Class Struggle in the Major Leagues

On December 1st, 2026, at 11:59 PM, the collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball (MLB) and the Major League Baseball Player’s Association (MLBPA) will expire. Within a minute of the expiration, MLB owners will institute a lock-out of players, even though it is the off-season. Their likenesses will be scrubbed from all public-facing MLB media; teams will no longer be able to communicate with players and vice-versa. This will lead to a stalemate: neither side will make concessions, each waiting until the start of “spring training”, the pre-season for MLB. It is at this point that the struggle begins in earnest, as delays threaten the loss of paychecks and game revenue. Public pressure will begin to mount on both sides.

In other sports, the risk of missed paychecks usually causes the union to buckle long before any concessions are extracted from ownership. In effect, the work stoppage never transitions from a lockout to a strike. In recent decades, notably from the end of the 90s until the recent 2022 collective bargaining agreement, the MLBPA was no different in its reluctance to press the issue. However, prior to those years the MLBPA was the most militant and strongest union in American sports; since the 2022 CBA it has reclaimed that mantle, willing and able to use the threat of missing games to achieve its goals. The 2026-2027 CBA lockout is likely to be the biggest labor struggle in major American sports in decades. As the most visible labor struggle in American public view prior to the 2028 May Day strikes, it will be critical for DSA to intervene in support of labor to show our role in the fights and demonstrate the power of organized labor. To do so, DSA should draw on the history of organized labor in baseball. 

A brief sketch of Baseball labor history

The long run of baseball’s history in the United States has been equally matched by a history of labor struggles, essentially beginning when baseball’s rules reached near-modern form in the 1880s. Early baseball players were overworked and highly exploited. Whereas baseball pitchers today work either once every five games or in more frequent short bursts, early pitchers were expected to throw hundreds of complete games every year, destroying their shoulders and elbows in the process. Careers were not long, yet even in a player’s prime they could expect only a pittance, despite bringing all the value to the sport. This was due to a monopoly suppressing labor costs: players were owned by teams for their life. In 1890, the players recognized that they were the source of value, and almost all of them walked off the job—not to strike, but to form a league of their own: the player’s league. It was a raucous hit, but they were engaged in a game of chicken with the owners, who formed a scab league. The investors backing the player’s league swerved first, and the owners ruthlessly crushed labor when players slunk back to the sport. Baseball’s labor movement went into a 75 year coma.

It is little coincidence that this coma coincided with most of baseball’s time as a segregated sport. Just as racism served to divide and conquer the working class elsewhere, racist appeals certainly played their part in baseball’s labor history. When the league finally integrated, organized labor struggles came back with it. A decade after Jackie Robinson retired, in the middle of the sixties, players voted to form the Major League Baseball Player’s Association. From the beginning, the MLBPA was a fighting union, and a black player would lead one of baseball’s most important labor fights. In the 1960s – just as in the 1890s – there was no competition for players: once a player was signed to a team, the team owned his rights in perpetuity. This was known as the reserve clause, and in 1969, a player named Curt Flood decided to challenge this system. He had been traded to Philadelphia, a city he despised for its racist fans, and he decided he was going to refuse to sign a contract with the team. Backed by the MLBPA, he threw away his career because he knew it would open the door for other players. He sued the team and the league, taking them all the way to the Supreme Court, where he lost. Afterwards, he was blackballed by every team in the league, but he proved that the reserve clause system was unsustainable. With continuous pressure, the union forced the league to adopt free agency—a development which preceded free agency in sports like football and hockey by decades.

A 2026 MLB Class Struggle FAQ

Why do MLB owners lock-out the players, instead of just negotiating with the old CBA in place?

In 1994, when owners and players kept working under the terms of the old CBA, they continued negotiations into the regular season. At the mid-point of the season, when playoff races really heated up and owners began to cash in, the players launched a strike. They had received half of their wages, but owners had not received most of their profit. They had more leverage at that moment than at any other point, and they used it well. The owners dug their heels in, and the 1994 season, and its playoffs, were lost forever. The players won, and the owners caved on their salary cap demand. Owners vowed never to let a strike like this happen again; now, they begin the lockout during the off-season, when they have the most leverage and their revenue is farthest away from the threat. 

Why would players lose a season to prevent a salary cap?

In every North American sports league except baseball, the implementation of a salary cap crippled the sport’s union, making them no longer a serious threat to ownership. The cap pits labor against itself and ties labor’s salaries to league baseball revenue, which can be manipulated by the league through unrepresentative accounting. By the union’s own accounting, baseball players’ revenue split is as good or better than any other sport with a capped league. And they get better benefits as well.

What kinds of benefits have the players won?

One big advantage MLB players have over the most popular sport in the US, football, is that their contracts are fully guaranteed. In football, an injury results in the immediate loss of millions for the player. In baseball the player will be paid the full value of his contract, no matter what happens to him. Players also get very good healthcare benefits, which become accessible for life after four years in the Major Leagues. With just 43 days in the big leagues, they are also entitled to a lifelong pension. This pension increases in size with continued playing time, maxing out at 10 years of service. Players are also offered sizable draft bonuses and granted the ability to refuse assignments and trades depending on their service time. There’s also no max compensation for players, nor any system of forcing players to stay with their team when they finish their initial contract. In sports like football and hockey, players can be essentially forced to sign under-market deals in these situations via methods which penalize other teams if they try to make counter-offers; in some cases, management simply bars the player from negotiating with other teams at all.

What will this CBA negotiation center on?

