Labor Strife Looms Over MLB Opening Day

Plus: Untenable in Tampa, Cinderella didn't show up for March Madness, TGL, and more.

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! May your baseball-related hopes spring eternal this week—for lo, the winter is past, Opening Day is almost here, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

We're talkin' baseball today, but we haven't forgotten about March Madness, we'll take a stop in golfland, and there's also a hockey goal that you've got to see to believe.

Before we start, a Reason Friends and Family Bracket Contest update: Mark S. has a narrow lead on the men's side with 550 points, putting him in the 99.9th percentile of brackets on ESPN. You deserve a waffle party, Mark S.! On the women's side, we have a three-way tie of people at 570 points, but only in the 99th percentile—close, but not quite waffle party material, sorry friends.

Locker Room Links

• Our resident Los Angeles Angels superfan, Matt Welch, gets mentioned in the Los Angeles Times' rather dour preview of the Angels' season.
• College basketball's sweatiest coach is heading to Texas.
• A great defense of sports betting from Ben Domenech.
• The best team in a bracket this month might not be a basketball team—it might just be Wisconsin women's hockey. (They won the title in dramatic fashion on Sunday.)
• But this is the most important bracket news this month.
• Elsewhere in Reason: "Trump and Congress Have a Right and a Duty To Kill the Department of Education"
• RIP George Foreman:
  

  In honor of the late George Foreman (R.I.P.), here is one of the greatest posts of the early blogosphere: https://t.co/gTSgFez9vo pic.twitter.com/RLzgs6kBKB

  — Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) March 22, 2025

Labor Strife Looms Over Opening Day

Things are going pretty well for Major League Baseball right now, which means they're probably about to badly screw it up.

Attendance is trending upward, game times are shorter and more digestible, TV numbers are promising, and the league has approximately 1 billion fans in Japan (but seriously, the Tokyo Series games averaged 24 million viewers there, or roughly one-fifth of the country's population). The rule changes of 2023 seem to have accomplished their primary goals (despite my disapproval at the time).

Yet a potential player lockout before the 2027 season looms over the sport, and there's a good chance a lockout goes a lot more poorly than the last one, which only narrowly avoided any lost games. Commissioner Rob Manfred is already playing a very weird expectations game, saying offseason lockouts should be the new norm: "It's actually a positive," because of the leverage. MLB Players Association Executive Director Tony Clark is already saying he expects a lockout too: "Unless I am mistaken, the league has come out and said there's going to be a work stoppage," seemingly referring to Manfred's comments.

Baltimore Orioles owner David Rubenstein is asking for a salary cap, and there's no doubt other owners of midmarket teams agree. Fans and owners might call even louder for parity if the Los Angeles Dodgers win the World Series again with their $322 million payroll this season and Shohei Ohtani's $722 million contract. How are the Detroits, Baltimores, and Cincinnatis of the league supposed to compete with that? Betting odds imply the Dodgers have a roughly 30 percent chance of repeating as champions—thankfully, baseball is still pretty random, and high payrolls don't guarantee success (as the Yankees and Mets have shown with varying degrees of schadenfreude).

But even if the big-payroll teams strike out and midmarkets dominate the playoffs, owners are still going to seek a salary cap. A ceiling on their payroll expenses would boost the value of their teams, probably even the ones in major markets. Clark said in 2023 the union is "never going to agree to a cap," and there's no reason to think he or the players have changed their minds.

The owners and players already have their positions staked out. They can see the car crash coming two miles away. If this game of chicken ends poorly, they can only blame themselves.

In the meantime, let's enjoy another great baseball season—except for you, A's and White Sox fans. You can probably skip this one.

Untenable in Tampa

One distraction plaguing the league right now is the Tampa Bay Rays, their ownership, and their stadium—or the big gaping hole where their stadium roof is supposed to be.

Manfred and some owners are pressuring Rays owner Stu Sternberg to sell the team, according to The Athletic's Evan Drellich. Sternberg has owned and operated the Rays for two decades. In that span, at least four different stadium plans have fallen apart—the last because the stadium literally fell apart. Now they're stuck playing at Steinbrenner Field, the spring training home of the Yankees, which seats just 11,000 people. Lucky(?) for them, the Rays only pulled 16,500 fans on average to home games last season.

