Major League Baseball sent a memo to teams last week outlining procedures and guidelines for team personnel during the planned offseason lockout, Evan Drellich of The Athletic reports. “Our commitment has been and remains to exhaust all realistic options to achieve our goal of reaching an agreement with the Players Association,” MLB negotiator Dan Halem wrote in the memo. “However, clubs must prepare for the possibility that a deal will not be reached by then and that they will have no realistic alternative other than to implement a lockout for major league players.”
This comes as no surprise to anyone with even a tangential interest in MLB. The current collective agreement expires at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on December 1. There is virtually no chance that a new collective agreement will be in place by then. The league will immediately implement a lockout to freeze MLB offseason activities. Even if there is nothing demanding In the event of a work stoppage when the CBA expires, it is in the league’s best interest to lock out players during the offseason rather than giving the MLBPA the leverage to strike during the season.
As with the 2021-22 lockout, this will more or less prevent team personnel from interacting with players on a 40-man roster. The league’s memo clarified the types of minimum non-professional relationships they can have with players pending negotiations. In one mild example, MLB said club staff can attend a player’s wedding during a lockout as long as they don’t discuss work, but said they must send greeting cards or gifts by Dec. 2.
Perhaps the most notable aspect of the Drellich report is that the status of the major league Rule 5 draft must be determined during negotiations. Draft Rule 5 is scheduled for mid-December but obviously cannot take place during the lockout period. MLB has canceled the 2021 Draft Rule 5.
The MLBPA would surely prefer to keep it in place to maximize big league opportunities for fringe players. The union has already proposed scheduling the Rule 5 draft for late November, in the final year of a collective bargaining agreement, to avoid a repeat of the 2021 scenario. That makes sense — there’s no compelling argument that the Rule 5 draft should be ignored exactly once every five years — but the nature of the negotiations means MLB likely wants the union to give up something in return.
Minor league transactions (including the Triple-A phase of the Rule 5 draft) are not affected. Minor leagues not on the 40-man roster have their own CBA and will play the 2027 season regardless of whether the MLB lockout results in game cancellations. 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 includes additional details on the league’s plan to immediately remove player likenesses from its website, an in-depth review of player health related to possible workers’ compensation claims, and more.
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