Will there be baseball in 2027? 4 experts share their thoughts.

In the backdrop of this fall’s World Series — and in the background of the entire 2026 season, really — has been a question that every baseball fan hopes the answer to is “yes.”

Will there be baseball in 2027?

Major League Baseball’s current collective bargaining agreement is set to expire at 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 1, and an ensuing lockout feels inevitable. Whether it lasts longer than the previous 99-day work stoppage that started in December 2021 — the 2022 season still featured 162 games, albeit with a shortened spring training — and bleeds into the season remains to be seen.

At the core of these labor negotiations is the debate over a salary cap and floor system. That battle pits the anti-cap Major League Baseball Players Association, led by interim executive director Bruce Meyer, against the owners, who are looking to enforce a salary cap and floor. According to Spotrac’s data on MLB’s 2026 tax payrolls, nine teams — including the Mets and Yankees — were above the proposed $245.3 million cap and 12 were below the proposed $171.2 million floor.

Newsday posed the question to four experts in sports law and the business of baseball to get their thoughts on what MLB will look like in 2027, and the sense among them is that, at minimum, a work stoppage feels certain. The factors in the potentially contentious negotiations start with the salary cap debate, but the experts detailed other elements, including revenue splits, national media rights and local TV blackouts.

“I'm guardedly optimistic there will be [baseball], I guess, would be the best way to phrase it,” said Robert Boland, a sports law professor at Seton Hall Law School, where he teaches a course in labor relations in sports. “I think there will be a lockout, and it will be nasty. The fight will be public, and it will be nasty.”

Wayne G. McDonnell Jr., the faculty director of Georgetown University’s sports industry management program who studies the business of baseball, is not optimistic.

“Unfortunately, I do not believe that there's going to be baseball, from the simple fact that I do believe that there will be a lockout occurring on Dec. 1,” he said. “I think where we are right now in the business of baseball is a very precarious position.”

Jodi Balsam, a sports law professor at Brooklyn Law School, said: “My prediction is, unless the players come around to some version — the baseball-appropriate version — of a salary cap, there's going to be a work stoppage, and I think that requires a new mindset from the union.”

Sab Singh, an associate professor in Farmingdale State’s sport management program who teaches sport law, said: “I do think there's going to be baseball. There might be a little bit of a delay in the season starting up.”

McDonnell believes the owners view this as their last chance to implement a salary cap, but he doesn’t think the players will budge.

“I think stubbornness is going to reign supreme,” he said, “and I don't think either side is going to blink anytime soon.”

'A loyalty to that mission'

The irony of the World Series matchup being between the Rays and the Brewers — teams that respectively rank 27th and 19th in tax payroll this season, according to Spotrac — is not lost on baseball fans.

“[It] shows us really clearly how good management can still work in baseball,” Boland said. “The game and markets are tilted, no doubt. But it doesn't seem to be that a cap-floor system, which the owners are going to push hard for, is necessarily determined a success.”

McDonnell recognized that this resolution ultimately will be the “legacy piece” for MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, who is 68 and previously said he would retire in January 2029.

“I keep on going back to this: Bruce Meyer is not going to let a salary cap happen,” McDonnell said. “If he does — and I don't think he will — that sets the game back five decades, maybe even more, going back to the origins of when Marvin Miller showed up with the MLBPA. And from my conversations with people who have worked for the MLBPA throughout the years, there is a loyalty to that mission and vision.

“It manifests itself in a variety of different ways, but I don't believe in my heart of hearts that you're going to see [a cap]. I just don't. I just think what we're going to see here is this is going to be a good old-fashioned knock-’em-out, drag-’em-out labor fight.”

Singh recognized that once one side has the negotiating leverage, they don’t want to give it up. In this case, MLB players aren’t operating under a salary cap, nor do they want one.

“The player argument in any potential work stoppage is a strong one,” he said. “It’s the fact that that's what we pay for. We pay to see these athletes play, and if they're not playing, there are no games, and that means there's no business. So when you think about who are the most important entities, I like to think that the fans are the most important. But I do think that sometimes they get forgotten, and it really is the players.

