanding an audience at a United Auto Workers union meeting. Manfred claimed that the owners intend to “lock out” the players after this season. This is essentially a strike of owners, by refusing to allow the players to attend spring training next year. A lockout would potentially delay or even cancel next year’s regular season.
Last July, when Manfred visited the Philadelphia Phillies players in their clubhouse, Bryce Harper, the team’s star player, confronted Manfred, telling him to “get the fuck out of our clubhouse” if he wanted to talk about a salary cap.
While many fans regard a fight between owners and the players as a squabble between millionaires and billionaires, high-profile union battles have a way of resonating through the broader society. In 1981, when President Ronald Reagan busted the highly skilled Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, it sent a clear message that the federal government would look the other way if corporations broke labor laws. Overall union membership has steady declined since then, even though over two-thirds of Americans support unions, according to the Gallup poll.
If baseball’s owners defeat the players union, it will send another anti-union message to America’s corporate class. And if a lockout drags on, you can be sure that President Trump will try to intervene, given his penchant for surrounding himself with famous athletes and inserting himself into high-profile sports conflicts. In 2016, he told NFL owners to fire players, like Colin Kaepernick, who refused to stand during the national anthem protest over police brutality and racial inequality. Two years later, Trump engaged in a Twitter battle with NBA star LeBron James, who accused the president of “using sport to try to divide us”—meaning the country, not just athletes. Last year, Trump talked with Manfred and urged him to end MLB’s ban on disgraced Pete Rose’s eligibility for the Baseball Hall of Fame because as a player he bet on the sport and then lied about it to investigators. Manfred complied and changed the rules. In February, Trump called Olympic skier Hunter Hess a “real loser” after the athlete expressed “mixed emotions representing the US right now” in the Winter Olympic games. Trump invited the men’s gold-medal ice hockey team to his State of the Union address, and said he would also have to ask their female gold-medal-winning counterparts or he “probably would be impeached.” The women’s team declined Trump’s invitation.
Since the MLBPA negotiated the first collective bargaining agreement in pro sports in 1968, there have been five player strikes and four owner lockouts. The 1994 World Series was canceled because of a 232-day players’ strike. It ended only after then–US District Judge Sonia Sotomayor issued a temporary injunction against the owners for violating labor law. The owners locked out the players before the 2022 season, but no games were lost because the two sides reached an agreement before the season started.
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
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The union owes much of its strength to the strategic savvy of Marvin Miller, a long-term negotiator and economist for the Steelworkers union, whom players hired as the MLBPA’s first full-time executive director in 1966. When Miller arrived, players were essentially owned by their teams, unable to test their value in the job market as a result of the “reserve clause” in every contract. The minimum player salary at the time was $6,000 ($59,000 in today’s dollars) and the average salary was $19,000 ($188,000). Most players, Miller wrote in his autobiography, A Whole Different Ballgame, “were not only ignorant about unions but positively hostile to the idea.”
After Miller’s tenure as executive director (1966–82)—and thanks in part to the sacrifice of Curt Flood, whose suit against MLB in the US Supreme Court for allowing the St. Louis Cardinals to trade him against his will laid the groundwork for overturning the reserve clause—salaries and benefits dramatically improved. Players won the right to hire agents and to negotiate with any team. This year’s minimum player salary is $780,000; the median salary is $1.35 million. To put these figures in perspective, the typical player spends less than five years in the majors.
Pete Fairbanks, a Miami Marlins pitcher and union leader, sees the potential lockout as a straightforward labor-management conflict. “All of us understand that we’re fortunate to play a game and profit off of it,” he said. “But at the end of the day, we are the labor and that’s as simple as I can put it.”
Owners have always cried wolf about how the union would destroy the game, but baseball is thriving. More than 51 million fans in the US, Canada, and Japan watched the Dodgers defeat the Toronto Blue Jays in the final World Series game last year. Teams’ values have increased dramatically. The average team is now worth almost $3 billion, from the Marlins’ $1.4 billion to the Yankees’ $9 billion.
The 2020 season was shortened to 60 games by Covid, but as of last year, attendance at MLB games had climbed to 71.4 million and the average game attracted 29,471 fans—both close to the record. Over the last decade, MLB revenue has increased 33 percent, to $12.1 billion, an all-time peak, fueled by media deals, licensing, and stadium investments.
