Two Years From LA28, MLB’s Olympic Plan Remains Unsettled

PHILADELPHIA — The opening ceremony for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles is now exactly two years away, but the MLB players’ potential participation in those Games is still very much an open question.

There has long been conceptual agreement between MLB and the MLB Players Association that big leaguers should be there, and that the Olympics being in the United States provides a unique opportunity to raise baseball’s profile. From there, though, the negotiations have remained bogged down on a series of contractual details. Beyond these two entities, the LA28 organizing committee, the International Olympic Committee, and the World Baseball Softball Confederation are involved in the talks.

The still-unresolved issues vary widely, including player accommodations, insurance, tickets, and service-time implications, among others. More broadly, there are ramifications—both known and unknown—of shutting down MLB play for roughly two weeks in the heart of the season, something that heretofore has precluded big leaguers from being in the Olympics.

Another major sticking point between the league and union surrounds mandatory player participation for those selected to play—an issue that also has roiled throughout this week’s All-Star Game. MLB has gone so far as to even propose stripping more than three weeks of pay and service-time accrual for healthy players refusing to participate in the Olympics.

“It is a disruptive undertaking for us,” league commissioner Rob Manfred said Tuesday. “If we’re disrupting an entire season, and we’re going to undertake that effort, we want our very best out there so that people see how great our game really is.”

MLBPA interim executive director Bruce Meyer cautioned that the Olympics talks remain early, though he branded the league’s mandatory participation push “extreme.” 

“In general, our players want to play in the Olympics. They’re patriotic, and for them it’s a special opportunity, and we want them to have that opportunity,” Meyer said. “Having said that, we want to make sure that they have things like travel and accommodations [set], and things that they deserve based on who they are. We’re focused on player quality of life, player protections.”

Impact on Future All-Star Hosts

The ongoing deliberations surrounding the 2028 Olympics, meanwhile, are also complicating MLB’s placement of future All-Star Games.

Next year’s Midsummer Classic will be at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, though current labor woes have cast some doubt on whether the event will still take place. 

There is also a heightened expectation that San Francisco’s Oracle Park will host the 2028 All-Star Game, just before the start of the Olympics. That ballpark also had the All-Star Game in 2007, and the selection would be with an eye toward easing subsequent player travel to Los Angeles. 

The San Francisco decision, however, isn’t final. If it does become reality, it would push back a series of other MLB markets that want the All-Star Game, and haven’t had it since the 1990s, including Baltimore, Boston, and Toronto.

“I think I have been more chronologically disciplined than my predecessor [Bud Selig] was in awarding [All-Star] Games,” Manfred said. “And I was on a pretty good track until LA28 kind of popped up. But there’s a lot of uncertainty about what we’re going to do with ’28.”

Padres Sale Update 

Nearly three months after the Seidler family reached a $3.9 billion deal to sell the Padres to a group led by José E. Feliciano and Kwanza Jones, that record-setting agreement has not yet moved to other MLB owners for approval. 

Manfred, however, expressed confidence the agreement will soon get done.

“It’s a question of getting investment commitments, documentation to be put in a condition that it’s ready for a club vote,” he said. 

The relative delay, Manfred added, owes to the deal being unveiled publicly at an earlier stage of completion than many others like it.

“When people in the public became aware of the sale—this one was earlier, quicker than what sometimes happens,” he said. “Usually, it gets public when it’s a little closer to final documents.”

The sale price shattered the prior league record for a controlling interest sale, Steve Cohen’s 2020 purchase of the Mets, by about $1.5 billion.