Carlos Beltran and Andruw Jones are not in and of themselves exemplary Hall of Famers, but as of Tuesday evening they are duly elected Hall of Famers and are being celebrated as such. They may also end up being the last two Hall of Famers to be elected to applause and admiration until we remember why baseball pisses us off as often as it does.
The 2027 Hall of Fame ballots will be mailed out in 10 months, and the assumption at this point is that Buster Posey will be the likeliest candidate to sail into Cooperstown, and good on him for that. The problem for him is that he will be announced as such a month and a half after the owners vote—or are expected to vote, as they are already desperately signaling that they plan to vote—for a lockout over a salary cap. The result will be renewed hatred of the business of the game over its greatest and longest-running rivalry: labor v. management. Nobody is going to cheer for Posey at his moment of career-capping triumph, because everybody is going to be too busy screaming at whichever party in the industry they blame for shutting things down as part of a dispute over who gets how much of a slice of a still gigantic money pie.
Timing, as they say, is a vicious old bastard, which Posey will learn through experience in a way that hiring a mystery manager to run his San Francisco Giants never could teach. Posey is quite possibly the most popular Giant of the post-Willie Mays era, and his hiring as the Giants' new president of baseball operations in October of 2024 was hailed as a public relations triumph by even the most jaded of fans. Posey built up a great deal of goodwill over the playing career that will earn him that Cooperstown invite, and has no apparent natural enemies—at least, not until the manager he hired guides his team to three straight 79-83 seasons.
But it's a stone-cold lock that, on the day his induction is announced, baseball fans will speak as one when they say, "SHUT UP AND MAKE GAMES HAPPEN AGAIN, YOU GREEDY TRAITOROUS SCUM!" even though neither Posey nor the Hall of Fame voters will have been responsible for the lockout, and are therefore are neither greedy nor traitorous beyond the usual for adult humans. They may be scum, of course, but your own individual standards for that are your business.
The work of bringing baseball to a stop will ultimately be that of the 30 team owners, who are expected to vote on Dec. 1, 2026 for a lockout based on the tiresome issue of a salary cap, which they have been pursuing off and on for generations, and the momentum for which has been building since Shohei Ohtani's contract with the Dodgers. That drumbeat reached a new peak volume after Kyle Tucker's contract with the Dodgers, which in total value is actually one-third of Ohtani's and is therefore fair if you regard Tucker as one-third as impactful as Ohtani. In truth, owners have been screaming for a salary cap since the mid-'90s, when the San Francisco 49ers won their fifth Super Bowl in 15 years and spent their fellow NFL owners into apoplexy. But the Dodgers' recent moves, and recent dominance, have made them an outsized straw man in the debate.
In fact, some of our more tinfoil-behatted brethren and sistren suggest that the Dodgers willingly signed up for this villainy as part of a general ownership strategy to bring payroll inequalities back to the forefront. In exchange for jumping on this grenade, the Dodgers get to dominate the sport and its underexploited revenue streams (like, say, the millions of baseball fans in Japan). Two World Series titles suggest that the competitive balance problem is real, even though last year's magnificent World Series against Toronto—another big-market team that spends like one, or tries to—was quite likely the most compelling since the mid-1980s.
But let's ignore the little-green-men-under-the-bed argument and accept that the Dodgers chose to do all this on their own. The complaint that only the Dodgers could do this is, of course, nonsense. The Dodgers are merely the ones who chose to do it the most, suspicious motives aside, and in doing so proved that spending money is actually a wise tactic.
The owners, though, are going through one of their periodic phases of creeping Bob Nutting Mindset, named for the quarter-strangling owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and in this moment of kneejerk anti-union sentiment among America's elite, they see their best chance yet to crush the Bolsheviks (players) beneath the heel of involuntary cost controls. Tucker is the new face of this, through no fault of his own; the Dec. 1 vote, as announced by Undertaker-In-Residence Rob Manfred, will be attached to Manfred because nobody can be bothered to recognize Nutting in an empty room.
Why this public resentment will redound onto Posey is, as we said, primarily a matter of timing. His election will be the first big baseball announcement since the lockout, and he also is a de facto public representative of management because he is, well, management. He isn't a voter in the room, but he is paid to work as the lead representative of Giants' owner Charles Johnson, and therefore will spend a fair chunk of his Hall of Fame presser defending his boss' prerogatives. That's how the questions will be phrased. "Hey, great career, but when are we getting games again? When? Answer me! Answer me NOW!"
Is that fair? Of course not. But what's fair? An unfettered market is fair, for example. Buster Posey will get his day, but it will suck for a while, and it might still suck when Posey is actually inducted in August of 2027 if the lockout is still in place. Maybe if he'd had the wisdom to have retired in 2020 rather than 2021, he could have avoided all this, but that can all be brought up in November when the Hall of Fame once again comes up as a topic worth discussing—and before baseball sticks its face in the overhead fan one more time.
