Former Miami Marlins president turned Meadowlark Media commentator David Samson is the latest prominent figure in baseball to forecast another lockout between Major League Baseball and its players in the coming years.
As the MLB broadcast deals wrap up and team owners push hard for a salary cap, everyone is bracing for the worst. In typical Samson fashion, he turned up the temperature with his take, fully guaranteeing a lockout after the 2026 season.
“There is no scenario where at the end of December 2026, the players will not be locked out,” Samson said Wednesday on The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz. “The owners still cannot stop fighting with each other about what they want in a new CBA, forget fighting with the players. So when you’re still fighting with your own side, what you do is you delay the negotiation with the other side. And the way that you do that is by locking them out.”
The collective bargaining agreement between the league and players expires at that time, and nobody believes they will come to terms on a new agreement before the December deadline. Earlier this year on The Awful Announcing Podcast, MLB insider Ken Rosenthal said he was 90 percent sure a lockout was coming. Even MLB players’ association head Tony Clark is planning for the owners to lock his players out.
It could be a long one, too. Samson believes a lockout would eat into the start of the 2027 season.
“It will be minimum of four months,” he said. “It will go through the month of April at best. The season will be delayed until May at best in 2027.”
Beyond the simple idea of a salary cap, the MLBPA would in turn push for a salary floor and higher minimum salaries for players. At the same time, as commissioner Rob Manfred tries to slot more game rights into national deals and even sell a combined package of local rights to a streamer, small-market teams will be pushing to ensure they get the level of national revenue disbursement that they want.
After the Dodgers finally broke through and won a full-season World Series in 2024, competitive balance has been a big talking point in the media. Big-market teams are increasingly dominating the sport. While fans might gawk at near-billion dollar deals for free agents like Juan Soto or Shohei Ohtani, Samson believes the architecture of the sport’s personnel system is the issue that is most likely to cause a lockout.
“The lockout is actually over things that you wouldn’t think about, like what the minimum salaries are, what the total salary you can have per team (is), how revenue gets distributed among teams … those types of things are far more important than one player being two standard deviations away from other players,” he explained. “That’s not really, between owners, what they’re talking about.”
Both sides are incentivized to ride this wave. Attendance is up, the sport is getting positive publicity for rule changes, and ratings are great when big markets clash in October.
But if history tells us anything, Samson will be proven right in predicting a lockout in the American sport where players and owners have long had the most significant tensions.