The current Collective Bargaining Agreement between Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association is set to expire at midnight on December 1st, 2021. That means we just crossed the one-month-until-doom demarcation line, and boy does it feel murky.
On the surface, there do not appear to be the kind of external factors that make this potential lockout filled with nearly the animosity from the one that sapped the 1994 World Series and screwed the Cincinnati Reds out of their most recent chance at any sort of glory. The stock market just hit a record high (again) and is roughly 6x more robust than it was just 13 years ago during the heart of the financial crisis, and while day to day life has yet to get back to complete normal in year two of the pandemic, the wealthy folks that own baseball teams have their money tied up in investments that just keep increasing in value exponentially.