Sharks are circling in the form of ownership groups trying to buy the team. The league wants to keep the team in Tampa, but with different owners. Supposedly the market is too valuable, but attendance numbers beg to differ. Even with the small capacity, Opening Day still isn't quite sold out, even though cavernous, inconveniently located Tropicana Field had sold out Opening Days for the previous 18 years. If the Rays can't pull people to Steinbrenner Field's supposedly superior location (it's close to Raymond James Stadium and Tampa International Airport), perhaps the league should take that as a sign.

Local governments haven't managed to agree with Sternberg on a stadium funding plan anyway (fortunately for taxpayers). Instead, St. Petersburg is stuck paying $22.7 million for a roof on a stadium that everybody hates and wants the team to leave as soon as possible. Sternberg, for his part, is pretty good at the baseball side of things. His staff has done a good job keeping the Rays competitive with low payrolls. There's no championships to speak of, but there are two American League pennants, and before last season the team had a five-year postseason streak.

But the Rays need a stadium to play in. If Sternberg can't pay for one himself, it may be time to sell the franchise to someone who can.

Which Way, March Man?

Upsets have been increasingly common in March Madness until this year's brackets put a hard stop on all that. On the men's side, every No. 1 seed made it through to the Sweet 16, No. 10 Arkansas is the only double-digit seed left, and there are a pair of No. 6 seeds that, semisurprisingly, beat No. 3 seeds. The women's bracket is typically more predictable with fewer upsets, and this year is no different: every No. 1, 2, and 3 seed remains alive, with three No. 5 seeds beating No. 4 seeds. In both brackets, every remaining school is either in the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, or SEC (except the Connecticut women as the Big East's lone representative).

Is this a one-off after years of increasing upsets, or the start of a trend back to the best seeds cruising past the early rounds? As Nate Silver noted about the men's game, first-round upsets were more common from 2010–2024 than 1985–2009, and games had closer final scores, too. But the biggest increase in upsets was No. 11 seeds over No. 6 seeds—which are nice, but not exactly legendary upsets we'll never forget. It seems as though midmajor schools are getting fewer at-large bids, too, so even if there's a good upset by a No. 12 or 11 seed, it's more likely to be Generic SEC University instead of Northwest No-Name State University, which hasn't been in the tournament in 33 years.

Which way will March Madness go from here? Will parity and upsets come back, or are they on the outs? The answer may be just as unpredictable as your bracket.

Simulator Golf? In This Economy?

The concept of watching professional golfers play on a simulator might seem weird until you realize TGL (TMRW Golf League) pits teams of golf's most famous players against each other. The stakes might not be as high as a major tournament, but Sunday at the Masters isn't going to have Xander Schauffele, Rickie Fowler, Collin Morikawa, and Tommy Fleetwood all in contention.

TGL matches are fun to have on TV in the background while you do something else (like write a newsletter). Earlier this season, players seemed like they were having a little too much fun instead of stressing over the match, but the drama and tension of the playoffs have been more engaging. (The hammer rules remain confusing, and the in-arena music is a little annoying.)

The TGL Finals are this week, with Atlanta taking the lead over New York on Monday in the best-of-three finals. Awkwardly, Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy's teams didn't even make the playoffs. Have you watched any TGL this season? Let me know what you think at [e-mail].

Replay of the Week

It's always fun when the puck gets batted into the goal out of midair. On Saturday, the St. Louis Blues batted the puck in midair three times, back-to-back-to-back, to take the lead against the Chicago Blackhawks. Keep watching for the overhead shot to truly appreciate how weird this is.

Tic-Tac-GOAL ???? (This might be the weirdest goal in history) pic.twitter.com/8VViy9GLIm

— B/R Open Ice (@BR_OpenIce) March 22, 2025

We very nearly had a goalie fight, which would have been a guaranteed replay of the week. Alas.

That's all for now. Enjoy watching the real game of the week coming up on Sunday, when UFL defending champs Birmingham Stallions take on the D.C. Defenders and (hopefully) a lengthy beer snake.