As in any union battle, the key to the conflict will be whether the players can remain united during negotiations.
Over 25 percent of pro ballplayers are from outside of the United States, most of them from Latin countries. Javier Vasquez, a former player who now works for the MLBPA, says that the union has worked to earn Latin players’ trust. “Many players I talk to only speak little English so navigating the contracts, the media and even the clubhouse is demanding,” he said in an interview with The Nation.
“A lot of these guys were earning a small paycheck in the minor leagues but sent 70 to 80 percent of it home to their families,” he said. “If they make it to the big leagues, they do the same. It’s part of our culture to take care of our families.”
And then there is ICE. A number of Latin players have expressed fear that they will be caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Cincinnati Reds infielder Eugenio Suarez, from Venezuela, told the Cincinnati Enquirer during spring training in Arizona that he was scared, “because you don’t know what’s going to happen if you’re driving down the highway and somebody stops you. Even if you are a citizen.” Players have been told to carry their identification with them everywhere they go. Vasquez said the union has Spanish-speaking lawyers and immigration experts whom they work closely with. Only one major league player has so far publicly spoken out against the ICE raids—the Dodgers’ Kiké Hernandez. Atlanta Braves pitcher Spencer Strider posted an engraving of the Boston Massacre on his social-media feed after the killing of Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minneapolis. Two-time All-Star Sean Doolittle, now a Washington Nationals pitching coach, told The Guardian that the murders of Pretti and Renée Good “felt inevitable since the federal surge began in LA and DC last summer. DHS has an incredibly violent history. What we’re seeing play out in our cities feels like the natural progression of militarizing our police forces, providing endless taxpayer dollars at the expense of schools and social safety net programs.”
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One of the ironies of baseball labor relations is that while the union is perhaps the strongest in the country, its members are generally more conservative than NBA or NFL players, the majority of whom are African American.
One recent study, based on available voter registration records, found that 54 percent of major league baseball players are registered Republicans and only 8 percent registered Democrats. By contrast, 10 percent of NBA players, 12 percent of NFL players, and 44 percent of NHL players are Republicans. (Baseball has seen its share of left-leaning rebels, but more typical is the career of Jim Bunning, a Hall of Fame pitcher and one of the MLBPA founders, who was an anti-union Republican when he served in the House and Senate, representing Kentucky, from 1987 to 2011.)
Players’ differences over politics or religion have seemingly not undermined union solidarity and support for teams investing in top players. Dodgers pitcher Blake Treinen, an evangelical Christian with right-wing political views, told the Los Angeles Times, “If you’re going to complain about a team willing to do what it takes to win, then I think you are in the wrong business.”
Marvin Miller understood that highly skilled workers often develop solidarity based on protecting the prerogatives and ethics of their workplaces. “We’ve all walked in the same shoes,” Fairbanks said, “and that makes it much easier to find common ground with your teammates.”
The union is governed by an executive board composed of 72 major- and minor-league players elected by their teammates to two-year terms. They serve as a conduit to the union on player opinions. That body elects an eight-member executive subcommittee that make key recommendations. It includes Pirate Paul Skenes and Tiger Tarik Skubal, both Cy Young Award winners as best pitchers in their respective leagues last season.
The MLBPA strengthened its organization in 2022 by bringing minor league players into the organization. Their collective bargaining agreement significantly increased their salaries, working conditions, and housing stipends. The team owners are unlikely to lock out the minor league franchises, whose players have a separate agreement with the MLB.
In the past, team owners have tried to use minor league players as strikebreakers during labor disputes. Now that option is foreclosed.
William Simonite, a minor league catcher in the Blue Jays organization who studied industrial relations at Cornell, told The Nation that he “can’t really imagine a situation where scabs would be a thing at this point.” He added, “I think the players have each other’s backs, and ultimately that’s what really matters.”
The union has tried to educate players about its own history, bringing former players like Bobby Bonilla and Cecil Fielder to seminars to discuss how hard previous players worked and sacrificed to win the kinds of wages and contracts that today’s athletes take for granted. Holding the line against a salary cap is one of those accomplishments. But any successful union will tell you that effective labor history programs need to be ongoing and consistent, especially in unions where member turnover is high.
