Brandon Moss and the Players’ Flawed Bargain
“When you’re talking about free agency you’re talking about aging players and the trend of overpaying a player’s aging curves has come to an end across baseball.”
— Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins
“Everybody wants to look up and scream, ‘collusion.’ Everybody wants to look up and scream, ‘This isn’t fair.’ But sooner or later, you have to take responsibility for a system you created for yourself. It’s our fault.”
— Brandon Moss on MLB Network Radio
There have been eight work stoppages in MLB history.
Since the first of those, a strike in 1972 that lasted 13 days and 86 total games in duration, baseball has enjoyed its longest stretch of labor peace. Since the cataclysmic 1994-95 strike, which lasted 232 days and wiped out the World Series for the first time in 90 years, there has been no interruption in play. Revenues have grown exponentially since that strike. By some measures, the sport has never been more popular. No one wants a repeat of 1994-95, when there was no postseason and replacement players showed up for spring training the following February.
But if there were a doomsday-style, labor-unrest clock, it would be inching closer to midnight this winter.
What’s interesting about the comments made by Ross Atkins cited at the top of this post is they suggest the economic system is broken beyond repair for players. The institution of free agency, the right to enter the free market after accruing six years of service time, has changed what it can offer to many players. Clubs, when they can, are ignoring it as a talent-acquisition vehicle. Markets — in the form of multiple bidders — are not developing for many free agents.
What’s interesting about Moss’s comments is that they reflect a player who understands that the system is broken and who is pointing a finger not outwardly but inwardly. When he opened up to MLB Network Radio earlier this week, he offered a candid and sober examination of where the players stand, how they got there, and who they largely have to blame: themselves.
Bill Baer over at NBCSports was kind enough to transcribe and publish the interview. I found the following passage to be of greatest relevance:
“I don’t want to sit here and pretend that I represent all the players. I don’t want to sit here and pretend that this may or may not be a popular opinion. This is just from my perspective as a guy that — my career is almost finished, so I don’t have to deal with this much longer. But the worry is there for me as far as a player now for the players in the future that enough attention is not being paid to the way we allow our system to be ran. I feel like we put more things that are of less value to the forefront. I just feel like we’re starting to have to walk a little bit of a tightrope that we’ve created for ourselves.
“I think that we have given the owners and we have given the people who are very, very business savvy a very good opportunity to take advantage of a system that we have created for ourselves …. What we’ve done is we’ve incentivized owners and we’ve incentivized teams to say, ‘We don’t want to meet that price, it costs us too much to meet that price. It costs us draft picks. It costs us international signing money. It costs us all these different things. We’re going to have to pay a tax if we go over a certain threshold that we’ve set ourselves.’ I just think that by doing all those things, what we have done is we’ve given the owners and teams and franchises an excuse to not pay top free agents. To have a reason to say, ‘No, we don’t want to go after these guys because this is why.’”
I don’t know if Moss is representing a majority opinion with these comments — I suspect he is — but I know a growing number of players are thinking more and more the way Moss is. I have to imagine the majority of players are concerned and that the game’s currently unemployed free agents are particularly anxious. The CAA agency, by way of a statement released Friday, says players are uniting in a “way not seen since 1994.” The CAA’s co-head says players are “outraged.”
The concern has grown since I asked Tony Clark three springs ago if he was worried about his constituency being pinched, losing a percentage of revenue, as owners and front offices figured out how to win more and more efficiently. That was March of 2015. Clark claimed that no player, at that point, had expressed any anxiety about it.
“You’re the first person to ask,” he said.
I think the danger for the players is not so much this offseason, which has raised alarm with regard to the game’s economic model, but where the conversation is headed next offseason.
Next offseason is going to be different. A lot different.
Bryce Harper, Clayton Kershaw, Manny Machado, and Andrew Miller — among others — are going to be paid. But they are also the elite of the elite in a class of free agents historic both for its talent and its relative youth. There is always going to be a demand for the top talent in an industry. Across all industries, the top 1% are gaining a greater share of the available dollars.
The record contracts of next winter could obscure a continuing problem for the MLBPA and the majority of its members: teams are still not going to be incentivized to pay for vast majority of free agents (see: Atkins’ comment). A soft cap will still exist, aging curves will still be very real, most free agents will not be under 30, and most teams will still be trying to stock the majority of their rosters with younger, pre-arbitration talent. Baseball’s economic models will still have the same problems for the vast majority of players. Baseball’s middle class might still be contracting, as I suggest in the piece linked to above.
Moss noted those concerns on MLB Network Radio. Other players, too, might be more willing to dig in for a labor fight, aware of how some of the game’s economic structures are working against them, aware that free agency — which they fought so hard to create and protect — ain’t what it used to be for many players.
It will be interesting to see where the conversation is a year from now. It will interesting to see if this offseason is forgotten or it is something of a tipping point with regard to players’ collective will.
