Donald Trump was in the Oval Office with Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday, announcing a $25 million whistleblower program, when a reporter steered the conversation to baseball. His answer on the looming lockout was short. His answer on the World Series was shorter.
“I think it will. That is going to happen,” Trump said when asked whether a lockout was coming after the season.
The follow-up, pointed at the matchup between the Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays, got less of his time. “I better not get involved,” he began, before cutting the reporter off with “nobody cares.”
A labor fight he already picked a side on
Baseball’s current collective bargaining agreement expires on December 1, and the owners are widely expected to lock players out the following day. The dispute that killed talks is one Trump has publicly weighed in on: the owners want a salary cap, and the players’ union has refused to engage with the idea at all.
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In June, aboard Air Force One, Trump said that “if you don’t have a salary cap, you don’t have a sport” and that MLB “should’ve done it a long time ago.” A lockout is the owners’ main leverage to force the issue; from the moment it begins, trades, free agency and official contact between players and clubs are all frozen.
Two of baseball’s smallest spenders
The Brewers and Rays are an awkward case for the owners’ core argument. Milwaukee finished the regular season 19th in payroll; Tampa Bay sat near the bottom of the league. It is the first World Series this century without a team from the top half of MLB’s salary table, and under the current CBA’s own revenue-sharing formula, Milwaukee is officially baseball’s smallest market, with Tampa Bay at No. 19.
That is a tough selling point for a side arguing that low-revenue clubs cannot consistently compete without a cap.
Game 1 is Friday night in Milwaukee
Game 1 is at American Family Field on Friday, October 23. First pitch is scheduled for 7pm local time, with Fox carrying the series.
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If no deal is reached by December 1, the lockout starts the next day. The last stoppage, before the 2022 season, ran 99 days; a longer one would put the start of the 2027 regular season at risk.
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