MLB memo to teams outlines lockout procedures ahead of Dec. 1 CBA expiration

What happened

MLB sent a memo to teams last week laying out procedures and guidelines for club personnel during what the league itself is treating as an expected offseason lockout, per The Athletic's Evan Drellich. The memo was written by MLB negotiator Dan Halem, who acknowledged the league's stated preference for a deal while making clear that clubs should prepare for the alternative.

Halem wrote, per Drellich's report, that the league's goal remains reaching an agreement with the Players Association, but that clubs must be ready for the possibility that no deal is reached and a lockout becomes the only realistic path forward.

The current collective bargaining agreement expires at 11:59 p.m. Eastern on December 1. Per Anthony Franco's write-up at MLB Trade Rumors, there is virtually no chance a new CBA will be in place by that deadline.

Why it matters

A lockout would immediately freeze MLB offseason activity — no trades, no free-agent signings, no roster transactions of any kind involving players on 40-man rosters. As a general matter of league mechanics, the 40-man roster is the reserve list a player must be on to be eligible for a major-league call-up, and it is also the boundary that defines who is and is not subject to lockout restrictions on club-player contact.

The memo, per Drellich's report, clarified what kinds of minimal, non-work relationships club personnel may maintain with players while negotiations continue. The league's guidance included a detail that is either charming or a sign of how granular labor law gets, depending on your disposition: club personnel may attend a player's wedding during a lockout, provided no work is discussed. Holiday cards and gifts, however, must be sent before December 2 — one day after the CBA expires — or not at all. Front offices have faced a lot of offseason deadlines. This one is new.

The league's decision to implement a lockout at expiration rather than wait for a potential in-season strike is, as Franco notes, a matter of leverage. Locking players out in the offseason denies the MLBPA the ability to withhold labor during the regular season, when the financial and public-relations stakes for the league are highest. The 2021-22 lockout followed the same logic and the same calendar.

The Rule 5 draft question

Perhaps the most operationally significant item in Drellich's report is that the status of the major-league Rule 5 draft is listed as to be determined in negotiations. The draft is scheduled for mid-December — which, under a lockout, would fall squarely in the middle of a work stoppage.

As a general matter of how the Rule 5 draft works: it allows clubs to select players from other organizations' 40-man rosters who have been in the minor leagues for a certain period without being protected. A player selected in the Rule 5 draft must remain on the selecting club's active roster for the full following season or be offered back to his original organization. It is, in short, one of the few mechanisms that gives fringe roster players a direct path to a big-league job — which is precisely why the MLBPA has a strong institutional interest in keeping it intact.

MLB canceled the 2021 Rule 5 draft during the last lockout. The union, per Franco's reporting, put forward a proposal to move the draft to late November in the final year of any CBA — before expiration — to prevent a repeat of that outcome. The logic is straightforward: there is no principled reason the draft should be skipped on a five-year cycle tied to CBA expirations. But as Franco notes, the nature of negotiations means MLB likely wants the union to give something up in exchange for that scheduling accommodation. Where that particular item lands remains unresolved.

Minor-league transactions, including the Triple-A phase of the Rule 5 draft, were also referenced in Drellich's reporting, though the full details of that portion of the memo were not included in the available account.

What we don't know yet

The memo's existence makes clear that the league is preparing for a lockout — it does not establish that one is inevitable, and Halem's language, as quoted by Drellich, preserves at least the formal possibility of a deal before December 1. Whether that possibility is realistic is a question the reporting does not answer.

The fate of the Rule 5 draft is explicitly unresolved, per Drellich's report. It is a negotiating item, not a settled outcome. The union's late-November scheduling proposal is on the table; whether MLB accepts it, trades it for something else, or lets the draft lapse again as it did in 2021 is unknown.

The full scope of what the memo covers — beyond the personnel contact guidelines and the Rule 5 question — was not detailed in the available reporting. What specific transaction activity would be frozen, and under what precise conditions it could resume, would depend on the terms of any eventual agreement or the duration of a lockout.

What to watch

The December 1 deadline is the first hard marker. If no CBA is in place at 11:59 p.m. Eastern that night, the lockout machinery described in the memo goes into effect. Club personnel will be operating under the guidelines Halem outlined — including, presumably, a hard cutoff on holiday card delivery that no front-office staffer has previously had to calendar.

The Rule 5 draft's mid-December scheduling makes it the first concrete piece of baseball business that a lockout would visibly disrupt. Whether the union's proposal to move the draft to late November in CBA final years becomes part of a broader agreement — or whether the draft is simply canceled again — will be one of the cleaner early signals of how negotiations are progressing.

Free-agent activity, which typically accelerates in December, would be frozen under a lockout. Players on 40-man rosters would be subject to the contact restrictions described in the memo. The offseason calendar that front offices, agents, and players have already begun working through would effectively pause at the stroke of midnight on December 1, pending whatever comes next at the bargaining table.