The sport has done a good job of avoiding labor strife, but a growing number of players, like Moss, are questioning the cost of that peace.
A Cleveland native, FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Big Data Baseball. He also contributes to The Athletic Cleveland, and has written for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Sawchik.
The problem is that the owners figured out that overpaying in free agency wasn’t a good idea, but no changes were made to the years of team control and the arbitration system.
The bargain for the players was that they would be underpaid for the first part of their career but make it up with a big free agent contract if they played well. Now the teams just extract all the surplus value up front and move on. The fact that the MLBPA didn’t see this coming (as evidenced by Clark’s quote) even though player valuation was becoming more precise and understood by the general public is pretty damning.
I strongly disagree that free agency, worts and all, isn’t a good idea for teams. It will almost certainly end up bad on the back end but FOs need to assess the present needs exponentially more than the several years down the road. Known quantities are why trading deadline deals’ prices are inflated but still worth it. If you’re close to a playoff spot, it makes no sense just to stand PAT. Good teams can get bad in a hurry.
This doesn’t even apply just to “bubble teams”. Teams that are good need to push their status to elite. John Lester and Ben Zobrist (especially) are going to be albatrosses in their final years of the contracts. Ditto Josh Reddick. Making “rash” overpays like this is just the cost of doing business.
This same mindset of the rational act of assessing the present exponentially over the future applies to the trade deadline. The Astros paid a hefty price for Verlander. The Cubs paid a king’s ransom for Chapman. The Royals needed Cueto to start a do or die Game 5 in the ALDS, etc. etc. etc. Teams need to “overpay” in order to push through. Free agency is a necessary and rational cost.
What you are saying makes sense – judge FA deals on front end and expect losses on the back – but misses the point.
Teams are becoming more and more reluctant to spend on free agents, namely the middle/lower class, because there is too large of a discrepancy b/t FA prices and pre-arb prices. Every club has guys in the minors who they likely believe has a chance at producing 1-2 WAR next year. Why not take a risk on these guys (who would make ~$550k) vs pay ~$9-18M for very similar performance risks? And the free agent will likely want a multi year deal (which is guaranteed). If the prospect fails you are out virtually no money and can simply call up the next prospect or acquire a cheap half year rental at the deadline (see JD Martinez, Jay Bruce, etc).
The high end free agents will continue to get their money. The middle and lower class FAs will struggle. The union should have/needs to address the super cheap pre-arb years.
It will cycle back for the players. Every one of those guys who are cheap now will be young free agents 6 years from now
This is exactly right. Playing cheap younger players means starting their service clock earlier. Means they get to free agency younger on average. Means they are a better proposition for a multi-year free agent contract than they are today on average.
No, not “every one of those guys who are cheap now will be young free agents 6 years from now.” That assumes they last. How many players produce for 1-5 yeas and are done before they reach free agency, and thus never collect? And, of the ones who last, how many have their best years in their early/mid-20s, then wind up moderately paid FA’s? It’s a problem.
while your reasoning sounds solidly argued, keep in mind none of the top 5 ranked free agents have signed yet. and no one has received a contract with a higher AAV of $20M.
Part of me wants to believe that it’s just rational selfishness, but I can’t help but wonder about who has the ears of the veteran team reps of the MLBPA. Obviously, the answer is the agents.
The only people who benefit from a crazy top heavy scheme are the elite players and the agents. If you’re a super agent working off a percentage, why wouldn’t you push for top heavy salaries?
Doing so means that you get the same amount from a Kershaw deal as you would get from 10 or 20 other deals. That’s a lot less work per dollar. You know the total amount of money spent isn’t going to fluctuate a lot, but the distribution can.
I would be very curious to see how many team player reps someone like Scott Boras represents. I can’t seem to find a list of who the team player reps are though.
Part of my distrust of the agents stems from the fact the NFL and NBA both have player agent commission caps, but the MLB somehow escaped the cap. It seems like something that would benefit everyone, so why wouldn’t it be in place?
Excellent points, but the conclusion seems a bit harsh. Free agency as practiced for 40 years always depended heavily on SOME irrational exuberance among buyers, which inflated the market for everyone. It’s easy to say “that can’t last forever.” But when you weigh all that history against the CBA’s 5-year term, is it fair to expect union leadership to predict accurately when that bubble will burst? We don’t even know yet if what we’ve seen this winter predicts the future of free agency.
But I do hope the union is already thinking hard about the next CBA.
The difference is that the Players themselves didn’t want to hire a resource that exposed their flaws. Agents have to take some of this as well for not establishing a realistic market. Smart players extended early, taking a hometown discount in some circumstances, to get some guaranteed money in the bank before their “valuation” (flaws, age, defense, regression) were realized.
