Max talks labor pains after signing new deal

A three-year, $130 million deal for a Hall of Famer in Flushing would normally be an occasion drenched in smiles and champagne, but talk of MLB’s impending lockout dominated the 40-minute Zoom call as Max Scherzer was formally introduced as a Met.

The pitcher and his agent Scott Boras jointly addressed media from a windy patio in the Dallas area, hours before baseball’s owners were expected to lock out the players at midnight Eastern and bring the offseason to a screeching halt.

Scherzer, along with his new teammate Francisco Lindor, sits on the players’ union executive committee, and he embraced the labor talk Wednesday.

“Being at the table, hearing the tone of negotiations, the lockout seems like a very likely scenario, let’s just say that,” he said. The impending lockout created a free agent frenzy over the last week, and Scherzer said that factored into the timing of his decision.

Mets owner Steve Cohen is one of the men who would be locking out the players, but he’s the sole owner who has barreled past luxury tax threshold this winter.

Scherzer called the luxury tax, which is one of many changes that has effectively halted payrolls in their tracks over the last five years, “the specific thing we’re negotiating on right now.” (Or maybe not negotiating, as ESPN reported negotiations ended in the early afternoon Wednesday.)

“Teams view that as a cap and they won’t really spend too much over that despite the penalties being negligible, comparatively,” Scherzer said. “So to see Steve show the fortitude to go past it, and show that he’s going to do whatever it takes to win, that’s music to my ears. I’m still here to win.”

Scherzer is right that the penalties are minimal. The Mets are currently projected to have the league’s highest 2022 tax bill at $19.3 million, although that’s under the old CBA rules. Even if that bill grows, though, it’s a pittance for men like Cohen, who once paid a $1.8 billion fine for insider trading and might pay Robinson Cano around $21 million not to play next year.

Cohen said he hasn’t heard from the commissioner’s office about the enormous Scherzer contract, and that he’s out of touch with the collective bargaining negotiations, which are being led on his end by deputy commissioner Dan Halem and a seven-owner labor committee that includes Hal Steinbrenner.

“I’m gonna leave it to the commissioner and the negotiating team to figure that out,” Cohen said Wednesday. “I frankly haven’t been as involved with the labor stuff, I’ve been more involved with the team, and I’m just gonna leave it at that.”

TOTAL MARKET ISSUE

The previous record holder for average annual value, Gerrit Cole, effusively thanked MLB labor pioneers Curt Floor and Marvin Miller when he was introduced as a Yankee in 2019.

Scherzer made similar comments Wednesday. “I’ve always been the recipient of someone else’s deal in order to get my contract. So I’m very aware that I’m not in a vacuum, he said. “I didn’t get this number because I got this number. It’s because of players before me... Players as a whole from the game are connected from old to young.”

While Scherzer’s mega deal is indeed part of a continuum of superstars setting the market, it can be hard to draw a line from the gaudy numbers at the top of MLB’s payroll to similar progress for the rest of the player base. Much of the current labor discontent in baseball revolves around the plight of younger players under onerous team control or mid-tier veterans whom front offices have decided to replace with slightly worse and far cheaper young players.

Scherzer said that he and other players viewed it differently, but acknowledged that part of the system was broken.

“There’s top-down economics, and bottom-up economics, and they both work in tandem,” he said. “When you continue to move the market as a whole, everyone kind of moves up together. Certain parts of the market don’t function well, and it drives down the whole player market.

“That’s the system that we have, that’s the free market system that we have and that’s what we live by. I know for fans it’s probably kind of hard to understand that, but when you’re a player, you really get to see it on a player-by-player basis when you’re in different clubhouses with guys who push the market, what that does for other players as well.”