MLB’S BUSINESS MODEL MAY BE IN NEED OF CORRECTION
Years of labour peace challenged by teams passing on older free agents
The foundations of MLB’s long, wonderful period of peace are starting to shake.
Baseball is undergoing the first stage of a dramatic paradigm shift in the way players are valued in the free-agent market as well as a tilt in MLB’s balance of power toward owners and away from the powerful players union.
How the game copes with these tectonic forces between now and the expiration of the current collective bargain agreement after the 2021 season will profoundly impact the health, wealth and popularity of the sport for a generation.
The game has what seems like an eternity — four seasons — to adjust to changing market dynamics and extend what will be a 27-year era of labour peace. But conditions are changing so fast that players are disoriented and disturbed, while owners click their heels with their sport awash in new revenue streams.
The stunning symbol of this confluence of factors is the current spring training camp, run by the union, for players who have no job even though the exhibition season is underway. More than 100 free agents remain unsigned. A few are stars, but dozens are vets who are shocked they didn’t get multimillion-dollar offers.
A team of these “outcasts” would include some players who just don’t want to sign fat contracts because they aren’t fat enough, but also many who don’t even have an invitation to come to a spring training camp to try to make a team.
Such a hypothetical club could have Jake Arrieta, Lance Lynn, Alex Cobb, John Lackey and Ricky Nolasco in its rotation, NL saves leader Greg Holland as its closer and a lineup with Carlos Gonzalez, Jon Jay and Jose Bautista in its outfield, an infield of Matt Holliday, Neil Walker, J.J. Hardy and Mike Moustakas, as well as Jonathan Lucroy at catcher with Adam Lind, Jayson Werth and Mark Reynolds on its bench. These guys have won batting, home run and RBI titles or helped take teams to World Series. Not one has a deal? Really?
Three weeks ago, MLB Players Association president Tony Clark said, “A record number of talented free agents remain unemployed in an industry where revenues and franchise values are at record highs. This year a significant number of teams are engaged in a race to the bottom. This conduct is a fundamental breach of the trust between a team and its fans and threatens the very integrity of our game.”
On Tuesday, the next shoe dropped as the MLBPA filed a grievance against MLB, accusing the Oakland A’s, Miami Marlins, Pittsburgh Pirates and Tampa Bay Rays of failing to abide by the rules on how they spend their revenuesharing money. Whether that is true or not, players will have to recognize that other trends also are undermining their salary leverage.
In recent years, analytics-driven teams have come to value young, controllable talent more than ever, while avoiding over-30 vets, especially on long contracts. And many teams now shy away from signing top free agents because of the steep cost in compensation that they must pay.
Adding to this trend is MLB’s confidence that its drug testing for PEDs and amphetamines is effective. That means older players are even less likely to be able to extend their careers through chemistry.
As a result, MLB’s basic model for paying players — underpaying players in their prime years in their 20s, while spurning all but the best star players in their 30s — may have to be reinvented. The last such upheaval, from the arrival of the first free agent in 1976 through the strike that cancelled the 1994 World Series, produced almost 20 years of labour war. I covered it all. It was hellish.
“Guys like Adam Lind deserve to be on a big-league team,” the Nats’ Ryan Zimmerman said. “What Adam did last year (.875 OPS), you’re telling me every team’s good? He’s not needed? That’s where I get upset.”
Last month, three major signings — Eric Hosmer, Yu Darvish and J.D. Martinez for a combined $392 million — showed the market for stars, while crimped, is hardly crashing. Perhaps this off-season is just a recalibration or a financial deep breath by teams that want to save money for next winter’s far more impressive cast of free agents led by Bryce Harper and Manny Machado.
But plenty of players are mad. They exchange stories, such as an all-star who got three lowball offers from three tail-end teams, then weeks of silence from the other 27 teams. Softening him up to sign for half of his market price a year ago?
So far, calm players such as the Nationals’ Sean Doolittle are trying to see both sides and figure out where common grounds can be found for “the long-term serious conversation that we need to start having now.
“But it is concerning. I don’t know enough about the moving parts behind the scenes to come right out and call it collusion because that’s a really serious charge,” said Doolittle, aware that 30 years ago owners were fined $280 million for three straight winters of co-ordinated salary suppression. “But the later you get in this process, and we’re now in spring training, it does make you wonder what’s going on because you hope that’s not the case, right?”
Baseball’s labour-war era need not be repeated. But take heed. Now is the time for measured evaluation, not a rush to condemn either side. Positions, once taken publicly, are hard to walk back.
Players need to understand the realities of their situations have changed not through devious actions, but by evolution in our understanding of the sport. Analytics and PED -testing are both advances for baseball. But they’ve damaged the perceived value of older players, while boosting the status of young ones.
Nonetheless, players, agents and the union are wise to be skeptical. This month, club officials have sworn to me on their grandmothers’ graves they aren’t colluding. They all just got analytical at the same time and came to similar evaluations of almost every player’s worth. What a convenient coincidence.
Luckily, baseball has four years to work through this briar patch.
“We’re definitely in a transition period. Because of analytics, the days when 30-year-olds get sevenyear deals aren’t going to happen very much anymore,” Zimmerman said. “I don’t blame teams for that. It’s smart. But if owners are going to put so much value into the first part of people’s careers, then (future) players should be compensated at the beginning of their career more than they are now.
“Most guys don’t get to the big leagues until they are 24, 25. I’m not a genius, but 24, 25 plus six years (until free agency) is 30 or 31. Look around at how many 30-, 31-year-olds are basically just getting pushed out of the game right now. So the system, I don’t want to say it’s outdated, but ...”
But it is. Many players fear they won’t get their fair share of MLB’s huge revenues at the beginning or the end of their careers. How do you fix that?
“I don’t even know where to start that discussion,” Zimmerman said. “You’d be switching the entire thing. That’s above my pay grade.”
I don’t know enough about the moving parts behind the scenes to come right out and call it collusion because that’s a really serious charge.