No tanks! Scherzer, Boras want losing on purpose to end

At what was ostensibly an introductory press conference welcoming Max Scherzer to the Mets, the pitcher and his agent Scott Boras waded into a host of topics about baseball’s impending work stoppage and what it would take to get players on board with a new collective bargaining agreement. Hours later, the old CBA expired, and owners locked the players out, freezing offseason business.

As the expiration loomed, Scherzer and Boras held court.

Broadly, the players union wants teams to compete more aggressively with each other, driving up total spending on players. Boras has long been a proponent of the idea that much of baseball’s current tanking-induced malaise can be tied back to the 2011 CBA, where draft spending was capped for the first time. That meant that the worst teams were for the first time guaranteed to get the best players in the draft; before, top picks could hold out for huge bonuses.

“It had a real, real attack on the integrity of the game, because now nearly half the league is basically looking to next season by June or July so they can improve their draft status and get the valued draft picks,” he said Wednesday. “It’s the rules. We have something in our rules that creates non-competitiveness.”

The union is seeking several changes to disincentive losing, including:

l An increase in the luxury tax threshold

l Changes to the draft order to make losing less valuable l Earlier free agency for players “We see a competition problem with how teams are behaving and certain rules that are within that,” Scherzer said. “Adjustments have to be made to that in order to bring up the competition. As players, that’s absolutely critical to us, to have a highly competitive league, and when we don’t have that, we have issues.”

HOW HARD CAN THEY FIGHT TO GET IT?

The biggest question in any labor battle is how hard the workers are willing to fight. If there’s not much of an appetite for an extended work stoppage, management has the leverage.

Scherzer was confident that the players, even the ones who weren’t on their second-straight nine-figure contract, were ready to make the owners hurt.

“We have a pretty good war chest behind us of money that we can allocate to players,” he said. “Those decisions have been made behind the scenes, I’ve been at those tables to make sure that our war chest is as big as possible, knowing that for the past five years we’ve been kind of thinking that we need as big a war chest as possible coming into this.”

According to a union memo obtained by The Athletic, players have been skipping licensing payments since 2018, creating a work stoppage “war chest” that would likely run well north of $100 million. That sounds like a lot of money, but there are about 1,200 players to distribute it among if games are missed.

Of course, we’re months away from missing games, and Scherzer said Wednesday that everyone hopes that doesn’t happen.

“I’m not looking at it like we’re ever going to tap it; that would be the best-case scenario, not to tap it,” he said. “Hopefully we can get a deal at some point in time. But I just know we as players, we’re steadfast in our belief of how we see the game.