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I spend an alarmingly high percentage of my time on this earth watching all manner of sports, but my favorite is baseball. It’s the one I loved first, the one I was the best at playing, the one that has been a constant in my life for so long it’s difficult to find a baby picture of me in which I’m not wearing something with a St. Louis Cardinals logo on it. Everyone in my life knows this about me, and because none of them love baseball as much as I do, whenever something from Baseball Fanatic World crosses into the realm of casual fans, they reach out. Go ask Will. He’s the baseball guy.
This gives me a useful perspective into how baseball is resonating in the larger culture. It’s fascinating to see what breaks through. And sadly, for years, it’s generally been scandal of some sort. Steroids. Labor issues. Sign stealing. Gambling.
I don’t necessarily believe baseball has more scandals than other sports, but I do think it suffers from them more because baseball is the sport most associated with a sort of (mostly imagined) pastoral innocence: Fans fall in love with it so young that, as they grow up, it inevitably disappoints. As the late, great commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti once said, baseball “is designed to break your heart.” No one says football breaks their heart: It’s far too utilitarian and transactional for that. But baseball can burrow into you like a first love. That’s why people get so mad at it: When something goes wrong, it feels like a betrayal.
So I’ve been delighted, over the past couple of years, to have these casual fan friends seek me out not with complaints but with praise. No longer do I hear about how baseball has lost its way. Instead? Wow, that Shohei Ohtani sure is something else. I got home from the Braves game last night an hour earlier than ever before; is that the pitch clock? What a World Series, right? How fun was that Italian team at the World Baseball Classic? They’re doing something they haven’t done in a long time: telling me how baseball has made them happy.
The 2025 World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays, a seven-game thriller, earned the highest television ratings since 2017, continuing a trend of increased viewership across several networks. Attendance increased in 2025 for the third straight year. The runaway success of this spring’s World Baseball Classic (a 156 percent increase in ratings over the 2023 event) was no outlier: MLB’s popularity is jumping internationally. Japanese viewership was up 20 percent last year, and Latin America’s rose 16 percent in 2024.
But as with baseball itself, it’s easy to lose yourself in the stats. The resurgence is everywhere you look, thanks largely to vibrant personalities and the rising quality of play. The game offers up a superstar for every taste, from the transcendent, generational talent of Julio Rodríguez, to the mythical aura of Aaron Judge, to the charming, out-of-nowhere 60-homer season from Cal Raleigh (with the classic baseball nickname of “Big Dumper”) to, of course, the unicorn that is Ohtani, who constantly does things no human has ever done before. The game is crisp and fun right now. You can’t miss it.
Which is why everyone is so scared, once again, that they’re going to screw it all up.
Because I’m starting to hear something else from my casual fan friends: They’re not gonna strike, are they?
Oh yes: That. In December, the collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball and the players union expires, and it is widely expected that the league — really, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred and the owners he represents — will impose a lockout shortly thereafter. (Which, obviously, is very different from a strike, though the casual fan tends to conflate the two.) There was a lockout after the 2021 season as well, and it was quite contentious, but because it was settled by March 10, ultimately no games were lost. This has led Manfred, justifiably, to boast that he has never lost a game to a labor fight during his 11 years as commissioner.
It may be harder this time. Owners have signaled that they will insist on a salary cap, which they claim will help level the playing field between teams financially. But many observers (and certainly the union) believe the idea is just a way to lower salaries — to essentially save owners from themselves.
The salary cap is the great redline for the players union. It has long been seen as a signifier of the union’s strength that MLB is the only North American professional sports league without a cap. The players will be extremely loath, to say the least, to consent to one.
Maybe cooler heads will prevail. Saber-rattling is common in labor negotiations, particularly early in the process. And the no-stoppage streak extends well beyond Manfred. Baseball hasn’t lost a regular season game to a labor battle since the 1994 World Series was canceled, a near-fatal, self-inflicted wound that took the sport years to recover from. But that psychic scar still stings: Baseball fans will accept a lot, but the one thing that truly tests their loyalty is a money fight that makes it so there is, in fact, no baseball.
Nine months out from the bargaining agreement’s expiration, the looming threat is piercing the public consciousness, and it is doing so at a highly inopportune time, potentially blunting all the game’s momentum. People are embracing baseball again in a way they haven’t in years, maybe decades. I’ve enjoyed my friends doing something other than complaining about baseball. I hope the sport won’t give them a big reason to start again.
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