Baseball is soaring again. Will age-old problems pull it back to earth?

Disappointment is part of baseball’s draw. Angst and frustration are as much a part of the daily routine as balls and strikes. Success in this twisted sport is impossible without them.

So perhaps it is fitting that in recent days, in the brief space between one of the more exciting All-Star Games in years and a trade deadline full of intrigue, issues as old as baseball time popped up to remind the industry just how quickly they can pull it back to earth again.

On Monday, news broke that the mere specter of a salary cap spurred a verbal altercation between Philadelphia Phillies star Bryce Harper and Commissioner Rob Manfred, only to be overshadowed by MLB announcing hours later that Cleveland Guardians closer extraordinaire Emmanuel Clase would be placed on leave as part of an ongoing gambling investigation.

Labor strife and gambling, baseball’s two perpetual buzzkills, reared their heads again.

The clouds of another labor storm have been gathering for years, with the darkness intensifying in recent months.

A contentious negotiation before the 2022 season caused a lockout that nearly cost MLB regular season games and exacerbated growing mistrust between players and Manfred’s league office. Manfred stoked those tensions with talk this year of another lockout when the current collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2026 season, but he has since been trying to quell them by visiting all 30 teams this summer and suggesting players and owners might find common benefit in changes to the sport’s economic system.

But as evidenced by Harper’s outburst, which was first widely reported by ESPN, players are skeptical of the commissioner’s motives: Harper reportedly told Manfred that if he was there to talk about a salary cap, he should leave the Phillies clubhouse. The Major League Baseball Players Association has always taken deep pride in being the only major North American sport without a cap. Players went on strike and lost the end of the 1994 season because of it. And union head Tony Clark has indicated that if the owners are willing to lose games to get one, the players are willing and financially prepared to lose games, too.

“There are no illusions of grandeur here in regards to what it is we’re hearing, and what it is the interest from the other side seems to be,” said Clark, who was a young player in 1994 and said current players voted to withhold all licensing money last winter to prepare for losing salary in another work stoppage.

“[That] puts players in a position where [they are] making the determination that we may be sitting down at a table and that we may find ourselves in a work stoppage at 12:01 Dec. 1 of next year. They’re preparing for that, while hoping that is indeed not the case.”

Yet even as both sides brace against the other, recent events have exposed divides within each that could further muddy the negotiations.

The previous negotiation ended with most of the MLBPA’s executive board resigning after it voted to reject a deal the rank-and-file members eventually decided to accept — revealing, though union leadership is quick to brush it off — a disconnect between the game’s highest-paid players and those who count their earnings in the hundreds of thousands rather than hundreds of millions.

Similarly, tensions bubbled last year when some union members pushed for a change in leadership, only to see none made. And since then, Clark has come under federal investigation along with since-resigned NFLPA head Lloyd Howell, raising questions about union leadership just as it prepares for one of the most anticipated negotiations of this generation.

Perhaps those divides are part of the reason Manfred sees an opening, though he has plenty of reason to worry about the unity of his side, too.

While several owners — Baltimore’s David Rubenstein among them — have called for a salary cap, limiting the spending of high-payroll clubs does not address the non-spending of those who receive revenue-sharing payouts and do not reinvest them. Some owners argue that a salary cap could come with a salary floor that would force those smaller-market owners to pony up to a baseline payroll. But anyone with a choice between being forced to spend money and not would almost certainly resist it.

Plus, all of this is happening as Manfred is negotiating new national television deals and navigating changes to the local media setup resulting from the fall of regional sports networks, creating uncertainty over exactly how much revenue will be available, to whom, and how to divide it for the best interest of the sport: Small-market cable deals were the first to fall apart, widening the gap between those clubs and the big-city teams whose billion-dollar deals remain intact. And big-city teams tend to drive national revenue, too.

In other words, the current labor situation is a complicated mess, the kind probably best handled with mutual respect, trust and understanding — none of which seem possible between these two groups in the near future. Neither Clark nor Manfred misses a chance to posture against the other, both publicly and in off-the-record conversations.

And in the meantime, both groups are fighting another problem that threatens their livelihoods.

Despite MLB’s efforts to downplay the Clase situation and others in recent years as isolated incidents, the sport is facing a gambling problem. Perhaps the prevalence of phones and the ease of legalized sports betting made an epidemic inevitable. Perhaps the sport’s embrace of gambling industry ad revenue did not help. But from Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter to Clase’s entanglement, the sport has seen names big and small tied to something that could shatter the most important thing baseball has: the integrity of the sport.

Clase’s situation surfaced after MLB opened an investigation into one of his Guardians teammates, pitcher Luis Ortiz. If either pitcher is found to have bet on baseball, or to have altered his play to appease bettors, he will be banned for life.

Last year, four minor league players were suspended for a year after they were found to have bet on MLB games while on minor league rosters. Another, San Diego Padres minor leaguer Tucupita Marcano, became the first MLB player to be banned for life since Pete Rose after he was found to have bet on Pittsburgh Pirates games while he was injured but on their major league roster. A few months later, umpire Pat Hoberg — who called a perfect balls and strikes game in the 2022 World Series — was fired when MLB found bets were placed from an account he shared with a friend.

In each of these instances, MLB was quick to say that there was no broader issue, that these incidents were limited to a few misguided souls — that most players and staffers understand betting on baseball is a cardinal sin and can therefore be trusted to avoid it.

Yet Clase is a different case, an active star embroiled in an investigation that, according to reporting in the Athletic, stems from suspicious pitches thrown by Ortiz and flagged by betting watchdog agencies. If players are found to have influenced outcomes … well, the problem will have reached new levels of urgency, with no clear solutions available.

But today, as baseball readies for an exciting stretch run full of superstars and underdogs, big-market contenders and small-market challengers, the on-field product remains the focus. In Ohtani and Aaron Judge and others, the sport has a generation of nearly unprecedented stars. And with a pitch clock in place and an automated balls and strikes challenge system on the way, MLB has an updated product seemingly winning back the modern fan.

This is baseball, so slumps are inevitable. The question now is whether the industry will allow those age-old problems to pull it into another one.