The Great Free Agent Stalemate of the winter of 2017-18 now has a human face. It is rugged and bearded and blue-capped.
Third baseman tested free agency after standout year, but failed to draw interest
The Great Free Agent Stalemate of the winter of 2017-18 now has a human face. It is rugged and bearded and blue-capped. It may be wearing a smile when it next shows up in public, but there’s a good chance that smile will be hiding some deep-seated frustration and bitterness, and with good reason.
The face of free agency in March 2018 belongs to Mike Moustakas, who signed late Thursday with the Kansas City Royals on a one-year, $6.5 million guaranteed contract.
This is the same 29-year-old third baseman who made $8.7 million in 2017, when he hit 38 homers to set a Royals franchise record. The same player who turned down a qualifying offer from the Royals of $17.4 million in November. The same player who was projected by MLB Trade Rumors to sign for five years and $85 million this winter.
That Moustakas, a two-time All-Star, had to wait until halfway through spring training to find a home, then accept a pay cut and a one-year deal, signals his own quiet, begrudging acceptance of an unexpected reality — as well as his unquenchable desire to play baseball, and to get to a spring training camp before it’s too late to prepare himself adequately for Opening Day.
But it also highlights, in human form, the way the free agent system in baseball is broken — or at the very least operating in a manner in which it has never operated before, and was never meant to operate.
Free agency was designed to be a standout player’s reward after six years of club control, and for much of its life span that is how it played out. But Moustakas, through no fault of his own, arrived at free agency just as the industry as a whole was rethinking the very concept. This has been a winter like no other, with some excellent pitchers and hitters forced to wait longer and take less lucrative deals than they had expected. Others, such as Jake Arrieta, remain unsigned.
There were legitimate concerns about Moustakas as a player. In some ways, he has never fully recovered from the major knee injury he suffered in 2016. He is slow, doesn’t get on base at a very high clip and may be destined to become a designated hitter in the nottoo-distant future.
But what destroyed Moustakas’ value as a free agent, more than anything, was the shift taking place in the game’s economics.
Because of the qualifying offer the Royals made in November, any team but the Royals would have been forced to surrender draft picks and international bonus-pool money to sign him. But the problem goes beyond that.
Moustakas happened to arrive at free agency just as a group of large-market teams, for various economic and strategic reasons, became determined to remain under the $197 million luxurytax threshold, and just as another group of small- and midmarket teams undertook “rebuilding” jobs that essentially took them completely out of the free agent market.
There is also a growing consensus across front offices, most of them run by analytics-minded executives, that long-term deals with players in their 30s (or on the cusp of 30, as Moustakas is) are generally losing bets, or in the parlance of the day, an inefficient use of resources.
Just Thursday, Tony Clark, the head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, visited the Washington Nationals on his annual tour of big league camps and heard the same concerns and questions he has been getting from players across Florida and Arizona this month. The players, naturally, want to know where this is headed, and it is Clark’s mission, he said, to “educate.” But the situation is bleak, with a collective bargaining agreement that runs through 2021 and no sign that things will get better any time soon.
“There’s always an opportunity to have a conversation with MLB about the best interest of the industry moving forward,” Clark said, when asked about possible solutions. “We have signed a CBA. That CBA is in place until 2021. But [there are] any number of issues that are worth having dialogue on between now and then, [and] that opportunity exists.”
On the surface, it certainly appears Moustakas and his agent, Scott Boras, misread the shifting marketplace or at least miscalculated its possibilities. That’s the cold, hard viewpoint. The human version is that perhaps Moustakas simply held out hope for the longest time that someone would reward him for what he has accomplished, and would believe in what he can still accomplish — which is what free agency used to do — until that hope was crushed under the machine.
The one-year deal he signed with the Royals reportedly contains $2.2 million in performance bonuses, as well as a mutual option for 2019. But chances are, Moustakas will re-test free agency again next winter and hope against hope that a broken system will somehow, suddenly fix itself.