Major League Baseball sent a memo to teams last week outlining procedures and guidelines for team personnel during the expected offseason lockout, The Athletic’s Evan Drellich 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 be prepared for the possibility that an agreement may not be reached by then and that they will be left with no realistic alternative but to implement a lockout of Major League players.” This comes as no surprise to anyone with even a tangential interest in the MLB. The current collective bargaining agreement expires at 11:59 pm Eastern Time on December 1. There is virtually no chance that there will be a new collective agreement in place by then. The league will immediately implement a lockout to freeze MLB offseason activity. While there is nothing that requires a work stoppage upon expiration of the collective bargaining agreement, it is in the league’s best interest to lock out players during the offseason rather than give the MLBPA the leverage to go on strike during the season. As with the 2021-22 lockout, that will more or less prevent team personnel from interacting with players who are on a 40-man roster. The league’s memo clarified what type of minimum non-labor relationships they can maintain with players pending negotiations. In a light-hearted example, MLB said club staff can attend a player’s wedding during a lockout as long as they don’t talk about work, but said they must send holiday cards or gifts by Dec. 2. Perhaps the most notable aspect of Drellich’s report is that the status of Major League Baseball’s draft Rule 5 will be determined in negotiations. The Rule 5 draft is scheduled for mid-December, but obviously can’t happen in the middle of the lockout. MLB canceled the 2021 Rule 5 draft. The MLBPA would surely prefer to keep it in place to maximize Major 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 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 skipped exactly once every five years, but the nature of the negotiations means MLB probably 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 league players not on the 40-man roster have their own collective bargaining agreement and will play in the 2027 season, whether the MLB lockout results in canceled games or not. MLB will not attempt to prevent players from participating in foreign leagues and/or winter baseball during the lockout, Halem wrote in the memo. Drellich’s report has additional details on the league’s plan to immediately remove player images from its website, increased scrutiny on player health in relation to potential workers’ compensation filings and more.