“If you look at the history of the union, we’ve had a foundation set for us,” said the Marlins’ Fairbanks, whose mother is a teacher and union member. “They fought for players’ rights and for the general betterment of the whole, and it’s the job of the veteran players to pass that history on to the younger players.”
While the salary cap is a nonstarter for the union, the leadership recognizes that more can be done for the players who are not stars or whose careers are short.
During the 2022 negotiations, “the veteran leaders fought like hell for record increases in minimum salaries and pre-arbitration bonus pool money [that rewards players before they reach salary arbitration], things that weren’t going to benefit them but would benefit the younger guys,” Meyer said. “That’s always been the history of our union.”
Top baseball agent Scott Boras, whose firm represents over 100 major league players, believes that the players union has some advantages. “The prosperity of this game is in a very unique place, highest media ratings, highest attendance, highest revenues ever,” he told The Nation. During contract negotiations, Boras said, team owners have refused to “tell the truth about how well teams are doing.”
Pointing to the Atlanta Braves, which is a publicly traded company whose finances are therefore available to see, Boras said, “Lo and behold, the Braves are making millions in profits.”
Come December, if games are canceled, the owners will blame union intransigence, an unwillingness to bend to the owners’ insistence on a salary cap.
Both sides will be prepared with war chests. The owners have set aside over $2 billion in anticipation of lost games and revenue. The union, according to a Labor Department filing, has boosted their liquid assets to $519 million, an increase from $353 million in 2024.
Manfred has insisted that a salary cap would help small market teams remain competitive.
Last year, nine major league teams paid the so-called “luxury tax,” which is a penalty imposed upon teams who spend over a given threshold ($241 million in 2025) which is then distributed to other teams who stayed at or under the spending limits. The tax was designed to create more “competitive balance” among teams by disincentivizing excessive spending. On opening day this season, Dodgers owner Mark Walters jumped into the contract fight when he told the Los Angeles Times that MLB had to come up with a system that creates more “parity” among teams. “We can’t win all the time,” said Walters.
In fact, without a salary cap, over the last 11 seasons, 15 different teams have made it to the World Series, including teams from several small markets, so MLB is not dominated by only a few wealthy large-market teams. In fact, every franchise has made the postseason at least once since 2014.
The bigger distinction is that not all teams spend the same percentage of overall revenues to obtain top talent. According to Forbes magazine, six clubs spent less than 40 percent of total revenues on players, and three allocate only 27 percent of revenues on players, while several teams spend over half of their revenue on players’ salaries.
Because teams (except the Braves) refuse to be transparent about their finances, the public is understandably confused about the pros and cons of the salary cap.
The union will need fan support in their fight against the billionaires’ boys club. In the past, the MLBPA created a fund to contribute to stadium workers—such as parking lot attendants and food concession employees—who lost their jobs during lockouts and strikes. Minor league pitcher and union leader Ryan Long thinks that’s still a good gesture. Long, who studied political philosophy at Pomona College, said, “I think it would be great to find ways for the union to help the people selling hot dogs or working at local hotels because in many ways we all share the same goals.”
“It’s outrageous that billionaire team owners are threatening to lock out major league players, damaging the sport’s incredible momentum, robbing fans of America’s game, and causing great harm to players, their families, and the communities of working people that would be impacted by a work stoppage,” said AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler. “The entire labor movement stands in strong solidarity with these exceptional athletes. We demand that the owners negotiate the fair contract players deserve.”
Unlike in other professional sports, no baseball star has ever crossed a union picket line. Perhaps that is the most curious thing of all—a conservative-leaning membership with a large segment of foreign players demonstrating union solidarity that in many ways is unmatched.
During a tough moment during the 1972 strike—the first in the union’s history—a number of players threatened to cross the line to play the season’s opening game. Willie Mays, one of the greatest all-time players, spoke to the union’s executive board at a meeting in New York. Although he was near the end of his career (he retired after the 1973 season), Mays told his fellow players that they had to stay together. “This could be my last game,” Mays said, according to Miller’s autobiography. “It will be painful. But if we don’t hang together, everything we’ve worked for will be lost.”
That kind of commitment from top players has been the union’s not-so-secret weapon.
Kelly CandaeleKelly Candaele, a union organizer for 15 years, produced the documentary film A League of Their Own about his mother’s years in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League.
Peter DreierPeter Dreier teaches politics at Occidental College and is author of several books including Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America, published in April, 2022.