The bubble popped. Teams are much more inclined to pay for the player they will be over the player they were. Within the existing CBA, agents can get the top 1% paid, but the 1-2 WAR guys are seen as expendable by process of throwing prospects at the wall and seeing what sticks. These guys probably don’t have the luxury of pushing for an extension prior to arbitration and free agency, but I’m sure the majority would push that button now, just so that they know that they’d be under contract through their prime.
The new CBA is going to be driven by the big revenue teams and salaries. It needs to be driven by the guys getting buried in AAA for year to delay their earning potential. There should be no incentive ever to bury a player so you can extend control. Eliminate draft picks for free agents. That’s insane. In theory it works, but that basically incentivizes small market teams to only be token players in FA, and over time, more teams are forced to hold on to their picks as they have taken risks in the past. And for the love of god, the players need to understand that the game is numbers and they need to market and play to the right ones.
The owners have beefed up theirs analytic departments for the last few years. Time for the players union to do the same.
Intuitively the idea that this is useful for them makes sense, but can someone give us some examples of what such a department might do?
For the owners, analytics helps them pick among players in the market and look for the best wins-per-dollar ratio they can find. But all the clubs have more money than any individual player is asking for, and none of them are likely to get two massive deals, so you really need to take the most you can for the first deal. Players don’t join the union until they get an MLB contract, I believe, at which time it’s nearly impossible for them to, say, pick the pre-FA stadium or lineup environment that would maximize what they can show before getting that deal.
The other thing is analytics, as we talk about them, are all about getting an edge on competition. The owners don’t use analytics to maximize their collective earnings, where they barely compete, but their wins, where they really do. The players compete far more as market participants than the owners do, but the union exists for solidarity, not helping individual players beat the others (at least those who are already members) on the market.
So what’s the role of this department for the union?
Reality check?
To find out how much money they’re leaving on the table with every pre-FA contract. That data ought to help their CBA bargaining position generally, arbitration cases, and prevent undermarket signings.
It’s really time for the union to seek new leadership. I know Tony Clark to a degree was just asking for what the players wanted, but if your biggest focus in a new CBA is for things like more room on the bus and chefs in the clubhouse, then something is wrong. It’s Clark’s job as a leader to tell the players that those are lesser concerns and they need to focus their attention elsewhere. It wasn’t hard to see this coming with every team spending more and more on analytics for several years now.
This anti-Tony Clark nonsense is just a Boras/CAA/DisneySports – and for some reason Travis, Craig and nathaniel- nonsense meme.
MLB spending will be up 1-3% over 2017 by opening day 2018. Market value contracts are being offered- and every record for FA contracts and spends is going to get smashed next summer.
Just because an article claims that Tony Clark’s focus is on chefs and buses, does not mean it is true. All union heads primarily concern themselves with monetary compensation.
Neither Tony Clark, nor the MLBPA, nor the represented players need the free agent market to be overpriced. The players don’t somehow get more money if FA’s get paid $20m/WAR- the player 50-50 share of baseball generated revenue is roughly fixed. If the veteran FAs make more, the minor leaguers make less, the staff make less, etc.
You say that the union was primarily concerned with monetary matters, but can you please specify what the monetary wins were for the union in last CBA? Perhaps I missed something but I honestly don’t know what they could have been.
It’s clear the union prioritized quality of life (days off, room on bus, chefs) over money in the recent CBA. There are two items you could perhaps argue:
*Reduced penalties tied to QO free agents* While the draft pick penalties were decreased, they added a penalty that reduced your int’l pool $. Net, I don’t think this moved the needle much. And if it is even a small gain, it once again is something that only benefits the high end FAs since they are the only ones receiving QOs.
*Cap on int’l amateur spending* The union likely thinks that if they further tamp down spending here that it will instead flow to FAs. This is just faulty logic. There is nothing that forces ownership to re-allocate this money instead of simply pocketing the savings.
“Despite what you may have read or heard at any given time, the quote-unquote ‘player share’ is as close to 50-50 as it has been in a long time,” Clark said.
http://www.latimes.com/sports/sportsnow/la-sp-sn-baseball-players-owners-tony-clark-scott-boras-20151203-story.html
Both sides negotiating the CBA pay a ton of attention to this split- to make sure it remains stable.
Readers of Travis & Craig “Boras talking points” series seem to think that the purpose of the CBA is to bump the player’s share up to 51%+, or to go after the MLBAM sales proceeds. Generally, however, a change in the split is a moot point for either side to argue.
And while all readers would prefer MLBAM proceeds to go to players rather than owners, the real parties entitled to compensation are the staff that developed the MLBAM revenue streams.
The exact examples you list are monetary matters that are negotiated in order to make sure that the 50-50% split remains. There are others as well regarding major league minimums, compensation for league events, etc.
