One day earlier this season, a seasoned big league reliever took stock of his career.

He has spent five years in the majors, handling his share of high-leverage innings and generally performing well. This coming fall, he is set to reach a magic number: six years of major league service, earning him the right of free agency for the first time in his career. He will hit the open market still in his prime, hoping to land a trifecta that he’s so far been denied – the ability to choose his employer, garner a long-term commitment and earn a salary determined by open competition for his services.

He’s not looking forward to it.

“You talk to some of your buddies that are in it and it’s a miserable experience,” the reliever told me recently, “because you don’t know where you’re going to go, no team wants to give you the value you think you’re worth, and you’re like, ‘Am I going to have a job? Where am I going to go? What am I going to do?’”

He is hardly alone. This spring, I’ve spoken to a number of players who are set to reach six years of service by the end of the 2024 season. They range from some of the best players at their positions to journeymen just hanging on, and all were granted anonymity so they could speak freely about approaching such a consequential milestone. For many, it will have taken a decade or more – of minor league seasons, of call-ups and send-downs and other detours – to finally have the ability to exert some control over their careers.

And they have mixed feelings about it.

They watched this past winter as standout players like Cody Bellinger, Blake Snell and others were forced to settle for pillow contracts rather than long-term guarantees. Juan Soto will make his bag this offseason, but after seeing the open market shun a two-time Cy Young winner and a former MVP, players on the verge of free agency can’t help but wonder how rudely it might treat them. Some are well over 30 years old, meaning they’ll reach free agency at ages for which teams are typically loath to pay. They’re hoping for the best, but several say free agency seems something less than it’s cracked up to be.

“Free agency this year was really strange,” said one hitter. “Super strange.”

“For the first time in a while,” said another, “it’s just not as clear what free agency can present to a player.”

“You feel like you’ve reached this part of your career where it’s a thing to celebrate,” said a pitcher, “and then you start to wonder, ‘Well, what am I going to be celebrating? What is this going to look like?’”

To reach this point requires mettle. Players have weathered meager minor league salaries, sudden employer changes and punishing arbitration hearings. Most players never get this far, but the ones who do are told they’ll be rewarded for completing the journey. The closer you get, though, the more a question begins to nag.

What if the promised land sucks?

…

When you’re a rookie, none of this seems real. The glow of the big leagues is intoxicating, and it’s easy to get drunk on the promise of a long and storied major league career. A rookie’s mind is either too overwhelmed to consider a possible business decision six years down the road, or too naïve to treat it as anything other than a fait accompli. You assume you’ll get there because nothing has yet told you it might not happen.

Or, more accurately, that it probably won’t.

“To bank on anything for six years,” said a pitcher, “is crazy.”

By the time players reach five years, they’ve inevitably learned this lesson. Almost all have struggled and been sent down. Some have been taken on and off the 40-man roster. Several have been waived or traded and had to start over, proving themselves to a new team. All the while, they’ve watched as a brutal process of attrition filtered out many of their teammates.

“It’s a long time to get to that free market,” said one player. “A high percentage of guys don’t make it past a year, and most guys don’t make it past three years.”

No one knows this better than a major league reliever. The ones I spoke to for this story all underscored just how fungible their position is. “If you’re down for a couple months, it’s just, ‘All right, see ya.’ We’re expendable,” said a middle reliever. Sometimes, said another, that means pitching “on a night you might be a little banged up” because the other choice may be pitching for nobody. “There’s really no room for error,” said a third. “You have to bring it every day.”

Though starting pitchers and everyday players enjoy a greater measure of certainty, laboring without a guarantee of future employment is kind of the gig. Reaching arbitration after three years provides a welcome bump in pay – “You always hear the saying, ‘Take it to ‘traish,’” said one reliever – but the process can be brutal. An arbitration hearing can amount to an hours-long critique of a player’s value, often in disagreement over just a few hundred thousand dollars. And even though it represents a player’s first real chance to advocate for his own value, much remains out of his control.

Performance in a player’s last pre-arb year carries outsized evaluative weight, locking them into a rough pay scale no matter how much they improve in future years. “I would have liked to have a better platform year,” said one hitter. At least you can control your platform year; there’s little influence to exert over others at your position in your service class. “If you get a guy who takes a bad deal from a team because he doesn’t have a good agent, or he doesn’t have any leverage and he just feels like he needs to take whatever deal gets offered,” said a pitcher, “the whole market gets reset.”

