Major League Baseball has been through two rough and uncertain years in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, the sport completed an abbreviated 60-game season with no fans in attendance. This year’s total MLB attendance of 45,304,709 was about 66 percent of the total from 2019, the last full season.
So teams have lost quite a bit of ticket revenue since 2019. You’d think that would factor in to the expiration of the MLB/MLBPA labor agreement that will happen December 1 and create some urgency to make a deal, but according to this AP article by Ronald Blum, it doesn’t look like a deal will happen before December:
Baseball’s ninth work stoppage and first in 26 years appears almost certain to start Dec.