There is simply no fact-based reason to campaign against Tony Clark- and the ESPN/fangraphs types who do so are just peddling the Boras/CAA narrative, to the detriment of the players. The players picked Clark via the most democratic avenue that is available to them, it doesn’t help them to simply believe every click-bait piece pushing tired Boras misinformation.
I appreciate the good debate, ThomServo, but I’m not convinced. You named no monetary wins for the union in the last CBA (I suspect b/c there were none).
You seem to be saying that as long as a 50/50 split exists b/t owners/players that is all that matters. I don’t really take issue with this thought, but the problem is that there is *no* rule in place to ensure it. Given that every front office is now very analytically inclined and understands player valuation, the lower and middle tier FAs are starting to receive less. The players union has completely sold out domestic and int’l amatuers, so they are both receiving less money as well.
**So if all amatuers + low/middle tier free agents receive less then how can the split remain 50/50?**
Also, why would Tony Clark not say the 50/50 split remains intact? Do you expect him to tell the media he has weakened the union’s position? To be honest I don’t really trust him any more or less than Travis when it comes to reporting on the 50/50 split. It’s not very easy for the public to accurately assess.
The recent state of the union shows why Marvin Miller is an absolute slam-dunk Hall of Famer.
Happened to be watching Ken Burns’ documentary on Baseball (from the mid-90’s) recently. They had a whole section on the creation of free agency and then later on the collusion in the mid-80’s. They interviewed Miller for huge parts of those and one thing Miller pointed out is that the whole idea of a player not being allowed to be a free agent for 6 years was his idea. It was considered brilliant because it was a compromise with the owners so they wouldn’t have a flood of free agents every year. Seems to me like that decision is now coming back to bite the players in the butt since a huge part of the issues the players are having is the regular influx of cheap young, controllable talent given that teams have finally begun to understand its’ full value.
It is going to be pretty difficult for the players to win any concessions at this point, I believe. They don’t have a lot of chips with which to bargain because they swapped them for things that had zero economic benefit.
Pretty much their only option is a strike, but idk how many have the appetite for that.
Depends if the MLBPA also has great chefs available during strikes, or are they confined to the clubhouse during actual games.
Not true at all.
MLB players- like all extremely valuable employees- have tons to negotiate with ownership. Players create massive amounts of revenue in many ways other than striking, and have dozens of clauses in their contracts on media rights, image rights, community contributions, conduct codes, etc.
Players could simply agree to playing time adjustments that dramatically increase commercial time- or anything else that would dramatically increase TV/ad revenue, and owners would be very interested.
There are dozens of topics to be negotiated- despite the fangraphs narrative that the players and agents are both powerless.
This is an industry that can actually get multiple Ivy league economics graduates to intern. Are we really surprised that this was the end result? The players never stood a chance with how the system is currently constituted.
There is really only one option left and it isn’t fan friendly to say the least.
In retrospect, Tony Clark seems like a clear mistake for the MLBPA. They need a career labor lawyer ala Donald Fehr running the show, not an ex player. Clark, no matter how smart and well liked he may be, just isn’t trained for this sort of thing.
Definitely agree. The owners got Ivy League MBAs, economists and lawyers. The MBLPA opted for someone who, last we heard, was on the verge of completing his bachelor’s.
The MLBPA has plenty of career labor lawyers, as it always has.
Thanks for continuing to write about THE topic of the winter. It is probably not a fun topic, but is of perhaps existential importance to the game.
Unlimited* payrolls helped to separate several teams from everyone else. This is something MLB players have that other sports do not. Through this spending, aligned with some cost controlled stars often selected near the top of drafts, a few teams cemented very big advantages for themselves in the standings. Some other teams also have huge advantages that are less reliant on a big payroll.
This has, so far, benefitted players. But there is a downside – many divisions are not competitive, and teams and fans realize this. The lack of competition and the huge pool of fixed revenue from media rights eliminates the incentive for many teams to spend, other than the best teams spending on players they will rely on in the postseason. The likes of Lance Lynn and Mike Moustakas do not make the cut, especially when they cost draft picks that could yield a star player in the future. A bad team signing everyone this winter would probably still not catch the very best teams.
The habit of some lower revenue teams of collecting cost controlled “average regulars” in trades may be especially misguided when such players may no longer command much on the free agent market. While the R in WAR refers to a free player, if a cheap player is worth a full win or more this fundamentally changes the story.
So, what would make fewer teams sit out the free agent bidding? In the short term, nothing. In the long term, a hard salary cap, and earlier free agency perhaps based on age. This will move players between teams more freely and lead to fewer long-term juggernauts, each of which can diminish the spending of four or five teams.
A hard salary cap may somewhat reduce the bidding on stars, but competitive races will create bidding on everyone who can add a win to a team. The current system was nearly
certain to lead to this point; it is on the players to prioritize competition if they want to change their own wealth distribution.
