Last week I came across an interesting article -- I disagreed with it all, but it was interesting -- in regard to Major League Baseball's frightfully inactive off-season.
As I write this, pretty much none of the top free agents, in what has admittedly not been exactly the most talent-heavy class, has signed a new contract. A relief pitcher here and there has signed, but the lead dogs in the sled -- outfielder JD Martinez of Arizona, first baseman Eric Hosmer and third baseman Mike Moustakas (and outfielder Lorenzo Cain) of Kansas City, pitchers Yu Darvish, Jake Arrieta and Alex Cobb (and Lance Lynn and a few others) -- are still unsigned, by anyone.
We know that Martinez, a great hitter but deplorable fielder, is looking for a huge contract and at least six years, and the rest are looking for equally unrealistic dollars and years as well. The second-tier free agents are not moving either, regardless of their desires, simply because as the teams who could sign them wait for the top tier players to decide what they will do, the need -- a competing one, we have to note -- is murky.
For example, while Hosmer is looking for a huge contract, Boston had to decide whether his demands, and those of Martinez, would come down before they knew if they would have to look for a first baseman. They eventually decided not to wait and signed back Mitch Moreland, a second-tier first baseman who had played for the Red Sox pretty well last year. Hosmer will have to go elsewhere -- and the diminished market for him will cost him money.
Boston is mainly waiting for Martinez, having made what they see as a reasonable offer to him to be a designated hitter. Martinez is really good at that, and really not good as a fielder. So the only team for which his bat is a plus but his glove not a minus is one with a need at DH, and budget space to accommodate him. That list includes Boston and ... well, Boston. The National League doesn't have a DH, and the rest of the American League teams don't need one. Rather than bid against themselves, Boston is waiting for Martinez's demands to temper back to the reality of the market.
Martinez, of course, is not the one directly making those demands. They are being made by his agent, Scott Boras. Boras has a well-deserved reputation for over-hyping his clients, and in this case, he is the agent for about all the higher-end free agents out there. Since Boras's reputation also includes letting his charges go unsigned well into the off-season, we have now the situation where the rest of the free agents can't get an offer, until the top tier sign and the remaining teams know what they need -- but the guy representing the top tier is taking them far into the winter.
Of course, from the outside this (the dearth of free-agent signing) looks like the exact outcome you would have if the owners had gotten together and decided they were not going to sign anyone past five years and $100 million, or something like that. Of course we could be suspicious, since in the 1980s the owners did exactly that, albeit for fewer years and more 1980s-like dollars.
That is called "collusion", and is specifically banned in the collective bargaining agreement with the players that is now in force. But correlation does not equate to causality, as I think I have explained by giving you a perfectly good reason why none of those players has signed.
That doesn't stop writers, like those in the article I read, from writing a whole piece assuming that because none of the chief players has signed, the owners must be colluding.
I think I have a pretty good argument as to why those players haven't signed yet, and it has everything to do with the agent of many of them. But I could certainly compile an entirely equally-valid argument that I haven't mentioned as yet. That's the "historical context" argument.
It starts with Albert Pujols, about whom I wrote two years back. Pujols signed a ten-year deal with the Angels, and has played six of those seasons. He played a full 2017 season, now reduced to only a DH role, and was 19% below a league-average hitter for close to $30 million.
If LA had gotten the first five years, which weren't bad, from Pujols and his contract was now done after the miserable 2017, they probably would have written last year off and been OK. But Pujols's contract still has four years left, and $114,000,000 still to pay, for which the Angels will likely get next to nothing from their DH that they couldn't get from a good minor-league bat.
The Yankees are facing the same with outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury, with time left and no productivity, after they got the same with the last few years of a silly extension for Alex Rodriguez, and the last few years of a too-long contract for Mark Teixeira, and they appear to have decided to be more chary with those kinds of agreements. Boston is struggling to get a decent year from Hanley Ramirez, and are still paying for a terrible contract for Pablo Sandoval.
There are so many, many examples of the damage of long contracts and so few, few examples of solid productivity through any of them. It is perfectly reasonable that 30 team owners simply looked at recent history and, independent of each other, decided that it made no sense either to tie up too big a percentage of their player salary budgets on one or two players, or to allow another too-long contract for too-little productivity to hamstring their program.
Collusion not only isn't really likely, it wasn't necessary. Logic, pure logic should have dominated the proposed rationales for the slow off-season. Logic, and Scott Boras.
But I guess we'll see, won't we?
Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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