Baseball fans hoping there won’t be another work stoppage in the near future probably won’t like what Major League Baseball Players Association director Tony Clark had to say on Friday.
The collective bargaining agreement between MLB team owners and the players union expires after the 2026 season and Clark cited recent comments by MLB commissioner Rob Manfred as an indication that teams intend to lock the players out before the 2027 campaign.
“Unless I am mistaken, the league has come out and said there’s going to be a work stoppage,” Clark said at San Francisco Giants camp in Scottsdale, Arizona, via Sportico. “So, I don’t think I’m speaking out of school in that regard.”
In January, Manfred told The Athletic’s Evan Drellich that a lockout would be a good thing for the sport.
“In a bizarre way, it’s actually a positive,” said Manfred. “There is leverage associated with an offseason lockout and the process of collective bargaining under the NLRA works based on leverage. The great thing about offseason lockouts is the leverage that exists gets applied between the bargaining parties.”
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At the time, Clark disputed Manfred’s remarks, saying team owners were using a lockout as a threat.
“Players know from first-hand experience that a lockout is neither routine nor positive,” Clark told Drellich. “It’s a weapon, plain and simple, implemented to pressure players and their families by taking away a player’s ability to work.”
Manfred’s less-than-encouraging response to that, especially from the players’ view, is that a lockout was “like using a .22 [caliber firearm], as opposed to a shotgun or a nuclear weapon.”
MLB last had a lockout before the 2022 season, which delayed Opening Day, but a full 162-game schedule was still played. Among the issues then were the compensation system for younger players and teams tanking in an attempt to get better draft picks. Owners also wanted a salary cap, which the players opposed, in addition to an expanded postseason.
The salary cap is again an issue during this bargaining cycle. Team budgets are a major point of the discussion with the Los Angeles Dodgers building a payroll of an estimated $379 million, while the New York Mets aren’t far behind at $312.5 million, according to Spotrac. (MLB’s lowest payrolls are the Miami Marlins at $31.35 million and the Athletics at $55.25 million.)
Clark counters by saying that several teams are already using the luxury tax threshold — in which teams are taxed 20-50% on the amount over the threshold, depending on how many years a franchise has done so — as a de facto salary cap. (This week, he criticized the Los Angeles Angels for doing so.) This year’s luxury tax, or competitive balance tax, is set at $241 million.
The players union chief also said that the union is not opposed to a salary floor, but the owners always try to attach a maximum cap to a minimum floor.
Manfred said he doesn’t want to negotiate through the media and make this a topic among fans when the CBA doesn’t expire for another two seasons and negotiations are likely a year away. Clark said that he expects talks to begin next spring.
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