"Scheduling a Lockout Like a Wedding": Agents Turn on Manfred as Baseball's Labour War Boils Over

Baseball's agents almost never speak like this in public. That is what makes Friday's broadside so striking — and what makes it a warning that the sport's labour war is about to get louder. A number of leading MLB agents are, in the words of The Athletic's Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich, "incensed" by the way Commissioner Rob Manfred is guiding negotiations, and for once they are saying so on the record. The sharpest words came from agent Joel Wolfe, who did not hold back in his criticism of the commissioner and of the way the league is handling the end of the current agreement. "I find it incredibly obtuse and offensive that the commissioner's office is scheduling a lockout like it's some sort of wedding or bar mitzvah," Wolfe said. The current agreement expires at 11:59 p.m. ET on December 1, and owners are expected to lock the players out if no new deal is reached. Free agency opened November 2, giving teams and players one month of open business before the shutters come down, and the two sides remain far apart on the central question: whether baseball gets a salary cap. The league's latest proposal, made on Tuesday, did not remove the cap. It pushed its start date back a year, to 2028, at $258.2 million, with a $180.2 million floor, up from the $245.3 million and $171.2 million floated in May. The 2027 season would continue under the existing luxury-tax and revenue-sharing systems, and the offer came with sweeteners — earlier free agency for players aged 30 and over, no draft-pick forfeiture for signing a qualifying-offer free agent, and a minimum salary rising from $780,000 to $1.5 million. The players' association rejected it. Its interim executive director, Bruce Meyer, has made clear that a later start date does not change the union's objection to a cap itself. That is the backdrop to the agents' anger. ACES agent Seth Levinson said the industry is "damaged by the owners' portrayal of baseball as broken," and argued a lockout would only make things worse. Agents told The Athletic that even an offseason lockout is damaging — it freezes a market and poisons the relationship between the people who run the sport and the people who play it. The league, for its part, is not backing down. MLB spokesman Glen Caplin, responding to Wolfe, said the league is "going to keep listening to our fans who overwhelmingly support the same system every other league uses, and whose average player has done far better financially than the average MLB player over the last decade." Manfred has made the same argument all year: the payroll gap — $446 million top to bottom, by his count — is not a fair fight, and only a cap and a floor can fix it. The union's answer is that the gap is not the problem the owners say it is. The Milwaukee Brewers won the World Series this year with the 19th-highest payroll, beating a Tampa Bay Rays team that finished 25th. Attendance and television audiences are up, franchise values keep rising, and the players see a cap as a device to limit their pay and weaken their bargaining power, not to save competitive balance. With 25 days to go until the agreement expires, the public silence that has mostly held through the autumn is breaking. Agents rarely go on the record against a commissioner. When they do, in these terms, it usually means they believe the other side is not listening — and that the lockout everyone expects is now a date on the calendar.