The 2026 baseball season is either a week old or still weeks away, depending upon whether you count its beginning from the first grainy and distant social media photos of pitchers stretching on back fields or the first games that count. Either way, the positional jockeying for a potential 2027 owner lockout has already begun, because how else would the league follow its most entertaining World Series of the century? You can only cruise on the comedy stylings of Nick Castellanos for so long, right?
Tuesday morning's news that MLB players union head Tony Clark is about to resign, though, brings the doomsigning to the front of the church for the first time this season. Up until now, the pre-lockout sniping was coded and qualified, and mostly confined to "The Dodgers Are Ruining Baseball" chants from ownership-side people who see the Pittsburgh Pirates as a model franchise. Since the six people who believe that never gather in the same place at the same time, we cannot herd them together and nail-gun them to outfield seats at LoanDepot Park for the season. The news from camps, for the most part, was not yet or not really news, mostly about Castellanos's problematic Bluetooth speaker usage and the Emmanuel Clase pitch-throwing case.
And Clark's pending resignation, while surely news in a way all that isn't, has not yet been fully explained. It may well have connections to the apparently disastrous eight-figure investment the union made in a for-profit youth baseball company, and a federal investigation in the Eastern District of New York into Clark specifically for self-dealing, misuse of resources, and abuse of power at the union. It certainly is abrupt; Clark's scheduled meeting with the Cleveland Guardians on Tuesday was canceled at the last minute. There were denials all around, but regardless of factual roots, the timing of Clark's resignation suggests that the union's strategy for beating back the owners' salary cap demands needs a different front man. Either way, it will have one.
Update (3:57 p.m. ET): ESPN reported this afternoon that Clark resigned "after an internal investigation revealed he had an inappropriate relationship with his sister-in-law, who had been hired by the union in 2023."
This could all be nonsense, of course, because nonsense is forever the Option B to the Option A of a full season of lockout prep. But in the current landscape, in which all baseball behaviors seem to be calibrated toward the fragility of the 2027 season, it could mean a great deal. A change in union leadership would suggest that player reps are in the process of deciding how hard-line to go in beating back the owners' salary cap push. Baseball is the one domestic sport that has not given in to a worker-unfriendly cap system, and the owners have been hell-bent on installing one that enforces Cincinnati Reds-dom upon its teams rather than relying on their own individual versions of fiscal discipline. Which as we all know are either draconian or non-existent and nothing in between.
Again, Clark's resignation may be coincidental, but only in a vacuum. Everything else about 2026 is going to be framed as prelude to the winter of 2027, and this comes closer to being an indication of what's coming than anything that has oozed out of Rob Manfred's face in the past six months. We will see soon enough how Clark's resignation and replacement ratchets up the race to enforced idleness next year, but this is the season we've been promised, and the season we will have. We will even have speculation pieces by idiots-for-hire about the end of baseball itself, because that's the mood everyone is in these days. In lieu of any baseball to watch or care about, Clark's resignation will be a centerpiece of that mood, starting now. The entire industry is leaning into performative Armageddon, and this is the most serious development yet in the omens-and-signs department. It will only get more dire as the season progresses, but in the meantime, as everyone waits to see what it means, maybe everyone can shut a bit up, chill a bit out and take up knitting. Either way, 2026 would be a nicer year with a sweater at the end of it.
