Countdown to lockout.
The Milwaukee Brewers have won the 2026 World Series, the celebrations are over and now it is time to let the rhetoric begin. The clock is ticking and soon it will be December 1st, the day that the present collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association ends. Whatever is left of the newspaper sportswriters and the pundit community will be spelling out a doomsday scenario that people may have seen their last MLB game until 2028. That the owners’ position is rigid, the owners want a salary cap and that the players have dug in. The MLBPA will never agree to a salary cap. In reality, December 1st will come and go and no one except people in the Major League Baseball industry will notice there is a lockout. There will be some innocent people hurt by the lockout who have either lost their jobs or have been furloughed.
The deadline to make sure the spring training schedule is saved and tourists can go to Florida and Arizona knowing they can see spring training is around February 1st, 2027. Hotel operators, car rental agencies and restaurant owners will lose business without spring training and neither the owners nor the players really care about those businesses. Nor will they care about the per diem workers who make some money from games if those games are missed. The real deadline to make sure regular season games are not missed is the first week of March 2027 with the season scheduled to begin on March 24th. The players need somewhere between two and three weeks to get ready. That March 24th opener can be pushed back a week or two and the season can end a week or two later than scheduled with the playoffs to follow. It’s rhetoric season!
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Evan can be reached at evan_weiner@hotmail.com
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