The new baseball season starts tomorrow, and yes, that tall gaunt figure in the black floor-length robe with a sickle where its backpack is supposed to be is standing right next to Aaron Judge, its head tilted meaningfully toward the flagpole in right center. It's all part of the new American tableau that starts with "Here's something you might like" and concludes with "but don't get used to it."
Yes, this is a pre-lockout year, or pre-strike year if you are more inclined to sympathize with the idealized version of Scrooge McDuck, and that pressure will sit on the chests of every one of the 2,430 scheduled games this year. It feels surprising that Major League Baseball hasn't already done a deal with Fanatics for commemorative 2027 uniform patches that read "10TH WORK STOPPAGE." If you're that eager for another labor fight, why not take advantage of jersey completists and market it as vigorously as everything else?
The Yankees play the Giants in San Francisco Wednesday evening in a game that marks the beginning of MLB's brand-new deal with Netflix. As a metaphor for the accessibility problems to come next year, it works perfectly, and not just because it is available only on Netflix, America's most trusted name in bum fights with production issues. That this game is siloed is not a condemnation of Netflix necessarily, but it does make for a tasty juxtaposition that the same people who finally quit the Duke and Duchess of Kent as content providers, the better to pivot to filming Pete Davidson free-associating in his garage, have signed up Barry Bonds to be in the booth Wednesday night. Even for hidebound voters who have contorted their brains to keep Bonds out of the Hall of Fame, this is a fun chance for the streamer to take. It will also irritate the sport's management, and since they're already there temperamentally, hey, let's party down.
Even beyond the presence of live baseball on the streamer responsible for Happy Gilmore 2, there are lots of reasons to be excited about the start of a new year. Foremost among these is that it is new; the Rockies have not even lost a game yet. But that's boilerplate stuff, selling the illusion that everyone has a chance to compete, or just not be paralytic with depression by May Day. Guardians fans in Cleveland, for example, will not take long to notice that their team is paying a quarter of a billion dollars less for their roster than the Mets; owners are counting on this sort of realization leading them to think that a salary cap is what baseball needs, which is the zenith of brain lesions in full bloom. The fans who fall for this and work themselves around to being pro-lockout should be ignored as the crackpots and anti-fans they are. It's probably for the best not to say what treatment the owners deserve, but it has something to do with wasp hives carefully inserted. Anyway, the play is clear enough.
The true test of the salary cap myth would be to have a year in which the cap is $325 million (the Mets are at $308M) and everyone has to spend to it. We will learn as we have always suspected, that the biggest hindrance to success is not money but stupidity, and that so much of the disparity in the sport comes down to competence and interest. Owners have been chasing a salary cap since 1994, because capping salaries is a universal passion among ownership types but also because it's the only thing they know the union cares passionately about—and that's even allowing for the union leadership's recent attempts to slit its own collective throat. As with so many things in the culture, this is a reboot born first and foremost from a lack of imagination—the same thing everyone hated three decades ago, with a younger cast. Oopty doopty, what fun!
If you saw the original, which cost baseball 948 games and the 1994 World Series, you know that what's coming this winter going to be your standard king-hell bummer, the kind of thing that baseball invented the 2025 World Series and the World Baseball Classic and Shohei Ohtani to make us all forget. Even those of you we actively hate—fantasy owners with a misguided sense of what the rest of us want or need to know, mostly—deserve better than that. You deserve not to spend an entire season thinking about the absence of the next one; if you have to consider a season when you have to decide whether to watch a full year of Alec Bohm or expatriate to Kaliningrad (and yes, you know who you are), you should at least be afforded the luxury that 2027 can make that right. It's the classic baseball dodge in a nutshell—there's always next year, after all. That was the slogan that energized Dodgers fans before they decided that winning is a better use of money than palace upkeep.
And so the challenge for you is clear—to block out the leaden burdens of baseball as it rushes toward one more silly self-imposed brink, or doomwatch for the next 187 days because you know in your wretched, mold-encrusted souls that the people who run the game are going to fuck it six ways to backward because they think that the Monfort boys in Denver have their fingers on the pulse of modern American entertainment values, as opposed to having those same fingers power-wedged into their own nostrils. Baseball at its best is the joy of Venezuelans winning the WBC and dancing that joy into the Miami night. It is not Rob Manfred explaining anything to anyone at any time for any reason, and it surely is not whatever delivers a reliable ROI for Bob Nutting. If understanding all that doesn't make you pro-union and anti-lockout, then nothing will, which is a polite way of saying you are an awful human being who deserves no friends and should live and die alone.
Put another way, the Dodgers spent money and made people happy and had the decency to make it interesting last year. Who doesn't think that's a better reason for baseball to exist? Remember that as 2026 begins and you decide whether or not the Giants bullpen is worthy of your interest. We'd argue that it is, even if only as an alternative to watching sallow-faced mutants behind podiums explaining why you can't have something you enjoy because some billionaire with the judgment and long-range planning sense of a fruit fly really wants to keep a little more of his money.
In other words, Play Ball, for as long as you can stand it, you hopelessly delusional whelps.
