No sooner had the Los Angeles Dodgers signed free-agent outfielder Kyle Tucker than a firestorm erupted on social media. On the one side were commentators such as @guppie2121, who argued that the Dodgers’ move had all but canceled the 2026 season:
Seriously???
No point in even watching baseball this season especially not the playoffs. Dodgers literally buying another ring
— Guppie (@guppie2121) January 16, 2026
More than a few fans vented similar frustrations, though, it must be said, plenty of counterarguments were leveled as well. For example, the well-known sports media personality Colin Cowherd unleashed a series of posts defending the Tucker signing. According to Cowherd, fans need to remember that baseball’s recent uptick in popularity has coincided with the Dodgers’ dominance. Moreover, it is not just the Dodgers who are improving. The Chicago Cubs may not have secured Tucker’s services, but they traded for high-upside right-handed pitcher Edward Cabrera and, even more importantly, inked three-time All-Star third baseman Alex Bregman to a five-year deal. The New York Yankees, meanwhile, have traded for talented left-handed starter Ryan Weathers and re-signed outfielder Cody Bellinger. “Dodgers, Cubs, Yankees improving is NEVER bad for MLB,” as Cowherd puts it.
Such debates, of course, are nothing new. But this time, they carry added weight due to the looming expiration of Major League Baseball’s labor contract. In less than a year — the exact deadline is Dec. 1 at 11:59 p.m. ET — a new collective bargaining agreement will be required. To say that negotiations are going to be fraught seems like an understatement. Most observers believe that a work stoppage is unavoidable, though a mere work stoppage is hardly the greatest fear. As ESPN’s Jeff Passan explains, “The doomsday scenario (is) that not only are the players locked out, but the sides cannot find common ground thereafter. The greatest threat of an extended work stoppage — baseball’s last was in 1994-95 — would come if owners insist on an overhaul of the game’s economic system to include a salary cap. Player leadership has indicated it won’t even entertain the notion of a capped system.” So, when fans like @guppie2121 and commentators like Cowherd spar over the Tucker signing, they are doing so against the backdrop of a bigger issue. For some, MLB is on the verge of collapse. For others, it is flourishing. The former think the latter are fools, and vice versa. So what gives? How do we account for the bitterness of this squabble? And is it even possible to decide between these two perspectives?
In order to answer these questions — to whatever extent they can be answered — a little philosophy is in order. In particular, I want to turn to the thinking of a Scotsman who, I suspect, was a bigger fan of soccer or rugby than of baseball. His name was Alasdair MacIntyre, and, upon his death in May 2025, he was one of the world’s most famous philosophers. MacIntyre taught at the University of Notre Dame until his passing, though his legacy was also bound up with his 1981 book “After Virtue.” Today, it is widely considered one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. MacIntyre’s fundamental argument in “After Virtue” is twofold. First, he observes that moral debate remains prominent in American life. No matter the arena — from politics to science to baseball — people are inclined to dispute right and wrong. “The Dodgers are ruining baseball!” “The Dodgers are saving baseball!” Second, he points out that underlying such arguments are a host of inchoate, often unexamined moral assumptions. We’re invested in ethical questions without being entirely sure of why they matter or what they’re for.
According to MacIntyre, the shrillness of contemporary ethical discourse lies downstream of this problem. Just spend half an hour on Facebook or X (Twitter), where people quarrel aimlessly and, it seems, interminably. “There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture,” MacIntyre noted. This is because the arguments unfold in spaces characterized by “rival premises.” For example, it would appear that @guppie2121 presupposes that MLB, as an institution, should serve the sport by promoting a kind of equality among its member organizations. He does not question the Dodgers’ excellence per se, but, as he sees it, the sport is only worth watching when a league-enforced parity prevails. Cowherd starts from an entirely different premise. For him, baseball’s growth is best measured in concrete data — TV ratings, gate receipts, and free-market outcomes such as the biggest stars playing in the biggest cities. As Cowherd puts it, “The best players are on the biggest brands and in the biggest markets, and it helps. Markets matter except for the NFL, so with that premise, baseball is in a good spot.” Clearly, then, @guppie2121 and Cowherd do not share a common framework for understanding what success means in MLB. Their conclusions — that, on the one hand, baseball is not worth watching and that, on the other hand, baseball is thriving — are logical within their respective frameworks. But they cannot have a productive conversation about the topic, much less come to an agreement, because their premises set them on parallel tracks of argumentation. As a result, the moral question about whether or not the Dodgers are good for baseball remains undecidable.