Wow. The union told players that salary limits were something they’d won, rather than something they accepted as the price of other wins. The owners’ MBAs must have been stunned and trying to hide it during the meeting.
https://sports.yahoo.com/sources-players-teams-digging-protracted-standoff-despite-lorenzo-cains-80-million-deal-060605804.html
A memo sent by the union to players upon the completion of the CBA in 2016 highlights not just the missed opportunity but a view of CBT penalties that multiple executives said simply doesn’t compute. The memo, obtained by Yahoo Sports, emphasizes the victories the union gained in the new agreement and, under the heading “CORE ECONOMICS,” says: “Increased the tax burden for the highest and most habitual CBT offenders.”
I don’t understand how the players could have possibly thought that increasing taxes on teams would increase overall player salaries, or why players would care so much about “parity” that they would be willing to sacrifice significant dollars for it.
Here is a simplified logic for them.
1. Without the CBT, Yankees would outspend other teams to win the WS.
With the CBT, Yankees can no longer do that.
Therefore, other teams have more of a chance and are incentivized to spend more to win.
2. Most players play in non-Yankees.
3. Profit!!
It is not completely unjustifiable, just probably wrong empirically.
Would it have been that difficult for the MLBPA to look at the history of free agency contracts and see that it’s usually the big market teams that spend the most and that it was their job to look for getting the most for the players, not “parity.”
What’s sad was that this agreement was made in 2016, long after sabermetrics had taken hold in front office’s of every team, just after the Royals showed that you can win it all in smaller markets.
There is nothing in the form of evidence to suggest that it is empirically wrong- save for this ESPN/fangraphs/Boras/CAA PR campaign against Tony Clark.
The article by Nathaniel that started this fangraphs series was based on gross revenue from a now-defunct website – there is no empirical evidence that player compensation is anything other than the best it has ever been, growing at a rate (~3%) that is roughly normal.
Only the data can show what sort of parity is needed to maximize overall spend.
A few clubs spending $320m, while clubs 14-30 spend $100m, could reduce overall spending. Overall spending is not maximized in general oligopoly scenarios.
Replace the qualifying offer: The year a player enters free agency, the team signing him must pay the former team an amount equal to the player’s last salary.
E.g., whichever team signs Harper next year owes the Nats 21.5 million.
That gives teams an incentive to pay higher salaries the last year before free agency as well as an advantage in negotiating with the potential free agent.
Wut
I mean I just sit and read baseball articles all day during work hours and I saw this coming so I don’t understand how the people paid to see it didn’t.
Like as if making young players absurdly cheap, and thus more valuable, to owners wasn’t enough they agreed to rules that put spending on FAs directly at odds with acquiring more cheap young players.
This is exactly the heart of the problem. There is no need to care for the greedy panic of those millionaires as long other players are not paid according to the value they really produce, and especially as long the players are dumb enough to insist on this unfair and therefore inefficient system.
Lets say aging curves are the reason. I am a collusion believer but accept aging really is an issue. How do we address this as most players don’t hit FA until they are (ie old$) due to service time manipulation, and their most valuable years are behind them at below market rates.
That is not acceptable for players.
Solution 1. FA for anyone past their age 28 season regardless of service time
Solution 2. Limit guaranteed contracts through a players age 34 season. Additional years beyond 34 are not guaranteed and subject to 10% of balance owed buy out
Players get something, owners get something
A real solution – that’s totally fanciful and will never happen – is some combination of:
(a) a reworking of the entire drafting/service-time control system to something that’s more like an actual free market for labor
(b) a reduction of the territorial ‘zone of control’ blocking provisions that would allow for a team to move to a more economically attractive spot – eg, a team in New Jersey and perhaps
(c) more revenue sharing on TV deals, on the basis that you don’t have a product without an opponent, who should thus share in the economics. (This is obviously complicated by the fact that the content deals are often with RSNs owned at least in part by the teams.)
I think the risk that “everyone will just sign with the Dodgers and Yankees” was not borne out historically in the int’l FA market (eg, Chapman signing with the Reds) and would be at least partially offset by the other 2 provisions.
players get 50% of the revenue- there is no need for FAs to get a certain share moreso than other players.
Contract extensions to player with years remaining are increasing every year- the annual spend on contract extensions is way up. Necessarily, free agent spending in a bad class is down. Player revenue share, however, has not been shown to be down- Boras and others are simply politicking against Clark who has explained that baseball related revenue is split 50-50.
This is such crap. Cain 5-$80; Bruce, Cosart, Chatwood 3-$39M; Morrow, Hunter 2-$20M, and those guys were on minor leagues deals last season. Outside of Addison Reed, has any contract really seemed low? The relievers, if anything, are making unprecedented money.
And rumours have JD Martinez sitting on 5-$125M and Hosmer on $7-140M. What’s wrong with that?
The structure of the luxury tax is a problem because it incentivizes periodic resets. The system would function much more smoothly with just a standard tax rate, say 30% all the time.
