What Baseball Should Be Fighting About

The 2026 Major League Baseball season has delivered a number of fun storylines. Pete Crow-Armstrong is doing things we haven’t seen since Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. The National League Cy Young field might be the best in history. The American League playoff picture might be the most confusing in history.

And yet, the story that continues to dominate the news is the ongoing collective bargaining negotiations between the league office and the major league player’s association. The current CBA expires in December, necessitating a new agreement for the 2027 season. And while no one believes an agreement will come until the winter (if one comes at all), it hasn’t stopped the sides from presenting offers to garner some sort of public support.

If you’re at all like me, you’ve already had enough of the back and forth. You’d never know that baseball is as popular as it’s been in years by listening to the current bargaining conversations.

The problem isn’t just the discourse, though. It’s that the “sides” are so firmly entrenched. Rather than competing against one another, players and owners should be working together to find agreement that serves baseball as a whole. Every issue should be thought of as what’s best for the long-term growth of the game. Yes, the league and union have legitimate conflicts of interest, and they’re not going to agree on everything. But a larger pie benefits everyone, regardless of how it’s divided.

Things don’t operate that way and haven’t for a long time. The attitude is to win the negotiation at all costs. Anything that’s added or changed benefits one group more — even if only slightly — and that advantage can’t be ceded without something in return.

A prime example is the adoption of the universal designated hitter. Watching easy outs and bunts in place of sluggers like David Ortiz took away from the fan experience, and pitchers hitting and running the bases created an unnecessary injury risk. Despite near-universal agreement that it would improve the game, the change didn’t go into effect until 2022 because it created 15 more “full-time” jobs for players and the owners weren’t going to give those away for nothing.1

Instead of spending the next six months arguing about how to divide and spend money, I’d love to see more conversation about things that would grow and improve the game itself. Here are four issues that fit that description.

Something I think all sides can agree on: the best way to gain and retain fans is for people to see Major League baseball games.

That’s becoming increasingly difficult.

The cost of attending games in person continues to rise. A recent report suggests the average cost for a family of four to attend a Major League game is over $300. That cost prices many families out of attending at all, and the ones that can go have to save and plan for the expense. They can’t simply decide the day of to head to the ballpark.

What’s more concerning is the inability for people to access games elsewhere. Plenty of people don’t live close enough to a Major League stadium or have the time to go to games in person with regularity. The game’s growth is highly dependent on getting people to tune into broadcasts. But good luck to anyone that tries to do so.

I live in Houston. If I want to watch every Astros game this year, I need access to Space City Network for games when I’m in Houston, MLB.tv for games when I’m traveling, and AppleTV, FOX, NBC, and TBS for national broadcasts. Beyond the potentially prohibitive cost — which is real for many fans — that’s a lot of coordination and logins to follow my local team.2

Some fans don’t even have the option to watch every game for a given team. MLB’s blackout policies are such a persistent frustration that they have their own Wikipedia page. In one of the most extreme examples, Milwaukee Brewers games were blacked out in Iowa despite the fact that Bally Sports Wisconsin was never available in Iowa.

Making the game more accessible — to fans all over the world — should be a priority for both sides.

It’s hard to talk about accessibility and the possible solutions without thinking about the local media ecosystem that exists in Major League Baseball.

Unlike the NFL and NBA, baseball has long relied on regional sports networks. Those networks served as the primary broadcast partner for teams and provided a real, even if imbalanced, revenue source. The league let individual teams handle and manage those relationships. Teams like the Red Sox and the Yankees started their own sports networks, while most other teams contracted with a regional cable network.

But over the last five years, the house of cards the system was built on all but collapsed. The biggest domino fell when Diamond Sports Group, a subsidiary of Sinclair that owns Bally Sports Network, filed for bankruptcy in March of 2023. At the time, they were responsible for broadcasts for 14 teams. While the league office stepped in to help, those clubs saw their local revenue drop as much as $50 million overnight.

