At 11:59 p.m. ET on December 1st, baseball’s collective bargaining agreement expires, and almost nobody expects a new one to be signed in time. For club media teams, that means two problems arriving at two different times.
The first arrives on December 2nd. The league has already sent clubs a memo on how to behave once the doors lock. One line in that memo, first reported by The Athletic, matters more to media teams than to anyone else: MLB plans to “immediately” remove player likenesses from its website.
The second arrives in February. Without a deal, spring training doesn’t open (the first games are scheduled for February 19th), and Opening Day on March 25th is next in line.
Unfortunately clubs have been there before. On December 2nd, 2021, fans woke up to gray silhouettes on every club roster page. The Braves, only a month after winning a heart-stopping World Series in Game 6 against the Astros, posted footage from 1957. MLB Network swapped its studio shows for archived games with no current players in them.
For 99 days, history was the only story clubs were allowed to tell.
The easy read is that a stoppage is a dead zone: freeze, wait, survive. I think that's the wrong read, and so do some of the people I've been talking to inside MLB clubs.
Let’s think about how a club media team lives. Spring training, then 162 games, then hopefully an October postseason and, if you’re lucky, a World Series parade. Then roughly three months to breathe before camp opens again and the treadmill restarts.
With a rhythm that intense, the projects everyone agrees matter, like cleaning up the archive, consolidating storage, or fixing metadata, never win against tomorrow's game. They get pushed to "the offseason," and the offseason is never long enough.
A game stoppage, for once, might be.
What I have heard amongst a variety of MLB clubs I have spoken with about this topic is that footage lives across a very disparate and fragmented ecosystem.
One video team estimated that most of its week goes to looking for content rather than making it. Another called its storage "a ticking time bomb." Editors recreate assets because finding the original takes longer. Institutional memory sits in the heads of two or three people, and when one of them leaves, a chunk of the archive effectively leaves too.
During the season, a messy archive is an annoyance but not crucial: there’s a new game every night, so nobody needs to dig. During a stoppage though, digging becomes a crucial part of the job. Clubs can’t show current players, so every post has to come from the vault, and only from the slice with no active player in it: legends, alumni, prospects, the pennant run your fans still talk about. Try asking your current system for “every walk-off from the 1990s with no active player in frame.” If the answer is “give me a week,” you’ve found your offseason project.
Two club executives I spoke with this month said the same thing, independently: a work stoppage is the window to do what the in-season pace never allows.
That doesn't mean bolting search onto tape-era storage. It means rebuilding how media moves through the organization, from ingest to tagging to distribution, so social, creative, partnerships, community and broadcast can find what they need without filing a ticket. Sponsors still need activations during a stoppage. Fans still show up for nostalgia: in 2021-22 teams posted far less, yet engagement rates on what they did post nearly doubled. The appetite is there if you can feed it.
I'll admit my bias: I work for ScorePlay, a media infrastructure built for sports teams, and I would love clubs to spend the winter rethinking theirs. So challenge me. Maybe a deal gets done by Christmas and none of this matters. Maybe budgets freeze along with everything else. Maybe the archive can wait another year, as it has for the last twenty.
But almost every scenario on the table includes some stretch of quiet, and quiet is rare in this sport. The clubs that use it to fix the plumbing will walk into Opening Day, whenever it comes, with a faster, leaner and more connected media operation. The ones that wait it out will walk in exactly as they left.
A game stoppage doesn't have to mean everything stops. For some media teams, it could be the best offseason they ever get.
