Passan: How MLB survived its darkest moment — and is now a whole new ballgame

IT’S EASY TO FORGET, just one year later, how narrowly Major League Baseball avoided catastrophe. The league’s lockout of the players was approaching its 100^th day. The doomsday clock for missing regular-season games was ticking ever louder. Players were annoyed. Owners were cranky. Fans were demoralized. The sport was self-immolating.

On March 9, 2022, when commissioner Rob Manfred postponed a second week of regular-season games, panic set in across the sport. This was the moment they feared. They’d weathered proposals dismissed with eyerolls, the implementation of the game’s first work stoppage in a quarter-century, a 43-day pause with zero substantive discussions, a weeklong bargaining session in Florida that ended with no deal, the cancellation of Opening Day — posturing, preening, politicking, all the maneuvers to set up this moment: the point of no return.

Baseball wasn’t just flirting with disaster. This was outright courtship. Conversations in recent weeks with more than two dozen people across the sport, from league and club officials to union and player leaders, illustrated how close baseball came to a labor fight that could have rivaled the 1994 player strike as the worst in the game’s history.

“A lot closer than people may realize,” one league official said.

“Too close,” a player leader concurred.

One day after Manfred’s announcement, over the objection of eight union executive board members who voted not to accept the league’s final proposal, the rank-and-file overwhelmingly said yes to a deal and no to chaos, even though the parameters of the agreement did not overhaul baseball’s core economics, a move many in the game — players and owners both — believe necessary. This was evolution, not revolution.