NEW YORK — Major League Baseball is changing at a dizzying speed in 2026, with the arrival of robot umpires, the Tampa Bay Rays returning to their home stadium and an alphabet soup of networks televising games in perhaps the last season before a labor shutdown.
Much has transpired in the 4 1/2 months since the Los Angeles Dodgers rallied in Game 7 of the World Series to beat the Toronto Blue Jays in 11 innings and become MLB’s first repeat champion since the New York Yankees won three titles in a row from 1998 to 2000.
There was the usual free-agent musical chairs game in the offseason, this one leading to Kyle Tucker winding up with the Dodgers, Bo Bichette with the New York Mets, Alex Bregman with the Chicago Cubs and Pete Alonso with the Baltimore Orioles among other changes.
Just this past week, Venezuela became a first-time champion of a World Baseball Classic with record attendance and television viewers.
Looming above the usual excitement for opening day on Wednesday, though, is the possibility of no games in a year.
Tony Clark was forced to resign as head of the MLB Players Association and was replaced by Bruce Meyer as talk intensified about a possible management salary cap proposal the union vows to fight. MLB ownership is likely to lock out players on Dec. 2, leaving the 2027 season in limbo.
Reigning Cy Young Award winners Paul Skenes of the National League’s Pittsburgh Pirates and Tarik Skubal of the American League’s Detroit Tigers are on the eight-man executive subcommittee that directs collective bargaining.
“We need people that are invested and kind of have status among players and within the game to go into the negotiations and be comfortable going toe to toe with the owners,” the 23-year-old Skenes said. “It’s not something that I sought out. Some guys nominated me for the position, and that’s not something you say no to.”
Meanwhile, following testing that started in the minor leagues in 2019, MLB decided last September to use the automated ball-strike system in the regular season.
While human umpires will still call every pitch, each team has the ability to challenge two calls per game, retaining the challenge if successful, and has the possibility of at least one more in each extra inning.
“You want get the egregiously wrong calls fixed and you want make sure you get it right in a big spot,” said three-time Cy Young Award winner Justin Verlander, who is returning this season to the Tigers, the team he pitched for his first 12-plus MLB seasons from 2005-17.
ABS won’t be used for a two-game series between the Arizona Diamondbacks and San Diego Padres on April 25-26 in Mexico City, for the Minnesota Twins-Philadelphia Phillies game on Aug. 13 at the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa, or the Atlanta Braves-Milwaukee Brewers matchup on Aug. 23 Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in conjunction with the Little League World Series.
On the fans’ side, finding where a game is televised is more complicated than ever.
Regular-season national broadcasts are split among Apple TV, ESPN, Fox/FS1, NBC/Peacock, Netflix and TBS. NBC’s networks take over the postseason’s wild-card round from ABC/ESPN.
In addition, MLB will produce and distribute the local telecasts of 14 teams in the wake of financial problems for Main Street Sports Group, which operates the regional FanDuel Sports Network stations.
When the New York Yankees play the MLB season opener against the host San Francisco Giants on Wednesday, the game will be exclusively on Netflix. It’s also the only game of the day, with other teams opening Thursday or Friday.
The Dodgers get started Thursday when they host Arizona, the first step in their quest to win another World Series and become just the fifth team to win three in a row, joining those turn-of the-century Yankees, the 1949-53 Yankees, the 1936-39 Yankees and the 1972-74 Oakland Athletics.
“When you’re a Dodger, people want to take us down. They want to beat us,” manager Dave Roberts told players in his spring training speech. “It’s a Game 7. So I think that we’ve got to look ahead and say that this is going to be harder than it’s ever been and we got to work even harder. And so my ask as a team, as an organization is to push ourselves even more. We’ve already got the talent. There isn’t any more talent in a major league clubhouse than in this room.”
Coming off his fourth unanimous MVP award — the past two in the NL after getting the first two with the AL’s Los Angeles Angels — Dodgers sensation Shohei Ohtani is expected to be a two-way player over a full season. He returned to the mound last June 16 after having his second major elbow surgery on Sept. 19, 2023.
The Rays will also open Thursday, but they’ll play their first nine games on the road before finally getting to play at their true home for the first time in two years.
They’re returning to Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg after a season playing home games across the bay at Tampa’s Steinbrenner Field, the spring training home of the Yankees.
Damage to the stadium’s roof caused by Hurricane Milton in October 2024 has been repaired. The Rays were 41-40 at Steinbrenner last year, their lowest home winning percentage since 2016. They drew 786,750 for an average of 9,713, selling out 61 games.
“There is genuine, authentic excitement to get back to the Trop,” manager Kevin Cash said. “We’ve played well in the Trop. We’ve had a lot of success in the Trop. And I think we’re going back to something that’s probably going to be a little bit newer, a little better than maybe as we left it because they had to do so many repairs.”