Why a baseball work stoppage is on the horizon, and a biblical view of the value of work

The World Series begins on Friday night between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Milwaukee Brewers, with the guarantee that one fanbase will experience the thrill of a first championship. The low-payroll clubs clash after boasting the best records in the sport. The intrigue is there, and we’d better cherish it because it may be the last of Major League Baseball that we see for a little while.

Baseball’s crown jewel event may get overshadowed by the strong likelihood of an imminent labor dispute. How did we get here?

Baseball is ingrained in the fabric of American culture. We use baseball idioms in regular conversation, perhaps without even realizing that’s where they derive from. Field of Dreams, The Sandlot, and Moneyball headline a lengthy list of influential feature films centered around America’s Pastime.

Major League Baseball, in particular, has left its mark on Civil Rights, American cuisine, and the rest of professional sports. Yet, despite its pioneering journey, it began to fade into the shadows in recent generations.

After a lull in its prominence, MLB has experienced its own sort of renaissance in recent years. The introduction of a pitch clock, the emergence of international superstars, and efforts to reach younger fans are all paying off. Television ratings and ticket sales have surged.

However, all that progress may soon be down the drain as MLB’s future looms uncertain, with a lockout likely to begin when the current collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between owners and players expires on December 1st.

Why a lockout?

The 2027 season is set to open on March 24th, but that is beginning to seem optimistic. It feels like baseball has only recently completed its PR recovery from the disaster of the 1994 players’ strike that cost fans a half-season and an entire postseason.

While the league locking out the players may be a foregone conclusion at this point, how long the siege persists depends on several factors.

The primary topic of concern is the creation of a “salary cap.” MLB is on an island of its own without one. The NBA, NHL, and NFL each introduced a cap decades ago. Now, baseball franchise owners are hoping to enact one.

Owners desire to strengthen the sport’s competitive balance and increase the value of their franchises. The sport’s resurgence could continue with financial predictability and stability.

But the players’ union has vowed never to agree to a cap. To the union, the cap is just a path for owners to artificially reduce player values and squeeze control of the free-agent market to line their own pockets.

The initial league proposal is for a $245.3 million cap and a mandatory floor of $171.2 million. Just ten teams opened the 2026 season with payrolls in that range–twelve were below, and eight were above.

Mark Feinsand, for MLB.com, points to other leagues to argue that the floor would increase spending and directly benefit player compensation. Feinsand also notes overwhelming fan support for creating a cap.

The fuller picture

With the Brewers and Rays as the last two standing this year, the Fall Classic will be between two bottom-half payroll teams. Experts are curious if this might change the dynamic at the negotiating table. Both players and league owners desire public support, and small-market teams finding postseason success does not fit the league’s narrative.

Following the elimination of the two-time reigning champion, big-market, high-payroll Dodgers, Ryan Glasspiegel of Front Office Sports shared his perspective on X: “Hard to see how MLB could credibly lock players out for months or longer over competitive balance issues now. . .Brewers might have saved the sport.”

From 2021 to 2025, nine out of ten World Series participants were top-half payroll teams, and the most recent “small-market” team to win was the 2015 Royals. While 2026 is flipping that script, it is certainly more of an exception than a norm. Perhaps the timing of the exception will prove significant.

If the lockout carries deep into the spring, actual baseball games will vanish from the calendar. 60 games is seen as a potential breaking point, according to The Athletic. Missing 60 games means the current media rights will be extended by a year, and importantly, “the big payday owners expect from new national TV rights deals could wind up delayed by a lockout.”

The league is eagerly eyeing the prospect of new television contracts for 2029 as an opportunity to make everyone richer (see the NBA’s most recent media rights deal). Owners may not be willing to postpone such a significant pay increase. Plus, if the lockout drags into a 1994-like PR disaster with fans, the league’s media value will tank.

Canceling games will come with other casualties, like ticket revenue, concessions, sponsorships, and merchandise sales as well. Each side has prepared by stockpiling a “warchest” for years in anticipation of this day.