As they did in the 1990s, the owners are attempting to force a salary cap on the players. Player demands center around increasing the money going to younger players, including increases in the minimum salary, and around forcing low-payroll teams to spend more. Both sides are appealing to public opinion by utilizing a “competitive balance” framing, though the players are open about seeking the best deal for players’ rights. Competitive balance is the idea that teams should have an equal opportunity to acquire talent and win games: owners suggest that the payroll disparities between teams are unfair. Players would riposte that every owner can afford to spend on their team: they simply choose not to. Further complicating matters is that a number of teams consistently succeed without high payrolls—including the Rays and the Brewers, the two teams playing in the 2026 World Series.

How does the public respond to baseball labor struggles?

Historically, media coverage and reactionary attitudes have led the public to be firmly against players. The media has rarely portrayed the union sympathetically, and framings like “they get paid to play a kids game” have proliferated, neglecting the fact that many players, especially Minor League lifers, only ever receive a pittance. Further, there is a huge asymmetry in transparency: every baseball player’s salary is public, but until very recently (the Atlanta Braves are currently a publicly traded asset), no baseball team’s revenue is public. This asymmetry makes it difficult for the public to have a real sense of the disparity between the wealth of owners and the wealth of players. However, public opinion has rapidly shifted in recent years, especially as baseball’s audience has trended nerdier, younger, and more progressive, and now players are viewed much more sympathetically. The post-94 practice of owner lockouts has further hurt the owners’ ability to control the narrative. Now, the players aren’t stopping you from watching the game: the owners are. 

Why has the union regained its militancy?

There are three reasons: first, the shift in public opinion in its favor, as we noted; second, the experience of watching every other major sports union be crushed in negotiations over the past two decades; and third, the primary answer, Bruce Meyer’s hiring before the COVID year. Three years after a CBA negotiation in 2016 that was broadly regarded as an ownership victory, the MLBPA hired Bruce Meyer as one of their lead negotiators, likely expecting his first big fight to be in the 2022 CBA. Instead, his fight came during the COVID year, where the players managed to force a desperate league to agree to pro-rated, guaranteed salaries in a 60 game season, a far better deal than any other sports player’s union achieved! The players managed to turn public opinion against the league, refusing to budge on any CBA modifications and successfully portraying the league as the villain. Galvanized by this victory, they fought the league in the 2022 negotiations to the point of the season being at threat, and they managed to secure a few victories at the bargaining table.

During all this, the union also quietly began an effort to unionize players in the Minor Leagues, the developmental system employed by Major League Baseball. In September 2022, with almost no warning, the union announced that Minor Leaguers had agreed to unionize under the MLBPA and presented it as a fait accompli, forcing the league to acquiesce immediately, without even challenging the MLBPA with a card check. Before the next season, the two sides settled a collective bargaining agreement in which Minor League player salaries doubled. Before this unionization effort, the MLBPA had often been accused of throwing Minor Leaguers under the bus in favor of superstars: this undercut a major line of attack against the union. If the union is going to be successful in winning concessions against ownership, it must continue fighting for Minor Leaguers, a task which will ensure a steady pipeline of union members ready to struggle against ownership.

Are the players ‘woke,’ though?

Broadly, no. Baseball players tend to be the second-most conservative athletes in major North American sports, behind NHL players. However, the vast majority follow a “stick to sports” attitude. Further, the team union reps tend to be more progressive (as far as can be gleaned from social media, comments, and actions during 2020), and we should also note the league’s inclusion of many Hispanic players from both the US and from the Caribbean, though foreign-born players are even more reluctant to comment on politics. 

What role will Trump’s National Labor Relations Board play in the fight? And for that matter, what will Trump do?

Just like in labor negotiations in other sectors, the NLRB acts to mediate class conflict and produce compromise. It does so by ensuring that each side is negotiating in “good faith”, which usually means making concessions every time a side comes to the negotiating table. What counts as a sufficiently real concession is determined by the NLRB. Under the Trump administration, we can already expect increasing bias against workers in this mediation, even without direct marching orders from Trump. However, Trump has already publicly picked a side in this fight, saying that MLB should implement a salary cap, in fact arguing that MLB should have broken the union in the 90s during the first cap fight. As the fight begins to seriously threaten the season, we should expect Trump to take an oppositional stance and pressure the union.

Why and how could DSA intervene?

Labor battles in baseball are demonstrations of how our state and economy operates, a high-profile snapshot of class conflict. They provide an opportunity to show the strength of organized labor, the role of the state in class conflict, and the need for unified action. Socialists have the opportunity to highlight this and push the union to keep fighting. Uniquely, baseball provides the ability to discuss these issues in the context of a social and cultural touchpoint. Unlike, say, a railway workers strike, baseball is something you can easily talk about at a bar or at the water cooler. Discussing baseball’s labor battle with your friends and comrades can connect the abstract ideas of labor power and class struggle with a visible, familiar, and concrete example. Beyond simply discussing it, socialists must illuminate the need to connect this labor struggle to the broader fight. DSA can do this by organizing pro-player rallies outside of stadiums, making legislative pushes for ending MLB’s special legal privileges, putting out public statements and giving electeds talking points, and pushing for statements of solidarity with baseball players in DSA-aligned unions. Further, even once the MLB CBA fight is settled, the unionization of the Minor Leagues also enables DSA to organize around baseball even outside of major cities, as the MiLB CBA expires in 2027. Just as Jackie Robinson’s fight to break the color barrier in baseball helped to ignite the civil rights movement, the fight for a better contract in baseball could help build a resurgent labor movement in the United States. The energy from a victory in baseball would help union organizing pushes across the country.