Rob Bradford

Yeah, I think...

Kind of inherently, because the owners are more the aggressors here, they are talking tougher than they did before.

And you do hear people saying, you know, if the players are really faced with missing games and maybe they will cave and that belief does exist, you know.

There's so many politics that go into this.

The management side, the ownership side in baseball, you need 75% to ratify a new CBA.

So if there's a group of eight owners who get together and say, we want a cap, well, that's a big political problem for Rob Manfred.

And the other thing that looms behind all of this

is the sports TV rights.

You're seeing these RSNs, particularly in the smaller markets, really struggle.

The money that goes to the teams in the RSNs is dipping.

On the other hand, you've got these big streaming companies that want to scoop up and buy everything.

And so what MLB wants to do

There's two sets of rights in baseball, the national rights and the local rights.

The national rights are what gives you the game of the week on Sunday nights on Now NBC.

It used to be on ESPN.

The local rights are what the Red Sox sell to Nessun, basically sell to themselves.

Two branches there.

Come 2028, baseball's national deals are up.

They run through 2028, so there's new deals starting in 2029.

Manfred would like to be able to sell those local rights to big streaming companies.