Fall is in the air. The clocks are changing. My backyard lost a scrubby wall of vines and now is bare to the new-build beyond. My gray and tan wrangler is giving way to a new blue boy. The World Series is wrapping up and we will soon enter a strange baseball off-season. The current collective bargaining agreement (CBA) will expire on December 1st and a lockout will begin.
The baseball world freezing over matters to Raleigh because the only thing standing between the city and an expansion team is a new CBA. That may sound a touch dramatic, but a new agreement is the only hurdle on the track. It’s a big hurdle, but once it has been hurdled by the hurdlers (owners and players), the MLB will quickly turn to expansion considerations.
Raleigh may not be New York or Los Angeles, but it’s a bigger market than the two World Series teams. This series has had good games, but Milwaukee and Tampa are not a blockbuster match-up. Nevertheless, there are fun storylines. Fitting with my theme of change, no matter the winner, baseball will have a first-time champion. I’ve been rooting for the Rays, but it is fun to see a nation full of Brewers fans bopping about on social media and game coverage.
There are interesting implications for the CBA too. In a year of extreme payroll inequality, with the Dodgers hundreds of millions above half of the league, two smaller market teams made the World Series. Baseball does that a lot. It is a sport played in high variance for single games. Mediocre teams can get hot. Development, drafting, and infrastructure have these two franchises standing above much bigger spenders. It will be interesting to see how that flavors the battles over salary-caps and salary-floors to come.
One of my favorite baseball writers recently entertained a silly realignment idea from a Pirates writer here. It’s a reorganization based on grouping teams in spending tiers. Not gonna happen. Aside from the financial logic, we will have two new teams soon. That will necessitate realignment. Baseball is not going to realign twice in a row. I have gone into some details about that impending change in a previous post, but it is interesting to think about the future shape of the league as it enters a pause.
Here is my best guess at a timeline:
-CBA drags on long enough that we don’t get real baseball until mid-July. A shortened season will leave a bad taste in the mouth of fans and MLB will look to pump a new narrative of the future with expansion headlines.
-Expansion deliberations will drag into the summer of 2028.
-Two new cities announced in the fall of 2028.
Many changes are coming to baseball. A new CBA will affect baseball business, team building, and player’s choices. The biggest changes, though, will ride the coattails of a weird shortened season and bring us inevitably to the expansion era.
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