As December 1st nears, MLB revealed plans to use the new CBA as an opportunity to revamp the sport’s calendar. The primary changes include reducing the season from 162 to 154 games, implementing a guaranteed weekly off day, and expanding the early postseason rounds. Such changes are widely viewed as beneficial to owners and players, but they come with a catch…a salary cap.

As with our recent examination of college football’s current challenges, it’s all about the money for baseball. As billionaire owners bicker back and forth with millionaire players, avid fans will wait in disappointment, and casual fans will simply disappear if games are not played.

Working is redemptive

Lockouts in professional sports are far from unprecedented. Every time a significant work stoppage like this is anticipated, I am reminded of God’s view of work, outlined in Scripture. Work is a blessing and should be treated as such.

God gave Adam work in the Garden, before the Fall (Gen. 2:15). Paul describes work as a service to the Lord, not to man (Col. 3:23-24). Scripture also speaks harshly against laziness (Prov. 10:4), idleness (2 Thess. 3:10), and greed (Ecc. 5:10)—all temptations for the person that “works” from a self-serving heart.

A great many athletes and league officials love their work and are passionate about what they do, but others are just there for the paycheck. It is hard for the average spectator to sympathize with the plight of players or owners when it all feels so greedy. Yet, the greed that influences decisions in ballpark front offices also influences decisions in workplaces of all shapes and sizes.

Our culture has degraded the value of work to a transactional segment of our lives, typically seen as separate from the personal and spiritual parts of ourselves. At best, work may be about our personal passions and goals. More commonly, work is simply a means to get rich or to be known, and if it does not produce those desired outcomes, we either leverage it for what we want or pull the plug and move on.

But work, whether a paid job or the efforts we pour into everything else in life, was never meant to be about us. Work is a form of stewardship. God has entrusted each of us with skills, time, and opportunities. Our responsibility is to use what he has provided for his glory, whether in a dream job or a “dead-end” job.

If the biblical worldview of work took root in the hearts of athletes and team owners, perhaps we wouldn’t be here waiting on a lockout. If it took root in the hearts of folks in Silicon Valley or on Capitol Hill, perhaps the country, and even the world, would look different.

But what if, first and foremost, the biblical worldview of work took root in your heart and the hearts of those you work with? Perhaps a newfound contentment and joy will emerge as you bring glory to Christ in your working efforts.

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Here’s some good news: Russian state media is reporting this morning that US citizen Stephen Hubbard, held in Russia since 2022, has been released. Now to some bad news: according to the New York Times, “a mysterious Russian satellite moved threateningly close to a US commercial radar satellite that provides imagery to the Ukrainian military.”

Over the weekend, a satellite called Kosmos 2612 came within an estimated eighty-five feet of ICEYE-X36, a satellite that produces three-dimensional images of Earth’s surface under contract with Ukraine. Analysts say the Russian satellite likely intended to attack the US radar satellite in what would have been the first instance of warfare in orbit, but the Kremlin may have called off the operation at the eleventh hour. Kosmos 2612 could close in on ICEYE-X36 again, and five other Kosmos satellites also in orbit could join in nefarious actions overhead as well.

The incident illustrates new warnings that a space war could break out in the future. The destruction of our satellites could cripple military operations and critical national infrastructure, leading to information blackouts and a financial sector collapse. Analysts warn that such a conflict would return modern life to the nineteenth century.

“Sleepwalking into World War III?”

What is happening above us is happening below us as well: Foreign Policy warns that “an underwater shadow war is raging.” The article reviews Undersea War: The Battle to Control the Cables and Pipelines That Connect Our World, a new book focusing on ocean floor cables that carry between 95 and 99 percent of global internet traffic. According to its author, both Russia and China are now damaging and threatening these cables.

Are these acts of war? When a reporter asked this question of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, he replied that the “damage and destruction of submarine cables” marks “a completely different transition between peace and war.”

Both stories illustrate an article by foreign affairs journalist Gideon Rachman titled, “Are we sleepwalking into World War III?” His Financial Times subtitle states, “As regional conflicts rage and revisionist powers challenge the established order, warnings of a new global conflagration are growing louder.”

