Jeff Passan just told me the 2027 season is already half-dead and I felt my chest tighten the way it does when a bullpen door swings open in the ninth with a three-run lead. Not a maybe. Not a risk. “There is going to be a lockout. That lockout is going to go into the new year.” He said it on SportsCenter with the trade deadline dust still settling, right after the Dodgers finished grocery-shopping for Tarik Skubal like the rest of the league was running a clearance aisle.
I sat there replaying the clip and realized the real story of this deadline was never the names moving. It was the owners already telling their GMs to price in zero baseball next spring. Passan put it plain on Threads: “There are owners that believe there won’t be a single game next season, so they’re telling their GMs to price that into their trade deliberations.” Some of these guys are treating March 25 like a rumor.
The Dodgers Are Not the Villain. They Are the Proof
The system is doing exactly what it was built to do and the owners hate the results. The Dodgers are sitting on a payroll that makes the competitive balance tax look like a parking ticket. They absorbed a two-time Cy Young winner who hits free agency after this season and the league responded by clutching its pearls about competitive imbalance. Ken Rosenthal saw it coming the second Skubal put on the uniform: “The hysteria is coming. The lockout is coming.”
I do not blame Los Angeles. I blame the people who designed a sport where one franchise can spend like a sovereign wealth fund while half the league pretends $100 million is fiscal responsibility. Passan has been clear the owners’ opening salvo was a hard salary cap around $245 million with a floor near $171 million and a 50/50 revenue split. The current CBT threshold sits at $244 million. Do the math. They want to turn the ceiling into the floor and call it fairness. The union looked at that proposal and correctly identified it as a stickup dressed in progressive language.
Passan gives the salary cap a zero percent chance of landing for 2027. That is not optimism. That is a declaration of war. Players who spoke to him anonymously said they would burn games before they accepted a hard cap. I believe them. This is not 2021-22, when everyone blinked before Opening Day got completely erased. This feels closer to the long knives.
This Is the Goodfellas Kitchen Scene and Fans Are the Ones Getting Whacked
Owners want the kind of cost certainty the NFL and NBA already enjoy. Players remember 1994 and the canceled World Series and they are not walking into that meat grinder again without drawing blood. The CBA dies at 11:59 p.m. on December 1. Everybody in the building expects the lockout doors to slam that night. Formal talks have been happening. Progress on the actual money has been a joke. Passan smelled it at the All-Star Game: “A pall hung over the festivities of the All-Star Game this week. A lockout is coming — and at the heart of it is a profound core-economics disagreement.”
I keep coming back to the owners who are already instructing front offices to treat 2027 like a phantom. That is not posturing. That is a man deciding which of his friends still gets to eat. The national TV deal runs through 2028, so the real leverage clock is ticking louder than anyone wants to admit. Miss enough games next year and the next media rights negotiation turns into a fire sale. Both sides know it. Both sides are still willing to play chicken with Opening Day.
The stomach punch is personal. I have kids who just started caring about October baseball. I have spent entire winters arguing about who gets the first baseman of the future. Now I am staring at a March 25 date on a schedule that might as well be written in pencil. Passan puts the chance of missing games at 35 percent. That number should terrify every fan who still believes the sport belongs to them.
The Dodgers did not break baseball. They simply refused to pretend the current rules were a suggestion. The owners looked at that refusal, looked at their own balance sheets, and decided the only solution was to blow up the table. Players are ready to let them. I already feel the absence coming. December 1 is not a negotiation deadline. It is the start of the funeral, and nobody in the room is bringing flowers.
