The parameters of baseball’s next CBA negotiations are already taking shape
The Collective Bargaining Agreement between Major League Baseball and the MLB Players' Association runs through the end of the 2026 season. There will be plenty of time for acrimony among and between owners and players around the business issues affecting the baseball industry, and most of it is a year or two in the future.
For now, at least, it isn't hard to see what all the acrimony will be about.
Evan Drellich of The Athletic caught up with baseball commissioner Rob Manfred at the MLB owners' meetings about the sport's collision course with its streaming-first future — a major shift away from the regional sports network (RSN) model that enriched teams for decades. Manfred confirmed what a handful of outside observers watching the sports media space already suspected: 2028 will be a defining year for how baseball is consumed in the future.
"Most important from my perspective is that all the deals for the Diamond clubs end no later than 2028,” Manfred told The Athletic on Tuesday. “My interest in local rights in large part is to have them available when we do national renewals.”
The goal four years hence, Manfred said, is to split the league's inventory of games into national-rights packages and have multiple networks (such as Apple, Amazon, CBS, Disney/ESPN, DirecTV, Fox, Netflix, NBC/Peacock, Roku, YouTube and Warner Bros. Discovery) bid on all of it.
MLB is planning to produce broadcasts for at least seven teams next year. Up to two-thirds of the 30 teams will have broadcasts rights come available by 2028, according to The Athletic. If the post-2028 broadcast future sounds dystopian compared to the locally-based broadcasts of baseball's past regular season broadcast deals, at least Manfred's candor this week is allowing fans time to adjust.
It's too soon to say how close the commissioner's vision will hew to reality. It's not too soon to predict what is dominating closed-door discussions at the owners' meetings this week — and what is likely to dominate the next round of collective bargaining.
As Drellich points out, most of the teams whose broadcasts were produced by and distributed on Diamond Sports Group-affiliated networks at the start of the 2024 season have taken pay cuts — either with Diamond or elsewhere. The diminishing revenues are likely to suppress free-agent spending, which will in turn grab the attention of the players' union.
In short, the union will want to see the fine print of the broader revenue picture for MLB and its teams. And with the broadcast-rights deals expected to be in flux for the next four years, that fine print has yet to be written.
In recent years, MLB has made visible changes to its on-field product: a pitch timer, a universal designated hitter, an expanded best-of-three Wild Card round, a 12-team playoff field. After the automatic ball-strike system rules have been negotiated to the owners' and players' satisfaction, we might not see a major change to baseball's on-field product for a while (one can hope, at least).
Expect the same core economic issues that nearly caused a lockout to interrupt the start of the 2022 season to dominate the next round of collective bargaining — this time with even more uncertainty ahead.
MORE TOP STORIES From the Big Lead
CFB: Nightmare CFP scenario for Indiana and the committee
NFL: What will it cost the Jets to get out of Rodgers mess?
CBB/WNBA: Caitlin Clark goes viral for getting frustrated with refs
NBA: Most likely trade destination for Giannis Antetokounmpo