The Collective Bargaining Agreement between players and owners expires at the end of the 2026 season.

Enjoy this season. It will be the last one for a while. Any hope of avoiding a work stoppage went out the window yesterday when The New York Times reported owners will push for a salary cap “no matter what.”

“No matter what” means fans be damned. “No matter what” means they are willing to lose an entire season or two or more to prove a point. “No matter what” means no baseball for a long long long long time.

This line in the sand was drawn after the Dodgers signed Kyle Tucker. That seemed to be the last straw for a certain breed of owners. The next morning, the other crazy spending team, the Mets, signed Bo Bichette. Then they ended up at “no matter what.”

Owners are furious of the salary imbalance and are going to take the nuclear option of forcing players into a position players don’t want in order to solve a problem players aren’t responsible for. It all leads to the One Big Question. In this next contract dispute, who are owners at odds with? It’s not the players. Owners are battling with owners. 

They are going to go into a labor negotiation that’s not Side A versus Side B, it’s Side A versus Side A. 

Sorry, players are not to blame in this scenario. Every human being would do exactly as the players have done. Say you are working a job where they pay you twenty dollars an hour. You’re really really good at that job. You’re so good, in fact, another company would like you to work for them and are willing to pay you two hundred dollars an hour, which is considerably more than twenty dollars an hour.

You, of course, would turn that down, right? You’d say “thanks but no thanks” out of respect for the owner of the company that was going to pay you only twenty dollars an hour, and out of respect for all the other owners of like-minded companies that would pay you only twenty dollars an hour.

Oh, sorry, you wouldn’t turn that down. Nobody would.

So, why blame the players? They are not sneaking into owners’ houses at night and writing a check to themselves. If Pittsburgh and Colorado and Miami and the White Sox (and the Rangers) aren’t willing to spend money to acquire players that will help them compete, and the Dodgers, Mets, and Blue Jays are, who’s at fault here? The Rangers owners have decided not to be competitive this year, not the Rangers players.

Isn’t trying to win the point? Yes, there is an imbalance. One cannot bury his or her head in the sand and not see that. But the imbalance needs to be worked out among the owners.

It’s as if Mom and Dad are fighting over the grocery bill and the consequence of that fight is they will refuse to feed the kids. Starve the kids and they will learn the hard way to affect the price of groceries, right? That doesn’t make sense.

There will be a World Baseball Classic, a 162-game schedule, and All-Star Game, playoffs, and a World Series. Then, nothing. Months and years of nothing but media blather.

Because billionaires hate being told no. Especially by other billionaires.