Yahoo!Sports quotes FBT Gibbons Partner Catherine Burgett in the article “Fans Could be the Key to Stoppling the Looming 2027 MLB Lockout,” which details the negotiations between Major League Baseball and the Players Association, which many feel could see the cancellation of the 2027 season.
She notes the lack of a salary cap impacting many smaller-market teams as they lose their stars to teams in bigger markets.
“They get players, they fall in love with their players, they support their players for five or six years, and then they lose their players,” Burgett says. “So, it is hard to build a team. It is hard to build that franchise. It is hard to build the loyal fan base because people get frustrated with it.”
Burgett also looks back at the “collective trauma” of the disastrous 1994 strike, which saw the cancellation of the World Series, and took years for the sport to recover from.
“Nobody wants to see Opening Day postponed,’ she says. “Nobody wants to imagine another year without a World Series, and so that leverage can change the closer you get something that matters more to the other side. In this case, the owners wanted to make sure that next season is uninterrupted.”
If both the union and the owners take their eye off the big picture, Burgett says, it could be devastating for the sport.
“It really depends on what happens between now and December, and how people are going to feel about it, how it gets portrayed, what kind of moves get made,” she says. “But there is a very real risk of not only eroding the relationship between the parties, the players and ownership, which is an important relationship to maintain, but eroding relationships between owners and their markets and players and their fans.”