Pretty sure Boras started those rumors. No other source has mentioned them and other sources say none of them are close to deals.
That’s not true at all- plenty of news outlets have reported the Martinez and Hosmer offers. Boston Herald, CBS, USA Today, etc.
Echoing ThomServo’s comment, the Padres’ executive chairman said in a radio interview that the team has offered Hosmer a 7-year contract (but didn’t confirm any dollar amount).
Maybe there are some second and third tier free agents who don’t have offers at all, or only offers at a really low AAV and/or 1-year pillow offers. Maybe that situation would clear up with some more aggressive offers from teams after the top names are signed. I could see that being the case with starting pitchers, where a Darvish signing could accelerate the market as teams who don’t get him move on to Plan B and so teams then move on to Arrieta, Lynn, and Cobb and then on down to pitchers like Jaime Garcia and Andrew Cashner.
I could also see the 3B market being really weak and staying that way, because there aren’t many logical landing spots for Moustakas and Frazier.
For a lot of the players toward the top of the market, however, it seems to be situations like Martinez and Hosmer. The players have offers that make sense relative both to predictions before free agency and the rough math of projections, aging curves, and an assumption of free agency pricing around $8 or $9 million per WAR.
We have reported situations like Darvish receiving multiple 5 year offers but wanting 7 years, Lynn and Cobb getting 3 year offers but wanting 4 or 5, etc. If these players and their agents want to negotiate for more, they have every right to do so, but I don’t see it as shocking that teams are hesitant to stretch on years for over-30 pitchers who have each had TJ surgery.
Based on some of the reported asks at points in free agency – Boras talking about $200 million guaranteed for Martinez, Hosmer, and Arrieta, reports of Darvish wanting 7 / $175 million, reports of Lynn wanting 5 / $110 million – these players were somewhere between “really unlikely” and “no chance at all” of getting close to their opening asks. I took these numbers to be “aim high” asks with the idea that agents can also do free agent pricing math and come up with numbers more like the the predictions here or at MLBTR, but they’ll start high and then be willing to negotiate down. With some of this recent talk, however, it may be that agents set up unrealistic expectations for their clients.
Yes, all this wailing and gnashing of teeth is totally premature. The signings we have seen so far are NOT bargains. If we were seeing a bunch of bargain deals being signed, then the complaints would make sense. But it seems like players are just holding out for bigger deals. Heck, maybe the whole thing is orchestrated by Boras who is colluding with all the players he represents to make it look like the owners are colluding, to pressure them to pay out big deals.
It’s not about individual contracts; it’s about total player income relative to total owner/MLB revenue.
Right and as far as I can tell that has held steady at around 50% for many years. The offseason isn’t over, these players will sign, SO… the wailing and gnashing of teeth are at this point premature
CliffH, you are mistaken. Nathaniel Grow wrote about this three years ago:
https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-mlbpa-has-a-problem/
Quoting from the above article: “After peaking at a little more than 56% in 2002, today MLB player salaries account for less than 40% of league revenues, a decline of nearly 33% in just 12 years. As a result, player payroll today accounts for just over 38% of MLB’s total revenues”.
I don’t know if or how this proportion has changed in the three years since, but I suspect it has continued to decline.
And some commenters there challenged Grow’s number for a variety of reasons, including a different study that shows a very different result than Grow’s numbers for the years from 2006 onward – http://www.chroniclet.com/national-news/2016/03/21/AP-study-players-share-of-Major-League-Baseball-revenues-remain-stable-over-past-decade.html
Nathaniel is wrong.
The only source he uses is a defunct website called “BizofBaseball”
Here is the relevant quote from the article:
“Payroll data from Cot’s Contracts and USA Today; MLB league revenue data from The Biz of Baseball.”
And the link:
http://bizofbaseball.com/
His article includes numerous other distortions such as using gross revenue, when the CBA deals with net revenue.
That’s not a distortion every other league uses gross revenue. the fact the CBA uses net revenue is a knock on the player’s union’s foresight if anything.
Remember early in the process when everyone was shocked at the deals a number of relief pitchers were getting?
Per MLB Trade Rumors, the # of guys at each position that have signed guaranteed/major league deals (using some judgment on position for some guys):
1B/DH – 5
2B/3B – 1 (Jose Reyes, assuming he doesn’t play SS)
SS – 2
C – 5
CF – 1 (I think Cain is the only guy that will actually play there regularly)
LF/RF – 6
RP – 32
SP – 13
Gives one a pretty good idea where teams think there is value. . . .
If you think of the season as split between the regular season and postseason, ace pitchers and closer-quality relievers have a far higher role, proportionally, in the post season. The post season is very competitive among the best teams and also full of luck that the best teams try to mitigate, but the regular season is not.