I saw his article just after reading The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History by Odd Arne Westad. The Yale historian argues that the world looks alarmingly similar to geopolitical circumstances just prior to World War I, a global conflict that led to forty million casualties.

However, I don’t want to write about a possible world war in the future any more than you want to read about one. We are both suffering from what British journalist Janan Ganesh calls “pessimism fatigue,” the result of living through the threat of nuclear annihilation, followed by the successive threats of jihadist terrorism, the pandemic, and now AI and world war.

By now, you likely expect me to offer trust in God as the antidote to such fatigue. Remembering that the Lord is still on his throne and that he still rules the universe encourages us to choose faith over fear.

But there’s a catch.

“All the thrills of religion and none of the cost”

A group of sociologists recently studied what they call “secular rationalism,” the belief that science is the only way to understand the world and that morality should rest on reason rather than religious teachings. There are three ways of responding to this worldview:

1. You can be a secular rationalist while still believing in God or attending religious services.
2. You can be a secular rationalist while rejecting religion.
3. You can be religious while rejecting secular rationalism.

Which of the three groups is most likely to also believe in magic? The first, by far.

Here’s why: Secular rationalists who hold spiritual beliefs get to define such beliefs however they wish. They stand outside the orthodoxies of a particular religion and approach spirituality as a buffet from which they can choose what they want. In essence, they believe about God whatever helps them be their own god (Genesis 3:5).

I’m reminded of C. S. Lewis’s observation in Mere Christianity regarding what he called the “Life-Force,” an amorphous something behind the observable world. (Star Wars characters might call it “The Force.”) According to Lewis,

The Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?

The “food” of Jesus today

Believing in God in the face of global threats is not enough. Such faith empowers us to face our fears only if it leads us to submit our lives fully to the living Lord Jesus. A shelter only helps those who stand within its protection. An umbrella in the car is no good when you’re caught outside in the rain.

Part of submitting ourselves to the Spirit each day is being obedient to what he then calls us to do. In this way, we are not only trusting our Father with our greatest challenges, but we are helping to meet them as we fulfill our kingdom assignment. “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (James 1:22).

Jesus testified, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work” (John 4:34). He continues such obedience today in and through our lives as his “body” in the world (1 Corinthians 12:27).

We can relate to him as our “Life-Force” or as our Lord, but not both.

Which would Jesus say you have chosen today?

Quote for the day:

“There are very few men who realize what God would make of them if they abandoned themselves into his hands and let themselves be formed by his grace.” —Ignatius of Loyola

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Around 1:00 in the afternoon on Thursday, a sixteen-year-old shot through the locks on the doors to the Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon. He then proceeded to kill three students and one teacher before a local bystander who’d noticed him enter the building shot him. As of this writing, another student and teacher are alive but wounded from the attack.

Police responded quickly to the flood of 911 calls, arriving at the school only a few minutes after the shooter entered. However, by that point, he was already dead. The surviving students were then taken to a nearby church, where they were reunited with their families.

Officials have yet to release more information on the shooter, his potential motives, or the weapon used, though law enforcement sources suspect it was a shotgun.

Bend Mayor Melanie Kebler spoke for many when she told reporters,

A school should be a safe place where children can learn and feel secure. What happened today should never happen. Like so many in our community, I’m struggling to make sense of a loss that feels unimaginable.

Perhaps you’re feeling the same way. I know dropping my kids off at school will feel different today than it did yesterday, even though what happened in Oregon is unlikely to have any direct impact on our lives here in Texas. Still, I imagine the parents who are grieving the loss of their children, as well as those who will have to try and explain what happened to the ones who survived, thought much the same yesterday morning.

So, what do we do with those feelings?

The churchy answer—which also happens to be the correct one, in this case—is to take them to the Lord. But the truth is, tragedies like this can make it hard to seek comfort from a God who could have stopped them and didn’t. What do we do then?

Reasons to be grateful

In a previous article, I argued that suffering is not only redeemable but necessary in light of God’s goodness. I still believe that’s the case, but tragedies like yesterday’s shooting are among the most difficult to view through that lens, even if they are also when it’s most necessary to do so. As I’ve thought and prayed about how to do that, though, I felt like the Lord brought two thoughts to mind that I hadn’t considered before.

