MLB players face a bleak winter as reality of pandemic revenue losses sets in

NEW YORK — Baseball’s version of “bargains galore” black Friday will arrive this Wednesday — or to paraphrase Marie Antoinette: After Dec. 2, le deluge, as in the deluge of players being non-tendered by their clubs, opening up potentially the most populated free agent market ever.

Nobody would be more delighted with this development than Charlie Finley, the maverick owner of the Oakland A’s who, when free agency was in its infancy in the mid-’70s, made a proposal to his fellow owners to limit all the players to one-year contracts and make everyone free agents every year.

Aghast, the baseball lords laughed at Finley, much to the relief of Players Association executive director Marvin Miller, who had to explain to his players that universal free agency was really a bad thing; that a flooded market would destroy the concept of supply and demand and salaries would actually decrease.

But this is only one reason why the players are facing a potentially lean offseason in which nobody has any idea what the owners’ revenues are going to be, or when the 2021 season is even going to begin, and with how many games.

The only thing that appears certain is that, with a few exceptions, longterm (three or more years) megabucks contracts aren’t going to be in the offing this winter. And when the music stops, a lot of non-tendered veteran players, in the $2-$8 million range, are going to be left without a chair as clubs seek to replace them with minimum-salary players from their system, whether they’re ready or not.

That’s why the clubs are waiting until Dec. 2 to start assessing their needs.

For example, the Yankees have made it known re-signing DJ LeMahieu is their top priority. After that, they appear inclined to scour the non-tenders list, and probably the trade route, to fill their remaining needs.

Insofar as their own non-tenders, they’ve apparently fallen in love with Gary Sanchez again (big mistake), with Aaron Boone apologizing last week for the defensively/contact challenged catcher’s horrible last two years by saying: “I think he’s been unfairly criticized a lot.”

So they will tender arbitration to Sanchez and return to the platoon of him and Kyle Higashioka behind the plate next year while passing on the two premium catchers in the free-agent market,

J.T. Realmuto and James McCann, and hoping for an accelerated development by either Anthony Seigler or Josh Breaux.

While Mets owner Steve Cohen has indicated he will be into big-game hunting this winter and possibly willing to sign at least two top-flight free agents from among Realmuto, George Springer and Trevor Bauer, he is the one owner in baseball who didn’t lose any money last year and is essentially starting from scratch.

Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred has claimed the combined debt for the major-league clubs this year was $8.3 billion. While teams such as the Yankees, Dodgers, Cubs, Angels and Red Sox with the highest payrolls took the biggest hits, low-revenue teams such as the Marlins, Rays and Brewers have been equally suppressed.

Indeed, as the Yankees concentrate on making sure LeMahieu stays put, the Rays are seemingly in the process of ceding the American League East to them — declining Charlie Morton’s $15million option and letting him go for essentially the same amount to the

Braves and now shopping their other two highest-salaried players, Blake Snell and Kevin Kiermaier.

This is because they received none of their accustomed $50 million in revenue sharing this year ,and there are no guarantees they’ll get any for next year either. The Rays, who continue to play in front of sparse crowds at Tropicana Field, rely heavily on their revenue sharing to pay their players.

But despite this impending doom for free agents, Scott Boras, the Avenging Agent, has been telling all of his clients that everything is going to be back to normal — and, as such, acting accordingly in making his typically exorbitant demands for their services.