MLB’s Next 5 Years: Realignment, Expansion, and 154 Games?

By 2031, Major League Baseball is set to look radically different from what it does now—even if only a small portion of the ideas on the table in current labor talks become reality.

Team owners’ new proposal for a 154-game regular season and expanded playoffs is just part of a sweeping set of changes that could hit the league over the next half-decade. Among the other initiatives in various stages of development:

• A potential expansion of the league by two franchises to reach 32 teams. Salt Lake City and Nashville are seen as the top candidates among several interested markets, and Jazz and Mammoth owner Ryan Smith recently told Front Office Sports he plans to be “aggressive” in pursuit of a franchise for Utah. 
• Large-scale, geographically based realignment that could do away with the traditional American and National leagues. A key goal in the move would be to ease team travel and create better broadcast schedules, particularly in the playoffs. 
• A restructured, nationally oriented media rights portfolio, taking full effect when MLB’s current national agreements expire after the 2028 season. League commissioner Rob Manfred intends to blend national and regional rights in unprecedented ways. The new-look schedule proposal also feeds directly into this, and part of the owners’ latest bid is to create as many as eight additional playoff games, which would lean further into the inventory most coveted by networks. By 2028, Manfred also intends to have league-level control over the local media rights of every club. 
• New ballparks opening in Las Vegas, Tampa, and Kansas City. 
• The selection of a new commissioner to succeed Manfred. The current contract for Manfred expires in early 2029, and he intends to retire at that point. It’s not certain yet whether team owners will opt for another internal candidate, like Manfred was, or look outside the league for its next commissioner, though they definitely will be wanting a cleaner succession process. None of Manfred’s recent commissioner predecessors had a simple exit, with delayed retirement, owner-led ousters, sudden death, and collusion to suppress player salaries all marring the ends of their terms to varying degrees. 

Those elements do not include the many other shifts that owners have proposed in the ongoing labor talks, including a hard salary cap, a remade reserve system that includes strict limitations on free agency, and a retooled amateur entry process that cuts down the size of the MLB draft. The owners’ salary cap proposal also includes the pooling of the local media rights revenue of every club, which theoretically could be done without a cap but is a central feature of the management offer. 

The shortened regular season and new playoff format are also being proposed in the context of implementing a salary cap, which the players vehemently oppose and, as a result, makes the schedule idea a likely non-starter. 

Still, the amount of change coming to MLB builds directly on prior initiatives such as the pitch clock and automatic ball-strike challenge (ABS) system that saw plenty of initial criticism and diverged from baseball tradition, but are now widely accepted parts of the sport.

“Our ownership group has changed a lot,” Manfred said last year at the FOS Tuned In media summit. “Today, owners say, ‘Explain to me how it’s going to drive my business.’ That’s a very different mentality.”