At the end of the day, God’s omniscience means that he knew this attack would happen, and his omnipotence means that he was more than capable of stopping it. As a result, it’s completely valid to ask why he didn’t. But the new thought—at least, new to me—was that if God bears any sense of responsibility for the lives that were lost, then he bears at least some responsibility for the lives that were saved as well.

The shooter managed to kill four people in under three minutes, and it could have been so much worse. While we don’t know much about the bystander who stopped him, what are the odds that someone who was not only armed but brave and capable enough to intervene would happen to be near the school as that sixteen-year-old broke in? How many more might have died if he hadn’t risked his own life to stop him?

Moreover, how many more would-be shooters are stopped by friends, family, or other people in their lives who notice them heading down that path and choose to intervene before they ever make it on campus? Thursday’s attack was the first mass shooting in a school since a fourteen-year-old killed four in Winder, Georgia, more than two years ago. It seems unlikely he was the first to consider it, though, and it is right to thank God that more haven’t done the same.

Again, that does not mean it’s wrong to have questions and doubts in the aftermath of a tragedy like this, but if we’re inclined to blame God for the four who died, then we should also thank him for the nearly five hundred who survived.

That said, it can still be difficult not to give the tragedy more weight than the blessing, though. And that basic impulse is important as well.

A lingering reminder of God’s image

The second direction God took me as I reflected on the tragedy of this shooting is how strangely natural it seems for the negative to hold our attention rather than the positive. I think at least part of the reason why that’s the case is that enough of who God created us to be still exists in all of us to recognize that this world is broken.

If God weren’t real and this world was simply the result of random chance, then there would be no reason for us to be this shattered by something like a school shooting. That kind of tragedy would simply be an expected part of living in this fallen, depraved world.

But that’s not the case. Rather, being appalled at something like this is seen as a basic test of our humanity. And there’s no logical reason why that should be the case outside of the fact that a shred of that imago Dei with which we were all created still cries out against such violence and loss of life.

That someone was willing to shoot up an elementary school shows that it is possible for sin to break us so completely that the image of God in our lives is all but buried. But that’s the exception rather than the rule, and it’s important to recognize that fact.

Again, none of this is meant to keep us from asking the hard questions about why God would let something like this happen. Those are entirely fair and appropriate, and the Lord is not offended by our asking them. But that grief is also a reminder that we were created for so much more than this world can offer, and the desire for what only God can provide is still woven deep inside each of us.

Perhaps at least part of the way God will redeem the Silver Rail shooting is by using it to awaken those desires on the other side of the grief and fear endemic to this moment. So, with that possibility in mind, let’s conclude for today by taking some time to pray.

How to pray

If this list is something you need to come back to throughout the day, that’s fine. Just don’t rush through it. After all, those who are hurting deserve more than empty thoughts and a quick prayer. Let’s make sure our prayers reflect that fact.

• Start by praying for the families who lost loved ones in this horrible tragedy. And don’t just offer a generic “Lord, please be with them” kind of prayer. Take the time to genuinely seek God’s help with knowing how to pray for those who are hurting, then follow through in obedience to what he shows you.
• Next, thank God for all the lives that were saved. Again, take the time to seek the Holy Spirit’s help in knowing how to offer that prayer, particularly if gratitude in this moment still feels more forced than natural.
• And if you’re still beset by the doubts, fear, and anger that a tragedy like this can bring to the surface, take those thoughts to God and ask for his help in working through them well. Don’t stuff them down or move on until you’ve genuinely wrestled with them in the presence of the Lord.
• Finally, ask God to make you aware of any opportunities to help people know him that will come about in the days ahead as a result of the shooting. The Holy Spirit knows the hearts and minds of the people around you better than you ever could, and he knows who is ready for that kind of conversation. If God brings someone to mind or helps them to cross your path, ask the Lord to help you be ready to have that conversation well.

Quote of the day:

“The true wonder of human beings is not that we are sinners, but that even in our sin we are haunted by goodness, that even in the mud we can never wholly forget the stars.” —William Barclay

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