As the 2026 Major League Baseball season continues to unfold, something vitally important to the future of the sport quietly hums in the background: the ongoing negotiations over a new collective bargaining agreement. The collective bargaining agreement, or CBA (or Basic Agreement, as it's known in a formal sense), is the negotiated accord between players and clubs -- i.e., the team owners and commissioner Rob Manfred, who represents their interests -- that governs the working relationship between the two parties, typically for a period of five years. It covers things as mundane as players' meal allowances and travel protocols and as vital as minimum salaries, the structure of free agency, revenue-sharing specifics, and roster sizes.
Every CBA can be distilled down to a fight over money, or, more specifically, how the league's revenues will be divided between players and team owners. The first CBA covered the 1968 and 1969 seasons and was the first in professional sports history. That was the handiwork of Marvin Miller, the pioneering head of the Players Association (i.e., the players union) and belated Hall of Famer.
It was Miller's organizing skills, foresight, and training as a union economist that allowed him to make the Players Association a viable and effective labor organization. Every CBA negotiation from 1972 through 1994-95 resulted in some form and scale of labor stoppage, whether a players' strike or an owner-implemented lockout. After the cancellation of the 1994 World Series because of the worst labor stoppage in the sport's history, a long run of peace followed.
That peace lasted until the prior CBA negotiations, which resulted in a 99-day lockout forced by team owners and delayed the start of the 2022 season. The current CBA negotiations have been underway for some time, and not surprisingly, the two sides remain far apart on several key issues. The biggest fight will be over the owners' renewed desire to implement a salary cap, which the union continues to view as a non-starter.
The push for a cap has less to do with the notions of competitive balance and more to do with the ownership's internal belief that being the only non-salary-capped league among the major North American sports is harming franchise values. The cap, though, is but one of many pressing issues on which players and owners must find congruity. Moving forward, the process will be uncertain and rife with posturing and pointed public comments from both sides.
The hope, though, is that a new CBA will be agreed to before the middle of March 2027, at which point there's a high risk of having the 2027 season delayed or even abbreviated. To keep you informed of the twists and turns along the way to a new CBA, we've provided a detailed timeline of negotiations. That timeline will illuminate the important and finer points of the talks and, along the way, explain the implications of the various proposals coming from each side.
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