Major League Baseball sent a memo to teams last week outlining procedures and guidelines for team personnel during the expected offseason lockout, reports Evan Drellich of The Athletic. “Our commitment has been and remains to exhaust every realistic option to achieve our goal of reaching an agreement with the Players Association,” MLB negotiator Dan Halem wrote in the memo. “However, clubs need to be prepared for the possibility that an agreement will not be reached by then and the clubs are left with no realistic alternative but to implement a lockout of major league players.”
That comes as no surprise to anyone with even a tangential interest in MLB. The current collective bargaining agreement expires at 11:59 pm Eastern on December 1. There’s virtually no chance there’ll be a new CBA in place by then. The league will immediately implement a lockout to freeze MLB offseason activity. Although there’s nothing requiring a work stoppage upon the expiration of the CBA, it’s in the league’s interest to lock players out in the offseason rather than give the MLBPA the leverage to go on strike during the season.
As with the 2021-22 lockout, that’ll more or less bar team personnel from interacting with players who are on a 40-man roster. The league memo clarified what kinds of minimal non-work relationships they may maintain with players pending negotiations. In a lighthearted example, MLB said club personnel can attend a player’s wedding during a lockout so long as they don’t discuss work but said they must send any holiday cards or gifts before December 2.
Perhaps the most notable aspect of Drellich’s report is that the status of the major league Rule 5 draft is to be determined in negotiations. The Rule 5 draft is scheduled for mid-December but obviously cannot take place mid-lockout. MLB canceled the 2021 Rule 5 draft.
The MLBPA would surely prefer to keep it in place to maximize big league opportunities for fringe roster players. The union has already proposed scheduling the Rule 5 draft for late November during the final year of a CBA to avoid a repeat of the 2021 scenario. That makes sense — there’s no compelling argument that the Rule 5 draft should be skipped exactly once every five years — but the nature of negotiations means MLB probably wants the union to give up something in exchange.
Minor league transactions (including the Triple-A phase of the Rule 5 draft) are not affected. Minor leaguers who are not on the 40-man roster have their own CBA and will play the 2027 season whether or not the MLB lockout results in canceled games. MLB will not attempt to prevent players from participating in foreign leagues and/or winter ball during the lockout, Halem wrote in the memo. Drellich’s report has additional specifics on the league’s plan to immediately remove player likenesses from their website, heightened scrutiny on player health related to potential workers compensation filings, and more.
