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| Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred (left) and MLBPA President Tony Clark (right). |
The Dodgers just gave us a World Series for the ages — eleven innings of beautiful chaos, the kind that makes even casual fans remember why they ever cared in the first place.
It was the kind of October that stops clocks and starts arguments. The kind that fills living rooms, group chats, and city streets.
Baseball, for once, wasn’t just alive. It was electric.
And yet, fans need to be concerned.
Because somewhere, beneath the roar of that perfect October, another sound has begun to rise.
A quieter, older, scarier sound.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The current collective-bargaining agreement between owners and players expires December 1, 2026. And if you’ve listened closely over the past year, the tone on both sides has started to shift, from polite to pointed.
That’s how these things always start: a few comments, a little posturing, then a slow slide toward something nobody can quite stop.
To the people who lived through 1994, it feels hauntingly familiar.
That summer, baseball didn’t just pause. It vanished.
The players struck in August. There were no playoffs. No World Series.
For the first time since 1904, October was silent.
The Montreal Expos, the best team in baseball at 74-40, never got their shot. Tony Gwynn was flirting with .400. Matt Williams was on pace to hit 61 home runs.
And then — nothing.
It was Armageddon for a sport that thought it was too big to fail.
Fans didn’t just drift away; they sprinted. Ballparks sat half-empty. Kids who might have fallen in love with the game that summer never came back.
Even when play resumed in 1995, the rhythm was gone. It took several years, Cal Ripken’s streak, McGwire-Sosa’s home-run chase, Ken Griffey Jr.’s grin, to remind people why they ever believed again.
That’s the ghost baseball keeps trying to forget.
And now, it’s rustling again.
The 2021-22 lockout wasn’t catastrophic, but it was a warning shot — a 99-day freeze that delayed Opening Day to April 7 and erased most of spring training. It bruised the game’s rhythm and reminded everyone how fragile the peace still is.
But 1994 left scar tissue that never healed.
And the fear now — the one no one says out loud — is that the next fight could look more like 1994 than 2022.
Because the old tensions are back:
Owners want cost certainty. Players want freedom and fairness. The luxury-tax threshold, now $241 million in 2025, has become a soft salary cap.
The payroll gap? A canyon.
The Dodgers are spending north of $340 million — by some estimates near $400 million — with the Mets around $320 million.
At the other end, the Marlins sit in the mid-$60 millions, and even the A’s have climbed past $70 million, just under $75 million.
Different payrolls. Same argument.
That’s what makes this so maddening. Baseball just delivered one of the best World Series in half a century — a global event that reminded everyone why the sport still matters.
Game 7 drew about 26 million U.S. viewers, the biggest baseball audience since 2017, with massive numbers in Canada and Japan.
It wasn’t just fans watching; it was families, kids, and people who hadn’t cared about baseball in years.
The game has momentum again — and hope.
And now, just as those new fans are buying jerseys and memorizing walk-up songs, the sport’s power brokers are dusting off the same playbook that once drove everyone away.
It’s like watching someone rebuild a house … and then light a match.
Commissioner Rob Manfred has talked about leverage. Union head Tony Clark has bristled at it. Neither side seems eager to blink.
So the game that just gave us its most joyful moment in fifty years may already be walking toward another self-inflicted winter.
Baseball — the only sport that can deliver goosebumps in one breath and gridlock in the next.
The Dodgers are still champions. The sport feels alive.
And yet, somewhere deep inside its boardrooms, the countdown to another potential armageddon has already begun.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
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