At least six MLB general managers enter the offseason with contracts expiring in 2025, according to league sources, while front-office leaders across a dozen clubs face intensified scrutiny from ownership groups bracing for what multiple executives describe as an inevitable labor disruption. The Athletic reported Tuesday that performance reviews have sharpened in tone and granularity since Labor Day, with several clubs conducting what one senior executive called "lockout-prep audits" of baseball operations spending and win-per-dollar efficiency.
The timing is structural, not coincidental. The current collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2026 season, but planning for a work stoppage typically begins 18-24 months in advance. Owners want flexibility. GMs on expiring contracts provide it. Three clubs—names withheld pending official announcements—have already signaled internally they will not renew their current baseball operations leaders, per sources with direct knowledge. Two more are conducting what amount to exit interviews disguised as strategic planning sessions. The remaining GMs are hedging, quietly reaching out to agents and former colleagues about advisory roles or media opportunities that could start as early as November 2025.
What makes this cycle unusual is the compression. Normally, front-office turnover clusters around the Winter Meetings or follows postseason disappointments. This wave is pre-emptive. Owners are building redundancy into their operations before leverage shifts to the union. One National League owner, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the logic plainly: "If we're going dark for four months, I don't want to pay a GM to negotiate with nobody and then come back to a rebuild. I want someone hungry who knows they have 18 months to prove they can win without spending."
The financial argument has teeth. MLB front offices have ballooned in headcount and salary since the last CBA negotiation. The average baseball operations payroll at a big-market club now exceeds $25 million annually, up from roughly $12 million a decade ago, according to industry estimates. Ownership groups are applying the same cost-benefit analysis to the front office that sabermetrics applied to the roster. Several clubs have begun disaggregating GM responsibilities—splitting player development, analytics, and pro scouting into separate reporting lines under a team president—making the traditional GM role easier to eliminate or downgrade.
Meanwhile, Buster Posey's Giants announced Tuesday the addition of Curt Casali and Joc Pederson to the front office as special assistants, extending San Francisco's trend of installing former players in advisory roles during uncertain labor windows. The move is cosmetic operationally but symbolic structurally: Posey, who took over as president of baseball operations in September 2024, is insulating himself with trusted voices while the league's economic model remains in flux. It's a hedge against the same scrutiny other GMs are facing.
The lockout preparation playbook is well-worn. Clubs freeze non-essential hires, defer stadium maintenance, and renegotiate local broadcast deals to preserve cash flow. What's newer is the willingness to replace baseball operations leadership preemptively rather than reactively. The last lockout, in 2021-2022, lasted 99 days and cost teams an estimated $640 million in gate revenue. Owners remember. The GMs who survived that cycle were the ones who entered it with multi-year deals and ownership confidence. The ones on expiring contracts spent the lockout updating their LinkedIn.
Three names to watch in the next 60 days: clubs that missed the playoffs in 2024, have GMs whose contracts expire before Opening Day 2026, and where ownership has publicly committed to "operational review." The coordinator hires and analyst promotions that follow will tell the story. So will the phone calls. One agent representing multiple front-office executives said his clients started reaching out in early October, well before the World Series ended. "They see it coming," he said. "The ones who don't are the ones who won't have jobs."
The Winter Meetings begin December 9 in Dallas. Expect announcements before then.
The takeaway
Six MLB GMs face contract expirations as owners prep for labor disruption, with three non-renewals already decided internally.
Want the 60-second program for your specific event?
Enter your event and email — we build it and send the branded proposal before lunch. No obligation.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori Press · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.