Standing on the field at Citizens Bank Park before Monday’s Home Run Derby in Philadelphia, a media executive marveled at how well baseball was performing this season. TV ratings are up significantly. Attendance has achieved its highest point in a decade. Ad sales and sponsorship rates are soaring. So what about the ongoing cold war between the league and the players union, I asked? You know, the one that had even the sunniest optimists resigning themselves to a 2027 lockout before this season even began? “They’ll figure it out,” was the short answer.

Indeed, the dispute centers on a seemingly intractable issue: MLB’s desire to institute both a salary cap and floor—cost certainties, particularly amid a media reckoning, that will create a more competitive balance and likely increase franchise values. After all, Major League Baseball is the only major sports organization without a salary cap—creating an inequity within the sport that has turned the business into a veritable caste system, in which the very profitable and valuable Los Angeles Dodgers (2026 payroll: $397 million, per FanGraphs) operate in a different solar system than the Miami Marlins (2026 payroll: $75 million, or less than a year of Shohei Ohtani’s annual salary). Alas, players have historically, and perhaps myopically, viewed any kind of spending limit as a third rail of labor negotiations that could lower the average player annual comp beneath $5.34 million.

Anyway, the vibes in Philly were sanguine. I talked to more than a dozen high-level sources this week—MLB officials, media executives, sponsors—and they all sounded similarly resigned to the fact that a lockout was coming after the MLB’s collective bargaining agreement expires on December 1, potentially canceling games in April and May. But MLB’s business partners believe that there’s sufficient enthusiasm around the sport right now—as evidenced by a crop of bankable stars like Aaron Judge and Ohtani, gangbusters ratings for last year’s World Series, and the surprise breakout success of this year’s World Baseball Classic—that the owners and players won’t risk the mutually assured destruction game theory that led to the abortion of the entire 1994 season.

“Everyone just assumes that we’re going to hear a lot of rhetoric from both sides,” one media executive told me. “And then they’ll get a deal done at the eleventh hour because baseball can’t afford to miss a full season, and the players can’t afford to miss paychecks.”

The battle for public opinion has already begun, with commissioner Rob Manfred and interim union chief Bruce Meyer trading on-the-record shots. To wit: MLB recently released “Level the Playing Field,” an ad campaign promoting the value of cap-enhanced competition. And in dueling press conferences this week, Meyer called the MLB’s ad campaign “perverse” while Manfred accused the MLBPA of not being “completely accurate or fair” in its public messaging around the dispute.

And yet, the sports business executives I spoke to still view this level of rancor as a natural byproduct of active labor negotiations. Their surprisingly cool demeanor may be due to the fact that baseball’s media contracts have clauses that provide rebates for missed games. Or they could be simply grinfucking everyone in this imbroglio. Or, notably, it may have to do with the upside of a shorter season where regular-season games matter more than ever. “We know it’s going to be a battle,” a media executive told me. “If they miss a month or two next season, we’re going to be totally fine. I don’t know that it’s the worst thing in the world to miss games in April and May.” Or, as another executive close to this drama put it, “I don’t have to come up with too many contingencies in terms of where we’re reinvesting our money if MLB loses games in April and May. But if baseball loses the whole season, that’s a whole different story.”

As sponsors prepare to negotiate their renewals only a couple of months away from a work stoppage, quite tellingly, some are insisting on opt-out language in their contracts should baseball miss too many games next season. “Everyone’s paying MLB significantly more money than we did a couple of years ago, so we are looking for something to protect us in some capacity,” said a top sponsorship executive.

On FIFA’s hydration breaks: “As a football-loving Brit, I feel compelled to push back on the hydration breaks. A three-minute stoppage in either half materially changes the structure of a match. Football is, quite famously, a ‘game of two halves,’ and these breaks can lead to huge swings in momentum. You’re looking at the most significant structural change to the sport since 1897, when two halves of 45 minutes were codified. And this hasn’t been done for the good of the game, but for revenue—something football is not short of. The anger at FIFA stems from its relentless interference for commercial gain, when, for so many fans, football is far more than entertainment—it’s identity and community, and that’s what makes it special. Forgive the rant, but there is real anxiety about FIFA’s pursuit of more cash at the expense of players, fans, and the sport more widely.” —A British Varsity subscriber

On MLS’s marketing campaign: “You took a shot at the timing of the MLS ‘Thanks World, We’ll Take It From Here’ marketing campaign. Did you ever stop to think that the league waited intentionally to launch the campaign to coincide with the end of the World Cup and the restart of the MLS regular season? I would expect the league to pour it on in the days ahead.” —A league executive

On Netflix’s Home Run Derby: “I find it funny that some were complaining about the Home Run Derby camera angles on Netflix. A buddy who has been a local market cameraman and editor for decades covering sports loved those different angles, [even] mentioning them in our group text thread.” —A Varsity subscriber

Have a great weekend. See you Monday,
John