The deals were already problematic because they proliferated the gulf between big and small-market clubs. Now the difference is staggering. The Dodgers pull in over $300 million a year from their local broadcast deal, and less than half of that revenue goes toward the central fund for revenue sharing purposes.

There’s an opportunity to turn the collapse into a positive if the league can devise a better system to deliver games to fans while increasing the overall revenue from distribution. But it’s clear that something needs to change before the problem moves from economic annoyance to existential threat.

Stay with me. I know on the surface it may feel like the only issue the two sides are focused on is competitive balance.

But the current conversation — cap vs. no cap — lacks the nuance and direction to actually improve things.

The first roadblock is that we don’t have agreement on what constitutes a competitive balance problem and if one exists. Some will point to the variety of champions as evidence of competitive balance. But as Travis Sawchik says, parity and competitive balance are different:

Yes, there have been seven different World Series champions over the last decade. But each of the last 10 champions were large-market clubs, defined as teams from the 15 largest media markets. The last small-market MLB team to win a World Series was the 2015 Royals.

A variety of large-market champions does not constitute competitive balance, either, though they are often conflated.

The NFL, NHL, and NBA combined to produce 15 small-market champions over the last decade.

Regular season performance shows the same thing. Since 2015, MLB’s five largest markets have won 52% of their games while the bottom five have won less than 48%. That’s by far the biggest gap in the four major sports.3

Under the current system, it’s feasible for small-market clubs to compete for playoff spots and maybe win an occasional championship if everything breaks right. Building a sustained contender or a dynasty? Nearly impossible. And that’s exactly the the type of thing that turns fans away from the game.

I don’t know that a salary cap is the answer. Even if it is, it’s likely only part of a larger, multi-prong solution. That’s where the conversation should focus.

The last thing I’d like to see the sides prioritize is how to use baseball’s platform for something larger than the game.

When I worked in independent ball, one of my jobs was getting players to sign up for appearances like reading at schools or visiting local hospitals. The players were paid a small fee for the appearances, but mostly they were giving up their free time to give back to the community. One of our relievers signed up for every appearance, regardless of what it was or what he had going on. One day I asked him about it. I’ll never forget what he told me. He said, “I’m a professional athlete right now. For whatever reason, people smile when I’m around and listen to what I have to say. That won’t always be the case. I want to use that power while I have it.”

The league has seemingly decided for the time being that it doesn’t want to take a stance on social issues. In response to Senator Josh Hawley’s letter regarding the San Francisco Giants’ Pride Night, Rob Manfred said, “The rationale for the policy is that the league does not desire for its players to become messengers for political or social issues while in uniform playing baseball games because many messages have the potential to offend some segment of our fanbase — even if that was not the intent of the player.”

That might sound fine — maybe even smart if the goal is growing the game — but the message shirks any sense of responsibility and paints the picture that baseball isn’t willing to take a stand to create an inclusive environment. To me, that has the potential to turn far more people away from the game than a player standing behind something they believe in.

Whether they admit it or not, Major League Baseball teams and their players are messengers for political and social issues. These are global brands that are as recognizable as any companies in the world. Failing to use that platform would be a shame because there’s the potential to make a real impact.

And using their influence doesn’t have to mean taking a stance on every political issue. It can be as simple as investing in communities or encouraging participation in the game. One of sport’s greatest strengths is the ability to bring people together.

Bargaining feels like the right vehicle for the league and player to talk about the best way they can leverage their platform — before something new pops up and forces them to figure it out in real time.

When a new CBA is put in place, there will inevitably be winners and losers. New provisions will benefit some players, teams, and owners more than others, and one of the sides is likely to come out ahead in the overall ledger.

But thinking about winning during the negotiation only works against the sport’s best interests. The fact that someone will benefit doesn’t necessarily mean that someone has to suffer as a result. Issues like fan accessibility and competitive balance affect everyone. Let’s not take the designated hitter approach to solving them.

Baseball is having a moment. Despite more entertainment options than ever, attendance and ratings are up. There’s an opportunity for both sides to put away their swords and use a new agreement to pour fuel on the fire. I sincerely hope they realize that.