Baseball should be on a high. Spring training has begun and a record-breaking winter makes the games especially welcome – baseball means the good weather is coming soon. Injuries marred the NBA playoffs and the Super Bowl was a dud, but no sport settled its championship last year better than baseball, as the Los Angeles Dodgers barely and thrillingly defeated the Toronto Blue Jays in a seven-game epic that ranks among the greatest World Series ever played.
Instead of basking in the afterglow, however, the game is spending this abundance of capital preparing for war: a 2027 work stoppage portends to be the most catastrophic since the summer of 1994, when the players went on strike and the owners responded by cancelling the World Series for the first time in 90 years.