Still, that bad deal is at least guaranteed under the Collective Bargaining Agreement. Going to a hearing can be a matter of principle for players, but as many learned this spring, it exposes them to more risk. Some were alarmed that the Giants could cut an established player like J.D. Davis and pay him just a fraction of the salary he’d just won in a hearing; while negotiated one-year contracts for arbitration eligible players are fully guaranteed under the most recent CBA, that provision does not guarantee contracts reached through a hearing. There are no guarantees, it shows, until they’re written into your contract.

“At any time, the team can be done and decide to non-tender you,” a hitter said. “It still feels like you’re playing every year for your job the following year. It’s an incredible amount of stress. Nobody’s sitting here asking people to feel bad for us. But it makes it hard to let the best version of yourself show up every day when you’re constantly feeling like you’re playing for job security.”

No wonder the game has seen a run of young players agreeing to early-career extensions that are both lucrative and team-friendly. They land life-changing money and no longer have to trek the long and narrowing path to free agency. Though the players union stresses the importance of setting a player’s value on the open market, few who have had to grind just to reach five years begrudge anyone who took an early payday.

“Before approaching this personally, guys turning down big numbers, I flinched at it,” said one hitter. “I always understood the narrative that as a union, as an association, we have to move the needle for the wave of players after us. I get that. But it was hard for me to see early in my career because I felt like so much needed to happen between now and then.”

These players are much closer now, but a lot still could happen to derail them. If they struggle, they could be designated for assignment and released or outrighted to the minors before crossing the six-year threshold. If their team falls out of the playoff picture, a trade becomes more likely, uprooting players and their families in the middle of the year. An injury – an ever-present risk, especially for pitchers – would guarantee them service time but tank their value at the worst possible moment.

Then, even if they survive that final gauntlet to reach the open market, they may get their asses kicked. Players feel strongly that it shouldn’t be that way – “It’s hard to get there, and if you do, you should get paid for it,” one pitcher said – but they’re also pragmatists who know better than to stand on stubborn principle. If the open market isn’t going to treat you well, because you’re too old or because your position is too expendable or because teams just don’t want to spend money that particular winter, then maybe a team-friendly extension in the hand is worth more than a lucrative deal in the free-agent bush.

“It would be silly and a little bit irresponsible,” said one hitter, “to not take that into account.”

…

This isn’t to say free agency has lost all its luster, of course. “Agency” is the key part of the term. Not all free agents will get paid, at least not as much as they’d hope, but all of them will get to choose.

For so long, players don’t have that luxury. In what other profession can someone go a decade or more without having any choice about where to work? The current system has been codified in the CBA for decades – and was even more restrictive before the players organized – so it may be easy to take its effects for granted. But not when you’re on the precipice of finally being able to make decisions about your own career.

“It’s crazy. I’ve had zero say where I’ve been for 14 years,” said one pitcher. “To have the opportunity is probably what players look forward to the most.”

They’d like to get paid, too, either in free agency or earlier in their careers. To that end, the players offer varying solutions, some more attainable than others.

Everyone would like a shorter runway to free agency – “Maybe two years of league minimum and two years of arb,” said one hitter – although the players as a whole might not like the concessions the owners would demand to secure such an overhaul. Those who have been closer to the bargaining process know that. “Everybody would love to get to free agency sooner,” said a hitter who says he keeps up with the union’s efforts. “Is it realistic? I don’t know.”

The latest CBA did do more to funnel money to pre-arbitration players, raising the minimum salary and establishing a bonus pool to be distributed among top performers. One pitcher noted most of the players receiving that money are the uber-talents who are already likely to be offered lucrative extensions or land large free-agent deals, but others pushed back on such criticism. “More can always be done,” a hitter said. “But I do think the system is pretty good.” Another wouldn’t change a thing, despite having been released at one point in his arbitration years. Reaching six years is supposed to be hard. “The system in place, it’s been there for a while and a lot of guys have gone through it,” he said. “Like everything in the game, you’ve got to earn it.”

One solution that generated discussion amidst the sluggish spring was the idea of a signing deadline. The union has never advocated for such a measure publicly, and Scott Boras, the game’s most powerful player agent, has lambasted it as a giveaway to ownership; it’s perhaps telling that commissioner Rob Manfred was the one to float the idea. Still, with players having watched their colleagues hang on the open market deep into March, their curiosity about the benefits of a deadline hasn’t evaporated.

“That’s the thing I’ve been hearing mostly,” a pitcher said, “and it seems like there’s maybe some traction there.”

