MLB Has a Plan for Players Who Want to Skip 2028 Olympics: Just Suspend Them!

The game of baseball has long had a strange, adversarial relationship with the Olympic Games. At right around the same time as the American League and National League were first merging to form Major League Baseball in the United States, the first casual games of baseball were being played at the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris. The game made occasional appearances at the Olympics afterward, but never actually became an official Olympic sport awarding medals until the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona, and then only stuck around until 2008, when it left the Olympic program. The big problem, of course, is the simple fact that by definition the summer games happen right in the middle of Major League Baseball’s own 162-game endurance run of a season. This has long represented a nearly insurmountable hurdle to merging the Olympic version of the sport with the one that features MLB athletes–how do you do both at once? No answers were worked out when baseball returned to the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, which meant very little participation from MLB pros. But Major League Baseball wants to finally reconcile the gulf between the Olympiad and professional levels when it takes to the stage in 2028 in Los Angeles as a major event. So we must answer: How do we get the athletes to accept a substantially changed season, and make them perform? Easy, reasons MLB: You just suspend them without pay for a few weeks if they say no!

No really, that is apparently the plan Major League Baseball wants to go with. In a proposal sent by MLB to the players’ union (the MLBPA), the league said it wanted to institute the following system: Any player selected for the Olympic squad who is unable to furnish an approved excuse would be suspended/put on the restricted list without pay or service time. And they wouldn’t be put on that list just until the conclusion of the expanded Olympics/All-Star break, either. Instead, they would remain on the restricted list for an additional two weeks after the MLB season resumes as a punishment, in order to dissuade players from trying to get out of playing in the Summer Games. Approved excuses, meanwhile, could include being on the injured list at the time, or “other exceptional circumstances,” although the league also went out of its way to note that during the 2028 season it might “apply heightened scrutiny to any requests” to put a player selected for the Olympic team on the IL. So effectively, the plan is to shanghai players onto Team USA by any means necessary.

Oh, and players could also be fined for not wanting to play in the Olympics as well. Sure, why the hell not?

I love baseball, and I love the Olympics. And (I say purely as a personal opinion not intended to be a comment on any labor implications of the current proposals) I don’t think baseball makes sense as an Olympic sport.

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— Hannah Keyser (@hannahrkeyser.bsky.social) 10:41 AM · Jul 16, 2026

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said the league wanted to be aggressive in forcing players onto the Olympic squad smack-dab in the middle of the MLB season because the Los Angeles games represent “a unique opportunity to market the sport with our very, very best players.” His concessions to the inherent awkwardness of doing so: “It is a disruptive undertaking for us. Put money to one side. You’re disrupting an entire season, and if we’re going to undertake that effort, we want our very best out there so that people see how great our game really is.”

Allow us to float a counterproposal: Who gives a shit about Olympic baseball, and why should we bother deeply screwing with the schedule and outline of the 2028 MLB season for Olympic reasons … particularly when the well-established (and still recently concluded) World Baseball Classic already fills this exact function on a four year cycle, has been doing so consistently for 21 years, and does it FAR BETTER than Olympics baseball could possibly do? Is there some American baseball exec out there who is just deeply embarrassed that the USA squad in the WBC has been embarrassed in back-to-back tournaments by Japan and Venezuela, and they thus want to watch Team USA run roughshod over a much smaller tournament competition? Are our collective egos that fragile?

By the way, when I say “much smaller,” I mean it: The entire Olympics baseball program at the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Games is scheduled to be only six teams, which is how they’ll get it all done in only a week. The USA is gifted one of those six berths automatically as the host nation (convenient), while two other spots are taken by Venezuela (the 2026 WBC winner) and the Dominican Republic (the next highest-finishing WBC team in the Americas). The final three spots will apparently be decided by future tournaments in Asia and Oceania. Compare that to the 2026 World Baseball Classic that ran from March 5-17 (functioning as an alternative spring training), and included teams from 20 nations, rather than a piddly six. This allowed for some great storylines, like the unheralded Team Italy advancing all the way to the semifinals before they were finally taken down by the eventual tournament winners Venezuela. Will the likes of Italy even have a chance to qualify for Olympic baseball?

This is a classic case of attempting to break something that is already functioning perfectly fine, for no good reason beyond the prestige conferred by the idea of the Olympic Games. And although I am sure there are probably players out there who would be happy to participate, whether because they like the idea of being an Olympian, want to win a medal, or are simply patriotic, the trade-off is an MLB season that gets all bent out of shape to facilitate a tournament that won’t even be any good compared to the now well-honed WBC, which already operates as a collaboration between MLB and the MLBPA. The likes of Rob Manfred know that Olympic baseball makes no functional sense as something to jam into the All-Star break (while still absurdly having the All-Star game as well!), but they don’t care. Manfred, seemingly wracking his brain to come up with some kind of justification for why the league should be able to force players to play/punish them from abstaining from Olympic baseball when they’ve never done this for the WBC, landed on “because players are already ready to play in the summer.”

Or as he actually put it: “Big differences between the WBC and the Olympics. The WBC takes place at a point in time when players are just beginning to ramp up for the season. There’s a whole host of reasons why, at that point in the calendar, players might not be ready to play. In contrast, the schedule for the Olympics is going to cover days that players otherwise would be playing in major-league games. If they’re not on an injured list, they’d be out there playing. I think that that is a huge difference.”

So there you have it, that’s the official MLB logic for why it’s perfectly fine to say that you don’t want to be compelled to perform in the WBC, but the league can suspend you without pay if you don’t want to join a sham Olympic tournament in the middle of the regular MLB season.

As you might expect, by the way, sticking an Olympics tournament in the middle of an expanded All-Star break (now July 9-21) of course means that the whole season has to be rejiggered in terms of its scheduling, or the overall number of games played has to be changed, which would effectively invalidate any records set in that season. The league’s proposal is to start the season earlier, with Opening Day on March 23, in order to get all 162 games in, but this of course would be rife with problems of its own–early season baseball in many of the MLB markets is already iffy because of the threat of extreme cold and inhospitable weather. An even earlier season start would likely result in a logjam of cancellations and make-up games that would involve many double-headers needing to be scheduled down the stretch, threatening teams with exhaustion and greater injury risk. There are too many downsides to list, in terms of potential effects on player/team performance. But hey, easily breakable Olympic medals! Wooooo! USA! USA!

Speaking as someone with actual plans to attend 2028 Olympics baseball, and who would obviously love to see top players for my (lots and lots of) money, let me be clear that this is ridiculous and you’re not going to make Olympics mandatory gtfo Manfred et al

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— David S. Bernstein (@dbernstein.bsky.social) 6:31 PM · Jul 14, 2026

This attempt by the league to make the world take Olympic baseball seriously and shamelessly market MLB to global markets is as awkwardly pointless as it is disruptive to the actual Major League Baseball season. The funniest thing: MLB isn’t even in some kind of dark place in terms of profitability and popularity, despite MAGA America liking to pretend that “woke” sports are all dying on the vine. Viewership on national MLB games has been way up in 2026, continuing multi-year trends. More people are watching baseball than have watched in about a decade. Even physical attendance is up, at a time when most Americans say they can barely make ends meet! People love baseball so much they’ll pay to go to a game even when they see themselves as poor! A lot of them even love things like the World Baseball Classic, a relatively smoothly run tournament that features teams from all over the world exuberantly (and voluntarily) competing for national pride.

But screw all that, wouldn’t you prefer to watch a much smaller tournament, with teams made up of players who are there against their will because they’ll be suspended without pay otherwise? That should make for wayyyyyyy better TV.