The Los Angeles Angels have a lot of planning to do for next year, but there's also a lockout coming.
The lockout is coming, and it’s going to be ugly, especially for a team like the Los Angeles Angels.
We’ve seen the kind of rampant stupidity baseball’s owners can put on display when they decide they want a salary cap, and this has become baseball’s version of Sisyphus. The owners push the boulder up the hill, thinking they’re going to get a cap, only to see it come tumbling back down when they inevitably cave as games are lost and revenue streams go down.
The Angels are part of this, and they’ll be watching the action carefully, especially with a new ownership group coming in. They need to do planning for next year, but it’s not going to be easy given the number of games that could be lost.
According to Evan Drellich and Andrew Marchand of The Athletic, the key number to watch is 60, and it has nothing to do with Babe Ruth or any of the other fraud players who have passed him on the home run list.
Instead, it’s about TV revenue and contracts, per the writers. If at least 60 games get wiped out due to the lockout, most of the league’s national broadcast contracts get extended for another year.
But it also means the potential delay of a big payday for the owners, so that’s the pain point to watch for. The NBA set the money number at an average of $7 billion a year as the goal for MLB to hit with big media contracts, with the ultimate wishful thinking goal being the NFL’s golden-goose number of $11 billion a year.
The silver lining is that the owners still get paid even if no games are played in 2027, as the contract language is set up for that to happen.
Do the thought experiment here, and it’s not hard to figure out what’s going to happen. Try to imagine a bunch of billionaires being asked to wait for a payday and standing in solidarity as they do.
Yeah, right.
The players will cave as well, but in a very different way. The rank-and-file of “low-level” millionaires will feel a much different version of pain when games don’t get played, so the MLBPA will slowly leak out some concessions in the hopes that an agreement can be reached.
It’s the sports version of Labor Negotiations 101, and no one knows what the Halos’ position will be. Former owner Arte Moreno was a hawk who badly wanted a cap, but we know nothing about where new owner Stan Kroenke will land on this issue.
