Rob Manfred called a lockout “a positive.” The commissioner of Major League Baseball looked at the idea of shutting his own sport down and used the word positive. Tony Clark, the head of the players union, just resigned in disgrace four days ago after getting caught in a federal investigation involving his sister-in-law he personally hired into a union job. Bryce Harper went on the radio this morning and said he flat out does not expect Opening Day 2027 to start on time. MLB owners have quietly built a $2 billion war chest, $75 million per team, specifically to outlast the players in a lockout. This league is not stumbling toward a work stoppage. It is sprinting toward one with its eyes wide open. And while all of that is happening, the Savannah Bananas just signed a 25-game deal across ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, and Disney+, have 35 million social media followers, and are launching a full multi-team championship league this year. Rob Manfred is handing these people baseball’s casual fanbase on a silver platter and he doesn’t even know it.

Rob Manfred Has Been the Worst Thing to Happen to Baseball Since the Black Sox

Let’s be completely honest about what is happening here. The MLB CBA expires December 1, 2026. The union just lost its leader to a scandal ten months before the most important negotiation in a generation. Bruce Meyer, the interim director, is already telling players to save their money because a lockout is coming. Manfred told The Athletic an offseason lockout is “actually a positive” because of the leverage it creates. That is the commissioner of a sport publicly celebrating the idea of shutting his own sport down.

This is the same guy who put a runner on second base in extra innings. The same guy who introduced a pitch clock that he sold as saving the game while simultaneously planning to black out that game for months. The same guy who has watched youth baseball participation crater, watched the average MLB viewer age push past 57, watched attendance flatline for a decade, and decided the best move right now is a work stoppage. Rob Manfred is not a bad commissioner because he’s unlucky. He’s a bad commissioner because he genuinely does not care about growing the game. He cares about the owners winning the labor fight. Everything else is someone else’s problem.

The players aren’t innocent either. The MLBPA has its own mess to clean up after the Clark situation. But at least the players have an excuse for being disorganized right now. Manfred is choosing this. He built the war chest. He called it a positive. He owns this.

The Savannah Bananas Published Their Numbers and They Are Genuinely Embarrassing for the MLB

In 2025 the Savannah Bananas played 113 shows, sold 2.2 million tickets with a 91 percent redemption rate, averaged 500,000 viewers per televised game, sold 1.9 million merchandise items, and paid their players an average of $100,000 per year, which is more than most minor leaguers make in the system of the sport that supposedly owns baseball. They have 35 million social media followers across platforms. More than any MLB franchise. The Fenway Park show on July 5, 2025 averaged 837,000 viewers on cable alone, making it the most watched primetime sports program on all of cable that night. Include streaming and it crossed a million people watching a trick shot baseball show on a Tuesday in July.

ESPN saw those numbers and bumped the deal from 12 games in 2025 to 25 games across ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, Disney+, and the ESPN app for 2026. VP Brent Colborne said the deal “reflects the incredible growth and fan demand.” Companies do not double deals because they are feeling generous. They double them because the first version made serious money. The Bananas are now playing in 18 MLB stadiums and three NFL stadiums. They sold out Clemson’s Memorial Stadium in April 2025. Eighty thousand people in a football stadium watching baseball. Their ticket waitlist has over 3 million people on it.

The MLB had 70 million fans attend games last year across 30 teams and 2,430 games. The Savannah Bananas got 2.2 million people to show up to 113 shows with one team. Do that math however you want, it does not look good for the league.

The Casual Fan Is Already Gone and a Lockout Finishes the Eulogy

Every MLB executive has the same response when you bring up the Bananas. The diehards aren’t going anywhere. The Cardinals fan from 1987 is coming back after any lockout, he always does. And yeah, that’s true. Good for the Cardinals fan from 1987.

That guy is 60 years old. He is not the future of the sport and everyone knows it. The average MLB television viewer is 57 years old. The league has known about this problem for over a decade and the best solution Manfred came up with was a pitch clock and a universal DH. The casual fan, the 28 year old who will watch if something good is on, the teenager who finds baseball slow, the family that goes to one game a year for the experience, these people do not have loyalty that survives a three month blackout. They have tolerance. Tolerance runs out.

I watched a Bananas game last year with someone who genuinely could not name the team in their own city. They watched the entire two hours. They asked when the next one was on. That is the audience the Bananas are capturing. And that is the exact audience that walks away during a lockout and does not walk back. The 1994 strike cost baseball a generation of casual fans and there was no competing product waiting to absorb them. That is just not the world we are living in anymore.

Jesse Cole Is Not Running a Circus. He Is Running the Future of Baseball.

Everyone who dismisses the Bananas as a novelty act is making the same mistake. They are looking at the trick plays and the dance routines and the banana suits and seeing a gimmick. What they should be looking at is the infrastructure Jesse Cole has spent ten years deliberately building.

The Banana Ball Championship League launches in 2026. Six teams. Real standings. An actual championship. This kills the Harlem Globetrotters comparison that every lazy take keeps reaching for. The Globetrotters are a novelty because the result is scripted, there is only one team, and nothing is ever on the line. The Bananas have played to win from day one. The teams compete, the scores are real, and now those results are going to mean something over a full season with a championship at the end. A multi-team league with playoff races and a title game on ABC is not a YouTube channel with good content. It is a sports product with stakes, and it is launching on network television during the same year the MLB is planning to lock its doors.

People said the same thing about the XFL. About the USFL. About every competitor that tried to challenge an established sports league. Those comparisons do not work here because none of those leagues had 35 million social media followers, a sold out three million person waitlist, and a 25 game primetime deal with the same network that carries Monday Night Football before they played a single game. Jesse Cole did not stumble into this. He built it on purpose and he built it to last.

The MLB Is Not Losing the Sport. It Is Losing the Next Twenty Years.

Here is the argument the MLB defenders will make. The sport survived the 1994 strike. Seven and a half months. No World Series. The worst work stoppage in American professional sports history. And baseball came back. The league is 150 years old. It does not die from a lockout.

Fine. Nobody said it dies. That is a strawman and everyone hiding behind it knows it.

The question is not whether the MLB survives a lockout. The question is what the sport looks like on the other side of one when a competing entertainment product with 35 million followers, a multi-team championship league, and a 25 game ESPN deal spent three months on primetime broadcast television absorbing every casual fan the MLB just abandoned. The 1994 strike happened before TikTok, before the attention economy existed, before anyone had built the infrastructure to vacuum up displaced sports fans at scale. The Savannah Bananas have that infrastructure right now. It is built. It is funded. It is on ESPN. And the MLB is about to hand them an uncontested window to use it.

Rob Manfred called this a positive. Tony Clark is gone. Bryce Harper is already telling people not to expect baseball in April. The $2 billion war chest is sitting there ready to be spent. Everything that needs to be true for this to be a catastrophe is already true. The Savannah Bananas did not create this opportunity. Rob Manfred built it for them one terrible decision at a time.

The MLB will not lose its sport. It might lose its entire next generation of fans to a circus in yellow pants. And the truly insane part is that the guy in charge thinks that is a positive.