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There is no one major thing to look at today — I’m still mulling over the parallel progress of the player-pay-deflating Protect College Sports Act with the blatant executive cash grab of the 24-team College Football Playoff — so let’s take a tour through a few smaller bits for now.
MLB’s latest proposal
I covered this in detail at Baseball Prospectus earlier this week, but here are some additional thoughts. MLB proposed a 154-game season that would institute a No Mondays scheduling policy, save for the creation of another national game, meant to spotlight more teams and also of course make more money in broadcast deals. Along similar lines, the postseason would expand, but not in terms of teams — instead, the Division Series round would move from five games to seven, meaning instead of 12-20 possible DS games every October the range would be 16-28. That’s more national television to package and sell, too.
As I wrote for BP, part of me thinks that this is also a lead-in to some league expansion action — more teams playing more games makes up for the drop to 154, and also makes expanding the postseason itself in terms of teams making it easier to sell since it moves the marker for what constitutes “nearly half the league” entering the playoffs.
These kinds of moves make it that much more important that no time is lost in 2027 that could damage MLB’s standing in negotiations for new broadcasting deals in 2028. Which in turn means it feels even less likely that missed time is a thing that’s going to happen next season: there will be a lockout the second MLB is able to implement one, but the more is riding on the league being in the best position possible for broadcast negotiations in this next round, the less there is to fear from that lockout extending into the regular season.
The league can leak that it won’t back off from the salary cap demands all it wants — and it has — but that’s because nothing is changing and no one is blinking until the lockout is engaged, and the sound of a ticking clock is louder than everything else around it. No one from MLB is going to tell a reporter, anonymously or no, that this is all a ruse to squeeze the best deal that the league can from the Players Association by applying whatever pressure there is, with no expectation of actually winning a salary cap. What would be the point? Of course the public-facing tidbits will all suggest a cap is The Mission, not to deviated from.
Athletes Unlimited Softball players unionize
Jen Ramos-Eisen has the details, but the long and short of it is that the players of the Athletes Unlimited Softball League have formed a union and requested recognition from the AUSL.
The AUSL Players Association — AUSLPA — managed a supermajority of signees in favor of a union in 48 hours, per their own statement, so brought it to the league, which has already commented to say that it’s “reviewing the players’ request carefully and are in touch with the AUSLPA contact directly.” Pretty annoying that this wasn’t just a “yes,” considering that even MLB went straight for the immediate voluntary recognition of the minor-league portion of the MLBPA a few years back, but one imagines that recognition will come. Hopefully without a major fight — save that for the actual negotiations.
You might recall that the AUSL has, as a minority but substantial investor “north” of 20 percent, Major League Baseball. Commissioner Rob Manfred said, at the time, that “This is one of the biggest investments that we’ve made in an outside entity, ever. Our goal is to get a softball league into the same position of stability that the WNBA has found.” To which I said:
There are good reasons to be skeptical about MLB’s involvement in… anything. But that they see AUSL as something worthy of investment is heartening.
…the AUSL doesn’t have owners, but investors, and it’s heavily player-focused and player-driven … Those investments are capped, which means MLB can invest 20 percent, yes, but their return on that investment is not some hypothetical infinite figure. If the AUSL makes high revenues, they can surely make more, too, but the players basically only benefit if MLB is in a position where they’re making money on this investment.
That the players were already in on this ground-floor level of pulling from league revenues without actual owner interference, and the league itself is already so player-driven, is a positive in terms of how this is all going to work out. But we’ll see how it all goes — the existence of AUSL itself is excellent, given the sports world needs more high-level, professional softball and whatever trickle-down effect can come from it. The only thing better would be unionized high-level, professional softball, and we’re on our way to that right now.
Dodgers eliminated, guaranteeing “small-market” World Series
The unstoppable [citation needed] Dodgers had their season end Thursday, when the 103-win Brewers swept Los Angeles in the NLCS. It’s Milwaukee’s first World Series berth since 1982, back when it was in the American League. And before any active player in MLB was born, too — Justin Verlander is the oldest, at 43 years, and he’s also only active in the sense that the 2026 season isn’t over until the World Series concludes.
The Rays and Guardians are still duking it out in the ALCS, which means the Brewers are the comparative financial juggernaut: Milwaukee’s year-end 40-man roster came to a cost of $144 million, 19th in the majors, while neither Cleveland nor Tampa Bay hit nine digits with theirs: the Guardians are dead-last at $74.8 million, and the Rays are 28th at $96 million.
While it’s funny that, as this is happening, MLB is running advertisements saying small-market teams don’t have a chance but a salary cap could give them one, none of this will actually change their negotiating approach. This is a league of owners who got up in arms about literally Tanner Scott and used his contract with the Dodgers as evidence that a salary cap is required. These three teams will be labeled as exceptions to the rule to get around the fact that three non-spenders are all that’s left in mid-October, when the only exception is that their front offices are run well. And also that the AL Central is an embarrassment to competitive sports, yet was somehow better than the AL West this season, helping Cleveland out a bit in its potential World Series path.
It’s fantastic, narratively, that no matter what we’re getting either a first-time World Series winner in the Brewers or Rays, or the first in so long for Cleveland that it actually goes beyond the formation of both of those teams. However, none of that will change the league’s approach — it’s not some kind of gotcha that can be applied to derail their arguments. It’s funny, there’s no denying that, and that this whole setup is going to make people like Rob Manfred and Bob Nutting extremely aggravated is a bonus, but it lacks meaning in terms of the CBA battle. At the least, though, it will make it easier for you to argue with that annoying friend or coworker or family member who has been saying “The Dodgers are inevitable!” for a year now. There’s value in that.
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