Free agents on frozen winter
Cobb on belated signing: ‘It was ridiculous’
BALTIMORE – Alex Cobb and Lance Lynn are well-paid Major League Baseball players, a group that prides itself on accountability and generally loathes excuse-making.
Yet the two right-handed starting pitchers also are unwilling members of a fraternity formed last winter, when baseball’s free agents endured a frozen market that created unprecedented conditions: more than 80 employable ballplayers, some elite, still seeking jobs when spring training began.
Now, just 30 or so games remain in the season that followed. And while both pitchers eventually got paid, their performances and those of many of their peers almost assuredly suffered due to their late starts.
They’d still like to know why the winter played out as it did and what can be done to prevent future free agents from similar fates.
“It was ridiculous. It was absolutely absurd,” Cobb told USA TODAY. “I have yet to understand a reason for it. Every single free agent this season outside of (Boston slugger) J.D. Martinez has struggled in some sort of way. That’s not the players’ fault; that’s Major League Baseball and the way they decided to do business this offseason.
“I hate talking about it, because it sounds like if you admit to the difficulty of it, you’re making an excuse. In reality, it’s the hardest thing I’ve had to do. It’s like rolling off the couch in the middle of January and going to pitch against the AL East. I paid for it early on — and the team paid for it, as well.”
Cobb does not want your sympathy; he received a four-year, $57 million con- tract from the Orioles. Yet as teams slow-played the market, it was incumbent on more valued free agents such as Cobb to avoid signing a below-market deal out of fear.
As a result, he did not have a job until March 21. Oh, he worked out on his own in Arizona but missed out on all but a few days of spring training before making his season debut April 14. He gave up seven earned runs to the Tigers.
Cobb continued to get hit hard, but now it’s safe to say he’s had two seasons: In his first 12 starts, he posted a
7.14 ERA and 1.71 walks and hits per inning. In his past 12 starts, Cobb has a
3.21 ERA and 1.16 WHIP. Perhaps the Orioles would be 37-94 regardless of when Cobb joined them. It’s almost certain he would have been more competitive with a normal spring.
“They wanted us to wait it out. This is what they get for making guys wait,” says Lynn, who on March 13 settled for a one-year, $12 million deal with the Twins and since has been traded to the Yankees. “When you get a team together and get everyone in there (on time), you’re going to have better success.”
In Lynn’s first eight starts he was 2-6 with a 7.47 ERA and 2.04 WHIP, and the Twins got off to a 22-30 start, dimming hopes of a repeat playoff berth.
In his last 17 appearances, including five starts and one relief appearance since his July 30 trade to the Yankees, he’s 7-6 with a 3.93 ERA and 1.43 WHIP, closer to his career marks of 3.38 and 1.29 entering the season.
The 6-5 right-hander will hit the market again after this season but has questions about his first journey through free agency, a process of which he says: “It’s not like I wasn’t returning anyone’s phone calls. They weren’t calling. So that’s on them.”
In talking with free agents, he says, a strategy seemed to emerge: Keeping players in the dark with limited to no contact while floating word of “interest” in free agents through the news media.
“They’re using the media to say they’re putting out offers they’re not putting out,” Lynn says. “Anything that involves a player and a team saying that they made an offer, if it’s not officially (submitted) with the (union) and MLB, it should be collusion, because that’s what it is.”
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred steadfastly has denied any claims of collusion; it has been raised indirectly or directly by the likes of MLBPA executive director Tony Clark and agents Scott Boras and Brodie Van Wagenen.
“To lay responsibility on the clubs for the failure of some agents to accurately assess the market is unfair, unwarranted and inflammatory,” Manfred said in a February statement.
Manfred claimed some measure of validation during July’s All-Star break when, as Cobb, Lynn and others were struggling, he said the slow and soft market was justified.
Make no mistake: Elite free agents such as Martinez, who is threatening to win the American League Triple Crown in the first year of a $110 million deal, along with Eric Hosmer (eight years, $144 million from the Padres) and Jake Arrieta (three years, $75 million, Phillies) will always find lucrative homes.
It’s the middle- and upper-middle class of the game that Cobb and his peers want to restore.
“It’s our turn, now, to have some say again,” he said, with an eye toward the collective bargaining agreement expiring after 2021. “There’s a lot we can do. But that’s for us to figure out, and down the road.”
Lynn will enter next winter’s market without a qualifying offer attached that helped suppress his value last winter. “I’ll have a better grasp of what’s going on,” he says. “You work your whole career for something and then get stipulations put on you.
“But that’s part of the situation we’re in now — there’s all kinds of ways players can be devalued.”