Unsigned free agents, pace of play key issues
Spring training opens in a few days with union miffed.
If you love baseball, you hate when people call it boring. There’s so much going on, it’s only boring to boring people, all that stuff.
But let’s face it: The offseason of 2017-18 has been mind-numbingly boring. A few interesting trades, sure. But when we get to the actual Groundhog Day and the baseball world feels like the movie — the same old story, on endless repeat — maybe it’s gone beyond boring and become a fullfledged farce.
As you may have heard, teams have a lot of money. Yet here are a dozen wellknown players who are unsigned free agents, with spring training camps opening in just a few days: J.D. Martinez, Jake Arrieta, Yu Darvish, Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Greg Holland, Neil Walker, Logan Morrison, Jonathan Lucroy, Alex Cobb, Lance Lynn, Lucas Duda. Plus about 100 or so more.
Naturally, this makes the players’ union furious. Here’s how Tony Clark, the union’s executive director, responded in a statement Thursday about Commissioner Rob Manfred’s latest pace-of-play proposal:
“As we sit here today, the first week of February, our focus is on the 100-plus free agents still available. Players and the players association remain committed to the competitive integrity of the game on all fronts, including on-field rules.”
In other words, you’re on your own.
To most of the players, pace-of-play issues are a distraction from the alarmingly frigid free-agent market.
“The players are so much more focused on what’s always been the crown jewel of our union, which is free agency, and the way that’s kind of been taken away,” said a veteran player who is a free agent and who was granted anonymity because he did not want to hurt his chances in the market. “It’s something you once fought and strove for — you wanted to become a free agent desperately.”
A prominent agent, Brodie Van Wagenen, came close Friday to accusing the owners of collusion, saying in a Twitter post that their inactivity in free agency “feels coordinated, rightly or wrongly.” Van Wagenen also mentioned a “rising tide among players for radical change” and threatened a boycott of spring training.
With the current collective bargaining agreement stretching through the 2021 season, that seems highly unlikely. But in this environment, players see little need to cooperate with Manfred, despite clear evidence that games are getting slower.
The average time of a nine-inning game last season was 3 hours, 5 minutes, the highest on record and nine minutes longer than in 2015. That was Manfred’s first year as commissioner, when he made pace of play a priority. But the players quickly learned that the league and the umpires were not really forcing them to stay in the box or deliver pitches at a brisker pace. The pace reverted to a crawl.
The biggest factor, though, is that players are increasingly incentivized to take more time. In the age of analytics, teams cultivate power hitters and power pitchers, and the amateur ranks churn out plenty every year. Strikeouts and homers reached record highs last season, and walks are rising again, too. That means more pitches, which means more relievers, which means more time.
The 2017 season included 1,196 more home runs, 1,756 more walks and 2,658 more strikeouts than the 2015 season. The number of pitches per nine-inning game rose from 283 to 292 in the same period. No wonder games were nine minutes longer.
“Guys are working the count; nobody’s trying to just put the ball in play. Everybody wants to lift and launch and hit home runs,” said Jim Kaat, the MLB Network analyst and former pitcher. “So home runs, walks and strikeouts kind of dominate the game, and that’s going to make for a more boring game in terms of action on the bases. It’s really a three-hour home run derby, in a lot of cases.”
As a broadcaster, Kaat said, the best games don’t have to be the shortest. Last August, he called a 3-hour, 36-minute thriller between Cleveland and Boston at Fenway Park. That game, a 12-10 Red Sox victory, featured 88 plate appearances and only 23 walks or strikeouts.
“That was packed with action,” Kaat said. “To me, it’s not so much time of game as it is the boredom of hitters stepping out of the box, which forces pitchers to take more time.”
Manfred’s most recent proposal includes no changes in 2018 but mandatory pitch clocks for 2019 (18 seconds, with nobody on base) unless the average game time falls to 2 hours, 55 minutes this season. He also wants to limit mound visits to six per game. Mound visits have increased significantly lately, partly because of fears of sign stealing; to counter that, calls from the video room to the dugout will be monitored and recorded this season to keep teams from electronically delivering opponents’ signs.
All along, Manfred has said he would rather not exercise his right to unilaterally impose on-field changes. But his hopes of having an ongoing dialogue with players never materialized beyond one meeting last summer, and now players have little interest in moving along the conversation.
For Manfred, the wisest course of action would be to let this all go, for now, rather than provoke further animosity from the players or their union.
Part of baseball’s charm is the way the style of play can shift, over time, on its own. It’s not a boring game, and it won’t be this way forever.