Even if a deadline wouldn’t be sound policy – teams can choose to not spend rather than embroil themselves in a bidding war, but free agents can’t realistically take their talents to another professional league – its lingering popularity demonstrates how much the specter of this past winter clouds the minds of players approaching free agency for the first time. They want the right of free agency, but they want it to be worth it. They don’t want to sit at home for months wondering where they’ll play, only to settle for a short-term deal that lands them in the exact same predicament a year later. No one wants to join the Boras Four.

Still, as poorly as those free agent forays went, those players still got to choose their employer. That’s what players covet as much as anything. “You used to hear this all the time as a player, that the goal was free agency,” said one pitcher. He offers an amendment to that, though: “Six years is the goal, but six years while still having more than one team interested in you is the goal.”

That pitcher is a reliever, one who knows that even at his best, he’s likely to live the rest of his career off one-year deals. But if a player is good and lucky and happens to time the market just right, it’s possible to fully grasp that brass ring. Not every free agent cashes in, but some do.

“I imagine if you’re coming off finishing six and having a good year,” said one hitter, “it’d be pretty fuckin’ cool.”

For one awkward beat, there was silence.

Just like always, everyone in the room had offered an opinion. The December 2022 move the Royals were discussing was hardly a blockbuster – right-handed reliever Wyatt Mills to the Red Sox for relief prospect Jacob Wallace – but the process leading up to it was still time-tested and thorough. One by one, members of the Kansas City brain trust chimed in with their thoughts. Then, they turned toward Royals general manager J.J. Picollo.

Three months earlier, with the previous season winding down, the Royals had dismissed longtime GM Dayton Moore and elevated Picollo after years as Moore’s top deputy. Small as it was, the Mills-Wallace deal was to be the first of his administration. He’d been in that room for countless trade discussions and he’d listened as each department in baseball operations weighed in. Except now, the final say was his and his alone.

So long as he remembered. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month, Orioles manager Brandon Hyde stood in the visiting dugout at Chase Field and cast a furtive glance toward the warning track where his players began to warm. “I haven’t seen a baseball thrown today and it’s already 3:15,” he said. Even here, three time zones away from the comfortable climes of Camden Yards, the duties of a big league manager had pulled him in every direction. So many people had popped into his office – front office members, coaches, reporters, players – he’d barely found time to shed his street clothes and don his uniform.

At the helm of the team with the best record in the American League, Hyde is a clear frontrunner to be named AL Manager of the Year, an award for which he was the runner-up last season. His candidacy, then and now, bears many hallmarks of a winner. As the leader of a long-dormant team now in the postseason hunt, he makes for a good narrative. That the Orioles lead baseball’s toughest division, despite a young and inexperienced roster and a mediocre pitching staff, would seem to attest to Hyde’s managerial skill. If he wins, it will be hard to say he doesn’t deserve it.

It will also be almost impossible to say, definitively and concretely, that he does. Read the rest of this entry »

Evan Longoria’s locker is crowded.

Hanging from a rack are t-shirts and shorts, sweat-wicking warmup tops and Diamondbacks jerseys in white, black, red, gray and tan. Shelves and cabinets hold a smattering of personal effects; on the floor sits a three-tiered rack just for his shoes. But among these ballplayer trademarks are footlong white boxes found more often in the closets of baseball fans than in the lockers of the sport’s stars. Inside, they’re filled with baseball cards.

This year at Chase Field, it’s common to glimpse Longoria breezing into the clubhouse, a couple such boxes tucked under an arm. The 37-year-old veteran wants to share the joy of his favorite hobby. “He’s always bringing in cards like, ‘Hey, let’s open them,’” says rookie outfielder Corbin Carroll. Longoria’s teammates often oblige. They’ve unearthed a Gabriel Moreno card and ones featuring Arizona prospects Jordan Lawlar and Deyvison De Los Santos. Carroll has even pulled a couple of his own.

Longoria’s teammates may not know it, but the veteran third baseman is only sharing the scraps. He used to crack open boxes of cards like this more often – and indeed, it’s still fun – but Longoria has fashioned himself into more than just a hobbyist. What started as a pandemic-shutdown pastime has now turned into a serious endeavor. Longoria has inserted himself deep into the card-collecting world, quickly learning its intricacies. At home, he has “thousands and thousands” of cards, he says, many of which are a good deal more valuable than the ones he lugs into the office to show his coworkers.

There’s an autographed Mike Trout card that’s worth a fair amount of money. Longoria also collects Formula 1 racing cards and recently sold a 2021 Lewis Hamilton card that was one of just five of its kind. (One of those same Hamilton cards is currently listed on eBay for $5,000.) He’s also hot after classic cards from baseball’s golden age, both because he’s a fan and because he’s a savvy investor.

