The World Series Opens Tonight. A Lockout Could Follow It By Six Weeks

The World Series opens Friday night in Milwaukee, about six weeks before the sport could shut down. Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement expires December 1, the owners are pushing a salary-cap system the players’ union has vowed to reject, and a lockout could begin December 2 — putting the December 7–10 Winter Meetings at risk and making this Series, in the Associated Press’s framing, possibly Major League Baseball’s last games for a while.

Figures reported by the AP put the owners’ framework at a cap of about $245.3 million with a floor of about $171.2 million; those numbers are reported, not official, and the sides were described this week as far apart. In a bargaining session on Thursday, the owners proposed allowing cameras on catchers for broadcasts — a smaller item on a table dominated by the cap fight. ESPN’s Jeff Passan, in interviews this week, called a lockout “an inevitability” once the deal expires, while saying he believes baseball will be played in 2027.

The small-market angle runs straight through this Series. Milwaukee is the smallest of the 30 major-league markets and Tampa Bay is 15th; the Brewers could become the first small-market champion since the 2015 Kansas City Royals. Brewers owner Mark Attanasio — whose club reached the Series without a cap — still endorses one. Agent Scott Boras, asked by CBS Sports about owners who plead poverty, pointed at the two Series clubs as proof of what development can do: some owners, he said, “choose to wear their floaties all the time.”

The players’ side of it, from Tampa Bay’s clubhouse: Rasmussen, asked about the possibility, said: “It’d be a real bummer to lose a season, that’s for sure. I think the industry as a whole is in a really good place.” The AP also notes that the players’ association’s grievance against the Rays over the use of revenue-sharing money, covering 2017–19, was withdrawn in December.