As MLB enters a pivotal 2026, these five questions loom over everything

By most available measures, 2025 was a massive success for Major League Baseball. A riveting postseason culminated in a heart-pounding, star-studded World Series. Larger-than-life stars in the sport’s biggest markets, Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge, marked the poles of a baseball world that grew in new ways: A season that began in Tokyo ended in Toronto, the first time an MLB season has ever started and ended outside the United States.

And yet — because baseball somehow never stays comfortable for long — reckonings await in the new year. Some of them, such as looming collective bargaining, might be existential. Some of them are merely consequential. All of them will take center stage at some point in the next year. As the calendar turns, here are five big questions facing MLB in 2026:

1. Will 2026 be MLB’s last full season for a while?

This is the biggest question facing the sport, in large part because Commissioner Rob Manfred has been so public in wondering about it himself: With the current collective bargaining agreement expiring after the 2026 season, and tensions between owners and the MLB Players Association at an all-time high, Manfred has mentioned the possibility of a lockout before the 2027 season. Everyone from players planning contracts to executives planning vacations has taken him at his word, assuming next year’s offseason will be lost to bargaining much like the winter before the 2022 season was.

That lockout ended just in time for players to report to spring training and play a full 162-game season. But tensions seem higher and goals loftier for both sides this time around. Owners and players both want to remodel baseball’s economic setup, though the players believe the owners’ goals mostly center on suppressing salaries, while owners argue their franchises are not making enough money to keep up with how those salaries are growing. Some owners have suggested the best solution is a salary cap. The MLBPA has built its name on ensuring baseball remains the only major North American professional sport without one.

A dispute over a cap led to the last lost season, in 1994, which broke the sport at a time of massive momentum. But this time is slightly different: Manfred and his owners will be selling their national television rights to partners after the 2028 season, looking for the kind of multibillion-dollar deals that drive revenue for everyone. They will probably want to market a sport at its peak, with three years of high ratings to maximize those deals, which, given that Manfred plans to retire in 2029, could be legacy shapers. Missing games comes with cost. But as of this moment, both the owners and the players union want the other side to think they are more than willing to pay it.

2. Can the Dodgers be stopped?

Every major question facing MLB in 2026 relates to the first, including the most obvious on-field one: Are the Los Angeles Dodgers, the sport’s first back-to-back champions in a quarter-century, too big to fail? Because of their seemingly limitless budget, which has spurred seemingly borderless marketability, the Dodgers have been able to draw big stars into their orbit and pay them to stay there. Their latest acquisition, all-star closer Edwin Díaz, gives them the one thing they did not have during their 2025 postseason run. They’ve spent more on relief pitchers alone in the past year than some teams have on their roster. Their luxury tax bill will be $169 million, according to The Associated Press. Thirteen MLB teams paid their entire roster less in 2025.

Still, to this point, all of that spending had not been a championship guarantee. They did, after all, come within two outs of losing the World Series to the Toronto Blue Jays last year. But if the Dodgers start feeling even more untouchable, well … that will certainly be used as fodder in labor negotiations, which historically have centered on all kinds of ways to limit the advantage of the sport’s big spender of the moment. For now, they are playing by the rules and not apologizing for it — and challenging the rest of the owners to find ways to keep up.

3. Will the Tigers trade Tarik Skubal?

This question being asked at all is, to some, an indictment of baseball’s current economic model: Skubal is a 29-year-old lefty who has won back-to-back American League Cy Young awards and is one of the rare game-changing aces of his era. And because he will be a free agent after the 2026 season, and because his price will be so high, the team that drafted and developed him is mulling over whether it should get something for him before this season in case he walks away after it.

Whether Detroit’s ownership can afford Skubal and whether it is willing to afford him are two different questions, both emblematic of baseball’s economic frustrations. But whether the Tigers trade him could change the landscape entirely: He is one of the more dominant starters of his time, and the Tigers would probably be looking for a return they can justify to history.

Any team trading for Skubal now would have to A) be willing to accept he is a one-year rental and therefore probably unwilling to provide such a return or B) have reason to believe it can sign him to an extension after next season. As such, likely suitors might be limited to win-now teams who are not precious about prospects — say, the New York Mets or Philadelphia Phillies or Dodgers — so his market might be as complicated as a trade would be seismic.

As of now, Tigers general manager Scott Harris has insisted he must do his job of “listening,” but he has not indicated a trade is a sure thing. He and the Tigers could, after all, keep Skubal as the centerpiece of a budding contender and try to convince him to stay long-term with one last World Series run. But to many owners, sentimentality is not always financially prudent.

4. What’s going on with local television rights?

Here is a very long story made short: For years, Manfred has wanted to obtain the local television rights to all 30 teams and consolidate them into a single package without blackouts, which MLB could then sell as a whole, rather than separately in each market. Cord-cutting made this easier by bankrupting many of the regional sports networks under contract for those local rights, which opened the door for MLB to take them over in cities such as San Diego and Phoenix, among others.

As of the last day of 2025, MLB controlled the rights to six teams: the San Diego Padres, Cleveland Guardians, Minnesota Twins, Colorado Rockies, Arizona Diamondbacks and Seattle Mariners. At last check, the Washington Nationals were still mulling over whether to join that group, according to people in the organization, after exiting their deal with Mid-Atlantic Sports Network this past March.

Six more teams’ rights might soon also be in league control, according to a report from Sports Business Journal suggesting that if FanDuel Sports cannot finalize a sale to DAZN, it might shutter operations in 2026. If so, the six teams whose rights it controls — the St. Louis Cardinals, Atlanta Braves, Detroit Tigers, Los Angeles Angels, Miami Marlins and Tampa Bay Rays — might be facing the kind of broadcast uncertainty that has pushed other teams into MLB’s waiting arms. The loss of revenue could impact those teams in the short term, and how MLB handles what is next will almost certainly dictate revenue in the long term.

5. Has the World Baseball Classic finally arrived?

The next installment of the World Baseball Classic will be played in March, squished between the Winter Olympics and the first World Cup in North America in more than 30 years. Certainly, in just its sixth iteration, no one expects the WBC to rival those global staples just yet. But after Ohtani and Mike Trout faced off to put an exclamation point on the 2023 event, this spring’s tournament seems to have heightened credibility.

The main measure? Top American pitchers, who to this point had been too nervous about injury to pitch high-intensity innings in what would normally be spring training, seem to have decided it is worth the risk: Skubal and fellow Cy Young Award winner Paul Skenes have already committed to play for the United States. So have superstars such as Judge, Bryce Harper, Bobby Witt Jr. and more. Manager Albert Pujols is compiling a similarly star-studded roster for the Dominican Republic. And discussions about which elite starters will be available to pitch for Samurai Japan started months ago, with Ohtani and even Yoshinobu Yamamoto committed to the team despite concerns about their World Series workloads.

Regardless of who throws when, the tournament seems to have finally convinced the game’s biggest stars that it is worthy of their time — which should indicate to the rest of the sports world that it is worthy of its time, too.