Free agency freeze is a growing embarrassment for baseball

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baseball equipment and uniforms have been packed, the trucks are rolling on the highways, and in just a few days, spring training camps open in Florida and Arizona.

While local TV crews have breathlessly showed clips and soundbites of team equipment trucks leaving their snowy cities, something is mysteriously missing. Ah, yes, the players.

There still are more than 90 unemployed free agents on the market today, including a pair of 26-year-old stars – Bryce Harper and Manny Machado – who have nowhere to go, waiting for someone to offer the kind of mega-deal that was almost commonplace a few years ago.

The market freeze has left agents furious, players exasperated, fans frustrated, with tension rising between the players and owners, threatening a work stoppage in 2021.

“We think it’s bad for the players, the fans, and the game,” said Bruce Meyer, senior director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, “being this close to the beginning of the season and having so many fan-bases not even knowing who’s going to be on their teams.”

Major League Baseball argues that this has been the new norm, saying that 45% of the free-agent class was unsigned at this time in 2015-16, and 62% a year ago. This winter, 52% of the free agents remain unsigned, leaving all but a few signing minor-league contracts or forced into retirement.

“All things being equal,” said Dan Halem, Major League Baseball deputy commissioner, “we would like to have players sign earlier in the offseason. Teams can announce signings and create fan interest. But... it takes two parties to sign a contract.”

Yet, for an industry generating nearly $11 billion in revenue, with clubs generating record annual profits, the freeagent marketplace has gone as icy as the polar vortex. Only one player, Washington Nationals pitcher Patrick Corbin (six years, $140 million) has signed a contract more than $68 million.

Just four players have signed contracts longer than three years. And 16 teams have yet to sign a free agent to a multiyear contract.

This is the only major sport that doesn’t have a salary cap, only a luxury tax. But there are only two teams who currently are over the $206 million threshold – the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs – although the New York Yankees are projected to also surpass it.

There currently are 11 teams who don’t even have a $100 million payroll, and six teams who are under $75 million – Tampa, Pittsburgh, Miami, San Diego, Baltimore and Oakland.

The union projects that 12 teams will begin the 2019 season with a substantially lower payroll than a year ago, creating imbalance, lack of competitiveness, and dreary pennant races.

There were eight teams, a quarter of all baseball, that lost 95 or more games last season – including a record three teams that lost 100 games. There were 10 teams that finished at least 20 games out of first place. But only one of those teams, the Cincinnati Reds, have substantially improved themselves.

Still, Halem argues, it’s not as if clubs aren’t offering contracts, just not to the players’ liking. The Chicago White Sox offered Machado a seven-year contract two months ago, and continue to wait. The Padres met last week with Harper and agent Scott Boras, and also spoke with Dan Lozano, Machado’s agent. The Philadelphia Phillies – who haven’t had a winning season since 2011 – are actively engaged with Harper and Machado, and are willing to provide either one franchise-record deals.

Still, since the Nationals offered Harper a 10-year, $300 million contract at the end of the season that since has been rescinded, no one has offered a deal to make Harper or Machado blink. It’s maddening to Boras, who signed Alex Rodriguez to a historic 10-year, $252 million contract with the Rangers in 2000, and another 10-year, $275 million deal in 2007 with the Yankees, and has since watched revenues triple.

Lozano had Albert Pujols sign a 10-year, $240 million contract in 2011 with the Los Angeles Angels, and had two other teams offering as much more or more, but now has trouble attracting the same interest in a player who’s six years younger than when Pujols signed. Clubs insist they simply are smarter now with their extensive analytic studies on long-term contracts and players’ productivity past their 30th birthday. Players are grousing that teams are simply being cheap, pocketing tens of millions of dollars each year, with little regard to winning.

MLB also flatly rejects the notion that teams are rebuilding more than ever before in history, almost losing games purposely to improve their draft status.

The only concept the players and owners agree with these days is that it’s bad for business, even embarrassing, that the crème de la crème of the freeagent market may still be home when camps open next week.

Go ahead, blame whoever you want, but it’s an awful, even frightful look for the baseball industry to have several of its biggest stars to not only be unemployed, but have only a few precious teams interested in their services.

Play ball.