The last Major League Baseball game may already have been played. Nobody told the fans, which is normal; in labor years the news doesn’t arrive, it expires. The collective bargaining agreement runs out on December 1, the owners want a salary cap for the first time since their 1994 cap plan produced a seven-and-a-half-month strike and a canceled World Series, and by the league’s own arithmetic there are 148 days until Opening Day, which is either plenty of time or none at all depending on what happens between the owners and the union, which is nothing until it is suddenly everything.
Fans who want to prepare — and the smart ones do — should follow the protocol below, developed with the help of three families who lived through 1994 and one hot dog vendor in Milwaukee who has simply waited too long.
STEP 1: Notice the calendar
The Brewers’ first World Series title ended with a grounded fly ball caught by Jake Bauers. That catch is now believed to be possibly the last one possibly for possibly a while. This is the nature of catches: they don’t announce themselves. Watch any final out this century with the respect due a witness.
STEP 2: Learn the new stat
The league’s proposed centerpiece is a salary cap, an idea owners describe as united and simple and the players describe with other words that will be on posters in 2028. Between December and the resolution — any resolution, any year — the primary statistic of professional baseball becomes the press-conference batting average: how many times two groups of men in suits can stand at podiums and describe the other side as unreasonable. The projected league leaders are both sides.
STEP 3: Ration your Sundays
The 2027 season begins March 24 unless it doesn’t. A locked-out spring means the national pastime returns to its pre-1900 roots: a game played mostly by people you know, in fields, on weekends, with rules that get worse as the afternoon goes on. Support groups meet in rec centers in every large market. The sessions are pleasant; nobody talks about baseball.
STEP 4: Keep one seat warm
Season-ticket holders are advised to keep a single seat in permanent readiness, the way farming families keep one room ready for whoever comes. Dana Kessler, who has held Section 214 seats in the same park since 1991 and was eight years old during the last work stoppage, has a system. “My mother kept our tickets in a copy of the rule book,” she said. “I keep them in a copy of the CBA. Nobody’s opened either one. That’s not bitterness, that’s filing.”
An MLB spokesperson, asked whether the season would start on time, said the league was “more committed to baseball than ever,” which is the correct answer and also the answer given during the last four shutdowns, the last strike, the last umpire strike, the collusion years, and the War, which for baseball purposes is still ongoing.
The hot dog vendor in Milwaukee — fourth generation, works three gates over from his father’s old gate — was asked how fans survive a shutdown.
“They come anyway,” he said. “They walk the parking lot. They look at the lights on the field, nobody’s on it, they buy a dog anyway. Baseball’s not the games, kid. Baseball’s the walk to the gate with the chance there’s games. You can lock the gate. The walk’s free.”
Opening Day is March 24, give or take the rest of history.