While the market for high-priced modern cards has been more volatile – softening last year after two years of skyrocketing investment, per an analysis in Sports Collectors Digest – top-grade classic cards, like sports franchises, steadily gain value.

“If I spent $40,000 on a Lou Gehrig card or a Babe Ruth card or something like that, in 20 years, it’s going to be worth $60,000,” he says. “It’s not going down. It’s like owning the S&P 500.”

All of this started with a different type of collectible. Desperate for something to do while the sport was shuttered in the summer of 2020, Longoria began buying Pokémon cards to open with his two oldest children, now 10 and 8 years old. The hobby caught on with him more than them, however, and now Longoria can’t get enough.

A novice to card collecting, he started by buying packs of baseball cards at Target and Walmart, but that approach never turned up anything special. Card manufacturers rarely sneak the truly valuable stuff into the cheap packs. “It’s like playing a slot machine,” he says. “You put in a hundred bucks and you’re probably going to lose it all.” To catch ‘em all, he learned, you gotta spend. So, he did his research and became more literate. He followed prominent collectors on social media and he watched card breakers on livestreams. He figured out which cards had value, which packs they came in, and how to procure them.

That attention to detail makes him unique among pro athletes who collect. “He gets it,” says Ryan Veres, owner of Burbank Sportscards, a Southern California clearinghouse that sells roughly 4,000 individual cards a day from a stock of 40 million. Most sports stars who collect tend to delegate, Veres has found, but Longoria pops into the shop whenever he’s in town. “A lot of those guys will just have guys buy stuff for them. ‘I don’t know a lot about it. Just buy me cool stuff,’” Veres says. “But he does everything himself. He’ll pound the pavement.”

With nearly $150 million in career earnings, Longoria has the scratch to be a serious collector. (Though don’t expect him to rival the nearly $100 million collection belonging to Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick.) He’ll frequently sell cards through his Instagram profile. The rest he keeps for his kids, in the hopes that they might someday appreciate them. They haven’t yet.

“In the meantime, it’s like a Picasso. You get to look at it, it’s a story. Somebody comes over, ‘Hey, check this out,’” he says. “That, to me, is the exciting part about it.”

It all makes for an amusing image – Longoria, a former Rookie of the Year and three-time Gold Glover, grinning as he plucks a card featuring some prospect who’d be lucky to accomplish half of what he has. “The future of the game is bright,” he says, and the cards serve to connect him to that future as he prepares to become the game’s past. This is Longoria’s 16th season, and it marks the beginning of his career’s final phase. But it’s a phase he entered willingly, signing with Arizona for one year and $4 million to play part-time and live in his offseason home.

He senses the end is near, which is why he’s begun collecting something other than cards. Over the last two seasons, Longoria has made a point of asking opponents to swap jerseys. He’s received personalized uniform tops from Austin Riley and Bobby Witt Jr., trading them one of his own. This year, Bryce Harper inscribed a message on a dirt-covered jersey he’d just pulled off his back. Longoria has also mined his connections to procure game-worn uniforms from athletes in other sports – including Devin Booker, Stephen Curry and even the GOAT himself, Tom Brady.

His collection could be even more robust – think Derek Jeter and David Ortiz – but he lacked the foresight in his early years to curate mementos as he went along. Like an actor absconding with a prop after a long shoot, it took until the end for Longoria to realize he wanted to bring home more than just memories. “I may not have another chance,” he says. He doesn’t want his young Diamondbacks teammates to take their time for granted. Carroll, one of the few players in the Diamondbacks clubhouse with a legitimate chance to surpass Longoria’s on-field exploits, sees the logic.

“His reasoning for it was kind of cool,” Carroll says. “It made me want to start getting some guys that I’ve played with and will play against. I think it’s a cool memento, a living collection of your career.”

The game is hardly done with Longoria yet. For the Diamondbacks, he’s provided cost-effective punch from the right side of the plate, with an 112 wRC+ overall and a 137 mark against left-handers. He’s a veteran presence on a striving and surprising young team, and one of the only men in the room with any postseason experience. The Diamondbacks have a 50% chance at a playoff berth, per FanGraphs’ projections, and they’ll need Longoria’s experience.

He has memories left to make, but in the meantime, there are packs to open. And so, every so often, he plops a box on a clubhouse table and beckons a few teammates. They rip open the packaging and rummage through like they’re kids once more, pondering which players are destined for stardom. And for a moment, time stops.