Free agency is not free. Nor is it working – for players, teams, or fans.
Short of removing Marvin Miller from the Baseball Hall of Fame, free agency should be easy to fix. All it will take is cooperation from the players union, which typically opposes anything suggested by management even when it is in their own best interest.
Okay, here’s the problem: as of Valentine’s Day, 112 players who appeared in a major-league game remained unsigned free agents.
Five of them were represented by Scott Boras, the publicity-seeking superagent from California who typically takes all his clients into free agency and keeps them there until he can squeeze every last dime out of prospective buyers.
That’s why Blake Snell, winner of two Cy Youngs, and former National League MVP Cody Bellinger are two of the Boras Brigade, a quintet of stars that have received solid offers but rejected all with an eye toward getting even more years and dollars in their new deals.
Also in that situation are Jordan Montgomery, the veteran left-hander who starred in the World Series for the winning Texas Rangers; slick-fielding third baseman Matt Chapman; and designated hitter J.D. Martinez, coming off a 33-homer campaign.
They are worth an estimated $800 million on the open market, or about a quarter of the nearly $3.3 billion that will be spent on free agents this off-season. Any one of them is a potential difference-maker when it comes to shifting the divisional balance of power.
Boras believes having them hold out will raise their contract offers as teams get desperate. But the facts suggest otherwise, as teams considered candidates to sign them have pivoted elsewhere, saving dollars in the process, thereby reducing the number of bidders for each.
Snell, for example, seemed like the perfect fit for the pitching-poor New York Yankees, who got tired of waiting and inked Marcus Stroman, a less-expensive free agent, instead. The veteran left-hander would have been a nice signing for Baltimore too but the O’s, lacking unlimited patience, instead packed off a trio of prospects to Milwaukee for Corbin Burnes, another Cy Young recipient – even though Burnes could turn into a one-season rental with free agency (and Boras)looming.
And how about Bellinger, whose left-handed power would have been perfect for the short right-field wall at Yankee Stadium? He could also play center field better than Aaron Judge, who’s more suited to a corner, and serve as a solid insurance policy against injury-prone first baseman Anthony Rizzo. But Bellinger, who’s had an up-and-down career, got greedy and demanded at least $200 million – a figure even the Cubs weren’t willing to pay after he played well there last year.
The big problem here is everybody knowing everybody else’s salary. If baseball players worked in an office instead of a ballpark, salary figures would be kept confidential to avoid greed and jealousy from raising their ugly heads.
Except for the Cubs, who spent a record $40 million to sign former Milwaukee manager Craig Counsell for five years, salaries of managers, coaches, general managers, and broadcasters are industry secrets. Nobody knows and nobody cares – especially since most managers don’t make as much as their players.
Think there’s no jealousy among players? Why did Francisco Lindor ($341 million) demand a million dollars more from the Mets than Fernando Tatis, Jr. ($340 million) got from the San Diego Padres? And why did rookie pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto ($325 million) request and receive a million more than Gerrit Cole, previously the top-paid pitcher?
Minus a salary cap, which the players union would never permit, at least let’s have salary silence. Starting immediately, teams should not divulge individual salary information and players that do should be fined and reprimanded.
Free agency – including the runaway salary spiral – could also be fixed by restricting signing dates, perhaps from the end of the World Series to the end of the winter meetings. The result would be a plethora of baseball news when the game needs it most – during the dark days of fall otherwise dominated by the lesser sport of football – and teams could sell more tickets for the following season.
Under the current arrangement, few players sign early because they want to keep raising the ante, using the Boras theory of building pressure among general managers anxious to earn their keep.
Nothing works better for Boras than a bidding war or two. Or several.
During the Good Old Days of baseball before free agency gave players with six years of service time the right to sell themselves, waiver-free interleague trading was permitted for the first time in 1959. An interleague trading period was established from Nov. 21 to Dec. 15 but later modified to run from five days after the final World Series game to midnight on the final day of the winter meetings.
Baseball already has a myriad of deadlines – including establishment of 26-man rosters and the end-of-July trade deadline – and adding another would do the game a world of good.
Even Commissioner Rob Manfred endorsed the concept last week and quickly won support from Boston manager Alex Cora. “The off-season was boring for the business and for the game,” Cora said. “There’s a lot of good players out there. They should be getting ready for this season.”
Echoing the union, which rejected the idea when last proposed in 2019, Boras lambasted the idea, saying it would be a death knell for players.
But perhaps he was more concerned with his own commissions, which might just be on the decline if a deadline suddenly superseded the calendar.
