Should MLB Shutdown Midseason to Let Players Compete in the 2028 Olympics?

Baseball is back in the Olympics, the Games are coming to Los Angeles, and Major League Baseball has roughly two years to answer a question it has never had to answer. What happens to the season?

The owners and the players association are working on it, the show reported, in the same way the NHL worked it out and got its players back into the Winter Games. That version produced an epic United States and Canada final, which is exactly the argument for doing it. The sticking points are the unglamorous ones. Accommodations. How much time off. What kind of break you carve out of the middle of a season.

Rich was not sold on the logistics, and his skepticism was specific rather than reflexive.

"What's the fix? Honestly, what's the fix?" he asked. "We're going to play the World Series in November? We're going to start the season in February? March?"

He reached for the World Baseball Classic as the closest comparison, a real tournament involving multiple countries, and noted it takes something like two and a half weeks. The pushback from the desk was immediate and correct. The Classic gets played during spring training. That is not a comparison, that is a different problem.

Rich's follow-up cut deeper. Olympic baseball is not a spring training exercise. You have to train for it. Are guys just going to show up out of nowhere? Maybe the first half of the season counts as the training, but nobody in the room could name the actual mechanism.

Then the conversation got real, because it stopped being about the calendar and started being about specific players.

Do you want Roman Anthony off your team for a month? Do you want Aaron Judge gone for a month? Juan Soto?

The Red Sox fan on the desk shrugged at the premise, which is the honest answer when your organization has not seen much of its young star anyway. But the risk case landed harder than the inconvenience case. Losing a player for a month is one thing. Losing him for October because something happened against Paraguay is another.

The proposed solution floating around is a league-wide pause during the Games, and the room was split on whether that is realistic or absurd. One argument in favor is almost too easy: the season is long enough as it is. They can afford it. Ten days, maybe stapled to the All-Star break, and the whole thing is over.

Rich then widened the question to the one worth asking. Do you want major league players in the Olympics, or should baseball even be an Olympic sport?

"Of course baseball should be an Olympic sport," came the answer, immediately, which is the correct answer regardless of how long it has been absent.

The football parallel is where Rich made his strongest point. Roger Goodell appeared on Women's Sports Now recently, interviewed by Susie and Sarah, and was asked directly whether he expects NFL players in Olympic flag football. Goodell said absolutely. The Fanatics event already gave everyone a preview of what that looks like.

"Why would Roger Goodell not want to have the Olympic stage filled with stars of the National Football League?" Rich asked. And wouldn't the players association want it too?

Not necessarily, came the answer, and the reasoning is exactly what you would expect. Somebody pops a knee or an Achilles and the whole thing looks very different in retrospect. That is the worst case, admittedly, but the worst case is what union lawyers get paid to think about.

Which loops back to baseball, and to the real gap. The Classic already showed us what happens when the stars sit it out. A lot of the big names took it off, and the tournament was poorer for it. The Olympics would presumably be different, but presumably is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Who plays? Is there a tryout? Do we vote?

Two years to figure it out. The biggest problem is not who goes. It is what you do with the season, and in baseball, where the calendar already feels thirteen months long, there is no obvious place to put the hole.

Rich landed where a lot of people will land. "I would like to see it," he said. "Let's put it that way."