Can the Blue Jays Save Baseball from Impending Lockout in 2027?

By: Jonathan Karas

November 2, 2025

Photo Credit: Associated Press

Can the Toronto Blue Jays save baseball from what is increasingly looking like a lockout in 2027? The answer may depend on who wins this October. On Friday night, the Los Angeles Dodgers won game 4 of the NLCS, fueled by arguably the greatest single-player performance in MLB history by superstar Shohei Ohtani, completing a four-game sweep of the Milwaukee Brewers to advance to their second consecutive World Series. The Dodgers’ return to the World Series only intensifies the outrage across the country of fans and franchises that have begun to clamor for both a salary cap and floor to be implemented in the MLB. If the Dodgers wind up repeating as champs in a few weeks' time, real madness could ensue, most notably, a potential lockout.

A lockout is when the team owners in the league shut down operations, which blocks players from being paid, which usually happens when there is a dispute over contract negotiations/labor dispute. With all of this said, the MLB’s collective bargaining agreement is set to expire following the 2026 season, and all of this puts a normal 2027 MLB baseball season in serious jeopardy.

The Dodgers have the second-highest payroll in the MLB this season (behind the New York Mets) at $321 million (USA Today), but this figure does not include the hundreds of millions that the team will also eventually pay in deferred compensation. Including that deferred money, the Dodgers owe over 1 billion dollars to their players by the end of their contracts. For a quick definition, a salary cap is a limit that the league imposes on how much money a team can spend per year on player salaries in efforts to uphold competitive balance. With no salary cap in the MLB (unlike most other North American professional leagues), the Dodgers, who have one of the richest owners in the sport, are simply able to stockpile elite talent at will without any real restrictions.

MLB Senior Insider Jeff Passan echoed this in an interview earlier this month when talking about the potential of the Dodgers going back-to-back. "MLB owners -- who already were vocal publicly and even more so privately about Los Angeles spending as much as the bottom six teams in payroll combined this year -- will likely cry foul even louder."

Unlike other major leagues in North America like the NBA or NFL, Major League Baseball has long been against implementing a real salary cap. The MLB Players Association has seen a potential cap as a true restriction on free market player earnings. With this said, the MLB instead uses a luxury tax, which in theory could help solve this Dodgers-type problem by forcing teams that spend over the threshold to pay a tax to the teams that spend the least. However, this has not helped the problem. The Dodgers (and a few other teams), with the richest owners and most money continuously, go over the luxury tax but have the funds so that it does not really cause them to even flinch when going all in on pouring as much money as possible into acquiring premium talent. Smaller market teams just struggle to keep pace.

This gap between small and large market teams and their spending has widened even further recently, with teams like the Dodgers beginning to defer compensation on some of their biggest contracts. For example, Shohei Ohtani, whom the Dodgers won the sweepstakes for a year ago, signed with the team for 10 years and $700 million, which is the largest contract in the history of the sport, but only $20 million of that will be paid to Ohtani over those ten years, with the other $680M being deferred to 2034 and beyond. This is a trick to, in a way, manipulate their payroll to be able to continue to run circles around the small-spending, small-market teams in the MLB. The divide between the rich and the poor in the MLB has never been larger, and all signs point towards a lockout in 2026.

While these antics from the Dodgers and a few other big-spending teams like the New York Mets and Yankees are likely to cause an inevitable lockout when it comes to the new collective bargaining meetings in 2026, there is a scenario that could potentially silence some of the critics. If the Toronto Blue Jays are able to break through and dethrone these Dodgers in the World Series, a new argument could come to light.

According to BetMGM, the Blue Jays have the fifth-highest payroll in the league at around $253 million (still around $70 million less than the Dodgers). If they are able to take down the Dodgers, it could be a new exhibit that elite player development, front office strategy, and analytics can be enough to overcome massive payroll imbalances. It would give the players’ union new ammunition in an argument to keep the status quo in terms of a salary cap/salary floor situation. They could point to this World Series as an example of the magical unpredictability of the sport and say that reforming the financial system that the league runs on is not as urgent as it seemed.

All in all, if the Dodgers are to repeat as champions, the buzz will become just impossible to ignore, and the path towards a lockout would become even clearer. If the Blue Jays are able to pull off an improbable upset, it might briefly quiet the noise, but ultimately, it feels like even that still would not be enough to erase years of underlying tension in this regard. Regardless, this year’s World Series champion has an opportunity to make a case for the future of competition in America’s favorite pastime.