“And so if we don't have them participating, then we don't have a sport.”

'A greater sense of partnership'

Balsam recalled a September event at the NYU School of Law, where she had the opportunity to interview NHL commissioner Gary Bettman.

Bettman spoke about the 2004-05 lockout — no hockey was played that season — and how it ended with the NHL’s adoption of a salary cap and floor system. The resulting CBA tied player salaries directly to league revenues, guaranteeing players a 54% share of total NHL revenues.

She recalled Bettman saying that the new system immediately improved the play on the ice. More importantly, Balsam said it “changed the economic relationship between the owners and the players from a largely adversarial contest over dividing the revenue into an interdependent relationship in which both sides have a stake in the financial health of the league.”

MLB players receive about 48% of the league’s revenue now, and the owners’ proposal would up that to a true 50-50 split. The idea is that assuming MLB grows and league revenue increases, then the players would get a larger piece of the pie and aggregate compensation would increase.

“There's a greater sense of partnership and cooperation, and less of an adversarial relationship,” said Balsam, who believes a cap and floor system is the best outcome. “I don't know if the Players Association will ever buy that.”

She noted that the MLBPA has a large reserve — the union reportedly has a $415 million reserve, more than double the $171 million reserve before the last labor negotiations — which basically is a savings account that is drawn down over time. On the flip side, she argued that the owners could survive a year of no or low revenue because they have franchises with multi-billion-dollar values that “are not drawn down and exhausted over time.”

“They simply have the staying power, especially given the influx of institutional capital through private equity,” she added. “They have the staying power to survive a work stoppage in a way that the PA doesn't have.”

Balsam pointed to this year’s World Series as an outlier, saying: “Over time, payroll has mattered.” According to Spotrac, eight of the 10 most recent World Series champions before this year ranked in the top 10 in MLB in tax payroll, five ranked in the top five and three ranked first. Seven of the 10 most recent teams to lose in the World Series before this year ranked in the top 10 in MLB in tax payroll and six ranked in the top five.

Boland noted that a cap also “might be good economically” for the big-market teams, potentially making them more competitive and freeing them from previous bad decisions. But perhaps it is more likely, he said, that going backwards in their markets would be hard for them.

“Will that divide that the players that have always exploited show up, or will it actually favor management?” he pondered.

'It's about the fans'

McDonnell, who previously worked at NYU and now lives near Charlotte, North Carolina, said he needed YES, ESPN, Netflix, Amazon, FOX, FS1, NBC, Peacock, MLB Network, TBS and Apple TV to watch the Yankees this year.

When the Yankees played Atlanta, Cincinnati, Washington and Baltimore, he could not watch them because of blackout restrictions, something he said is “alienating” a lot of fans.

“Major League Baseball has some real big issues ahead of them, and it's about the fans,” he said. “We're making this all about a salary cap and franchise valuations, but how are you going to engage with the next generation of fans when this is over?”

To McDonnell, one of the biggest overlooked talking points of these negotiations is the media rights. MLB’s national TV contracts are set to expire after the 2028 season, but if a lockout causes 60 games to be missed, an extension through the 2029 season automatically would trigger. He views that as a reason why the owners “have more to lose than the players in that regard.”

“They're going to get paid for 2027, but essentially, they're going to get no money for 2029 media rights,” he said. “Which think of it this way: it's almost like you're running a 5K, and everyone is given a mile head start on you, and you got to play catch up. That's what's going to happen if it goes this long.”

Boland said a lockout that leaks into the season would be “new territory for a lot of new-generation fans.” McDonnell said it would be “tough” for baseball to survive a long absence from a fan-retention and fan-growth standpoint.

“When you have all of this great momentum right now, you got to capitalize on this momentum,” McDonnell said. “And if you don't capitalize on it, it could be lost for a decade.”