We have seen a robust market for ace starters ( only because there aren’t any on the market) and closer-quality relievers, but few others. This may or may not be related to the reasoning I suggested, but it does is at least a possibility.
One thing I have not seen discussed is how currently performing players are being short changed due to dead money paid to past bad contracts. As a Tiger fan I know Victor Martinez, Jordan Zimmerman and Miguel Cabrera are eating all the money that could be paid to some of the 100+ free agents.
Shorter contracts would be good for the game. Dead money kills fan interest. Past fan favorites turn into franchise anchors. It steals money from the currently performing free agents that would inject excitement into teams.
Players are signed to long term contracts because that’s what it takes to get them. But if you want, say, a max of 5 year contracts, then grant FA earlier.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. Match performance to pay more closely at both ends of careers. Its just as bad when All stars make league minimum.
5 year max contract. Allow anyone who performs at a certain level to simply buy-out half way through their first deal. So let’s say they are on league minimum. They can renegotiate and if they don’t agree to terms, buyout their contract (obv someone would pay for them) and test free agency. Literally just spitballing ideas but even the ideas im making up would be better than whatever they have in place.
The owners would never go for max contract length without max contract dollars.
Granting free agency sooner would be ideal, but parity would really suffer. Small market teams would be very screwed unless revenue sharing also changed.
Squeezing the younger player–with control over service time being critical for top tier players, has depressed the salaries of the older ones. Signing multi-year contracts with players on the wrong side of 30–because they came up at 24, in June, etc. is too risky. But blaming the owners for not ponying up for a 31 year old begs the question–how did the guy get to 31 and not have had a chance to test the waters before.
I’m having a bit of a problem with the whole “the players are getting too small of a share of MLB money” argument.
It strikes me as a bit too simplistic: adding up all the revenue streams the 30 teams have developed and expecting the Players to automatically get a fixed/equal share of the revenues ignores the fact that not all the money comes from Baseball Games and, more importantly, the teams don’t all make the same amount of money and they can’t all afford to keep dishing out ever bigger FA contracts.
Since the money is earned unequally and the Players only share via salaries the only way the Players can share equally in the total pot is if the deep pocket teams spend half or more of their revenues on Salaries. Which would leave the Yankees and Dodgers with, What, $500M Payrolls? And Tampa, Pittsburgh, And Oakland With $100M?
The disparity between the growth in collective player salaries and collective team revenues is due almost exclusively to the hypervaluation of the big market teams’ local TV contracts. So, absent draconian income redistribution in MLB the smaller market teams will keep on running lower payrolls than their big market peers and be forced into regular teardown/rebuild cycles to even Hope to be competitive for a few years each decade.
Trying to cook up ways to force teams to pay more for players will only succeed in pricing more teams out of the FA market. Which is one reason for this “slow” offseason: very few teams can both use the current free agents and afford the contracts they aspire to.
Just look at JD Martinez. How many teams can afford him even at 5/$100M, much less his asking price? 4? 5? And how many of those are already set at the positions he can play? Or how about Moustakas? Arrieta?
If the players want a bigger piece of the pie they first need to convince the big market teams to give more money to the smaller market teams just so they can give it to their players, thereby driving up the price they themselves have to pay.
Good luck with that, mr Clark.
Just about every team in MLB could afford JDM at 5/100. The reasons they don’t want to have primarily to do with cost efficiency and their own internal accounting requirements.
And how many of those actually *need* a one-dimensional bat-only guy? Do
The reason he is locked in a stare-down contest with the BoSox is that his one skill isn’t as rare as it was before the rabitt ball/flyball fad era. When gold Glove Infielders are Launching 20-30hrs a year the pressure to sign long ball specialists is lessened. We saw that Last Year.
There’s no shortage of flyball hitters out there whereas there are shortages of other Commodities. So most contenders are already set at OF/1B/DH and non-contenders have more urgent needs to take care of.
Living wage for minor leaguers. A higher minimum contract (1.5mish) a team salary minimum, and forced 50/50 players to owners revenue.
Not sure those all make sense in practice, but I’d like to see them try.
I can’t even comprehend why anyone would want the players to see less than 50% of the pie.
I love baseball. I spend month(s) salary on fantasy teams. But I would be throughly disappointed if there isn’t a lockout in the near future.
Part of the reason the lockout and various other disagreements existed in the first place is that the owners had no common sense and no reason to exhibit common sense. Shortly after the lockout, that trend continued in some circles, prompting players to continue to believe that there continued to be a lack of financial sanity on the parts of their employers.
Really, what’s happened here is that the owners have forced themselves to be sensible, or else they punish themselves. It’s taken a long time, but here it is, and now the players don’t like it? Like Travis says, next summer is going to be very, very interesting.
I wonder if we will see a larger amount of players signing extensions over the next 12 months, particularly those who are one or two years away from free agency.
