Major League Baseball's players and owners are in the process of negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement, or CBA. The CBA is the accord that governs the working relationship between the players, as represented by their union, the MLBPA, and the clubs. It covers pretty much every aspect of that relationship that you can imagine, all the way from the overarching salary and payroll structure to daily meal money and days off during the season.
Not surprisingly, it's the economic platform of the game that's the toughest to negotiate because that is always, in essence, a fight over money, or how the league's substantial revenues will be divided up between teams and players. That's keenly relevant right now because players and owners are sparring over whether or not MLB will have a cap on salaries moving forward. The owners have renewed their push for a salary cap after not aggressively (or at least not this aggressively) pursuing one since the 1994-95 players' strike.
Matters are such that the owners are expected to implement a lockout of the players after the current CBA expires at 11:59 p.m. ET on Dec. 1 of this year, or a little more than a month after the World Series ends. There are two kinds of labor stoppages in MLB: the strike and the lockout.
A strike is when the labor side – players as represented by their union, in this instance – puts a halt to operations. A lockout is when the management side – team owners and the commissioner's office doing their bidding, in this instance – initiates the stoppage. In plainspoken terms, a strike is a refusal to work, and a lockout is a refusal to permit work to be done.
For those on the outside, the result is the same, in that there's no Major League Baseball during a lockout or strike. When a lockout is in force in MLB, as is expected to be the case after this CBA expires, nothing happens on the major-league front. There's an almost literal element to a lockout in that anyone on the 40-man roster of any MLB club will be locked out of any team facility for the duration of the stoppage.
That also means no access to team trainers or team physicians or members of the coaching staff. Beyond that, there's a transaction freeze in place starting the moment the lockout begins (more on that in a moment). Additionally, MLB is expected to remove player images and videos from the league's official website, MLB.com, and player images and even names would be removed from articles on MLB.com.
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