Major League Baseball Players' Association executive director Tony Clark, Santa Claus beard and all, is broadly hinting that the owners will try to impose another lockout on the union as soon as the 2026 season ends.
And why now?
Because of what happened in 2024 — and what is almost certainly going to happen again in 2025.
Last season, the White Sox finished 41-121, the most losses by any team in either league in the "modern era" (from 1901 to the present) — and this year's Rockies are on pace to go 39-123.
(Strangely, the same thing isn't happening at the other end of the standings, where the top 10 teams are separated by just 5 games, making the race for MLB's best record in 2025 look essentially the same as it looked in 2024.)
One can understand why this upsets baseball commissioner Rob Manfred — and his "cure" for this "disease" is a salary cap, which only baseball does not have.
This year, the Mets have the largest payroll in the majors, at $332 million — almost five times that of the $67 million that the sport's biggest misers, the Marlins, spent in 2025.
And if the combination of a salary cap and a wage floor prompts some of the cheapies to sell their teams, like Norman Braman, who sold the Eagles to Jeffrey Lurie just over a year after Judge David Doty brought free agency to the NFL, did? T.S. — and that doesn't stand for tennis shoes!
No fan with an IQ of above freezing cares about who owns the team that s/he roots for — just so long as the owner is committed to winning. As the old Chinese proverb goes, it does not matter if the cat is black or white — just so long as it kills mice.
Besides, baseball has always been the most Darwinian of all our sports: no one has ever expressed any sympathy for losers in baseball — a fact proven by baseball cliches like "cellar" and "Mendoza Line."
True, baseball does have a draft — but it is nowhere near the kind of "equalizer" that either the NFL or the NBA (lottery or not) drafts are.
But imagine what would happen if Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison, and/or Bill Gates were to enter the fraternity of MLB owners. It would be considered bad news indeed to such as Steve Cohen, Mark Walter, and Hal Steinbrenner.
Regardless of Clark's kvetching, the owners have a vested interest in attempting to maintain some semblance of competitive balance: some of us who will read this are old enough to remember the anything-but-good old days when one team in a major-league baseball game was favored over their opponents by 2 runs, or even 2-2 1/2 runs. These same readers will also be old enough to remember the "point-shaving" scandal that almost destroyed college basketball in the early 1950s.
Why should baseball risk having the same thing happen to their sport?
As Ricky Watters famously asked: for who? For what?
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