There are so many things wrong with the current agreement that it will a couple of strikes to correct. Most importantly is that owners and their front office have embraced ideas such as WAR in determining a player’s overall worth, while players have not, which shows up over and over again. Two that come to my mind are:
1) Arbitration: Teams can get high-value defenders at the peak of their value and pay them peanuts if they don’t also hit a ton of HRs and drive lots of RBIs. That arbitration would value a 3 WAR player with lots of HRs significantly more than a 4 WAR player whose main value is great defense shows that it’s a broken system. Because of this, teams have total leverage in handing out cheap 3-to-7-year extension deals to such players.
2) Eligibility Clock: The current way of determining which in-season callups will get an extra year by callup date is just stupid. It should be determined by value provided in their first X-years. It can be determined by something like WAR over their first 5 years (or at the very least, by games played, with various thresholds held for catchers, other everyday players, starters and relievers). Teams have learned that it’s better to delay callups by a few weeks if that means you get a whole extra year of that player at their peak. Remove this and players may be called up earlier and the best will often hit free agency one year earlier.
Other obvious needed changes include:
3) Remove the cap reset option for large teams. Why would players give the biggest spenders an incentive to reset their tax burden? Just let them spend as much as they like and give the tax to smaller teams, with the provision being that the taxes must be used it on free agents. Smaller markets have learned to be frugal and competitive with their limited budgets so players should want teams that can spend a lot more per additional WAR to do so.
4) Go back to old international free agent agreements: they had worked well for many, many major leaguers. It’s a shame that Ohtani had to settle for what he got.
5) 26-man rosters: Long gone are the days of 4-man rotations putting in 200–360 innings. One extra man per roster will open things up for some borderline free agents to get more time, especially bench players.
6) Cut arbitration years by one: The age curve is a serious concern and too many are hitting free agency near their 30-year age. They should cut it by one and allow clubs to get one player year on a franchise tag, similar to the NFL.
6) Enough with the “Time of Play” concerns. People would rather watch 3.5 hours of intense, interesting games than 2:45 of dullness. It seems to be a purposeful distraction by the MLB.
7) Some revenue sharing: Players should demand a certain percentage of revenue/profits. Even if only a little bit.
The MLBPA would be lucky to get 1–2 of these right now but it seems like the players have been playing checkers while the owners playing chess. The 90s showed that not many fans will not show up to see scrubs. The player have a lot more leverage than they realize.
They need to prepare their players to save for a strike and start to digging their heals. This starts by dumping Clark and get some Ivy Leaguers at the top.
This latest trend of teams not over paying for high delta on the aging curve casts Donald Fehr and Bud Selig in new light. Bud would have paid for paid players to take steroids (essentially he did) to further his revenue sharing crusade. I think its safe to say Donald Fehr realized that performance enhancing substances lengthened careers and altered the traditional aging curve. Is it safe to say that Fehr’s strategy impacted salaries more than Bud’s CBAs and belly button fixation?
This Travis & Craig series of CAA/Boras talking points articles is boring, way overdone, anti-empirical and biased.
More Wilmer Fonts and analysis related to baseball, less needless politicking against the head of the players’ union (in the guise of ‘saving it’).
What a joke that the author is suggesting that Tony Clark hadn’t thought or discussed the matter of free agency compensation.
“Hey Mr. head of the union, are you concerned about reduced pay to your union members, given, ya know, efficiency and other interests and and modern business?”
“No you are the first person to offer that insight.”
Given the realities of today’s world, I’m afraid that scenario is actually quite plausible.
Bravo Thom, extremely well thought out and stated throughout this discussion thread. It’s unfortunate that this site has developed such a leftist slant in recent years and is now often simply a squeaky mouthpiece for labor’s union thugs and lemmings.
I would also enjoy proof of one minor leaguer suffering from starvation or any other real effect from not getting paid a “living wage”. These pathetic talking points about the plight of youngsters freely following their dreams are both laughable and tiresome.
“Bryce Harper, Clayton Kershaw, Manny Machado, and Andrew Miller — among others — are going to be paid.”
Seems to me that if what’s happening to free agents this off-season is the beginning of a real trend, then even these elite players, notwithstanding their greatness and relative youth, won’t get close to the numbers that were being thrown around about them over the last year or so. If no one else is getting $200,000,000, do you really think anyone is giving Harper $350-400 million?
None of these guys are perfect – just think of the injury histories of Harper and Machado – and I just think the new market will affect them too.
Harper and Machado will absolutely get $350-400M, if not more. The union has routinely created rules to maximize the earning potential of the elite. Plus, it’s advantageous for the high payroll teams to consolidate value in fewer players.
Another aspect to be included is the reduction of PEDs in the game. Players are no longer extending their peaks into their early/mid 30s or having career years at age 34.
The aging curve has normalized, which makes young players under team control even that more valuable.