When this happens, according to MacIntyre, reasons for agreement are asserted rather than explored. Sure, the participants in an argument will make an appeal to certain objective ethical standards. One can easily imagine @guppie2121 saying, “It is unequal and thus unjust for the Dodgers to act in this way!” Likewise, Cowherd might follow another Scottish thinker — this time, the political economist Adam Smith (1723-90) — and maintain that the steady financial growth of MLB represents an actual instantiation of justice. After all, as MLB coffers continue to swell, the benefits redound to all of the league’s employees — groundskeepers, tour guides, ushers, and, yes, even to players on small-market teams such as the Kansas City Royals and the Pittsburgh Pirates. Why, Cowherd might wonder, should parity be equated with justice when the ultimate goal of any institution is material growth? Both @guppie2121 and Cowherd appeal to justice, but they are operating out of different trajectories in the history of philosophy. Even more problematic is the fact that they do not cite — or perhaps are unable to cite — the moral sources of their thinking.
This is a chaotic situation, so much so that an observer might throw up her hands and simply say: “Oh, forget it, these people will never figure this out. All they’re doing is talking about how they’re feeling or what they want.” It’s not hard to see why one might assume that moral claims are just ways of expressing emotion or preference. Perhaps @guppie2121 is a lifelong fan of the Milwaukee Brewers. Perhaps Cowherd has been instructed by executives at the Fox Broadcasting Co. — his current employer, not to mention a longtime partner of MLB — to talk up baseball’s increasing popularity. Yet, if the respective moral judgments of @guppie2121 and Cowherd are ultimately rooted in attitude or feeling, then neither one can actually be right. On this understanding, in other words, moral debates are not rational affairs, they are contests of emotion. Thus they can only be resolved, if they can be resolved at all, by stirring up the emotions of others. As MacIntyre puts it, “We use moral judgments not only to express our own feelings and attitudes, but also precisely to produce such effects in others.” The one who shouts the loudest wins.
MacIntyre calls this approach to moral argumentation “emotivism,” and one of the key contentions of “After Virtue” is that emotivism has come to dominate modern culture. If there have been emotivists of one sort or another throughout history, it is only today that “people now think, talk, and act as if emotivism were true, no matter what their avowed theoretical standpoint may be.” MacIntyre considers this “a grave cultural loss,” though he underlines that he is not claiming that people are ipso facto “worse” than they used to be. No, what is lost in an emotivist culture is the possibility of deciding moral disagreements by drawing on a body of shared “impersonal criteria” to rationally work through a problem. “The sole reality of distinctively moral discourse is the attempt of one will to align the attitudes, feelings, preference and choices of another with its own.” A society permeated by emotivism is one of shrill threats, humiliating memes, and winner-take-all diatribes.
Which, oddly enough, brings us back to the Tucker signing. It’s been about two weeks since Tucker officially became a Dodger, and the hoopla and hullaballoo has largely died down. This would hardly surprise MacIntyre, who, decades prior to the advent of social media, understood that modern people — including baseball fans, no doubt — will fly into temporary rages only to become distracted by other concerns. And so it is when morality is arbitrarily tied to personal preference rather than to a common understanding of right and wrong. One can only hope that, when Dec. 2 arrives and the need for a new CBA arrives, the Tucker situation is framed against a backdrop that unites all parties involved. If not, the looming lockout might very well prove catastrophic.
