With Major League Baseball’s collective-bargaining agreement set to expire on Dec. 1, there is impending doom circling the heads of everyone in baseball. Nobody knows exactly how the negotiations will end, but clubs’ internal teams and their commercial partners still have time to prepare responsibly for a potential lockout. If your contingency planning begins when games are canceled, you are already too late. The window for long-range contingency planning may be closing, but if those conversations wait until games are threatened or canceled, teams and sponsors will already be operating from behind.

Through my time with the Miami Marlins, I gained firsthand experience with lost games and inventory through the disruption of COVID-19 in the 2020 season and then again during the 2021-22 lockout. Those situations were different, but the commercial challenge that baseball might face is the same: How do you protect partner value, preserve revenue and maintain trust when the product everyone bought may not be available as planned? The answer starts with preparation, and the remaining weeks before the deadline are critical.

During both of the aforementioned work stoppages, we made a point of communicating with our partners before they had to........

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