As we’ve talked about ad nauseum, this season’s free agency period is a total clusterfuck. There are glaring holes in the business of baseball and it’s only getting worse. We’re slowly watching the inner workings of baseball suffer because of owners not wanting to put a competitive team on the field, but also the players trying to game the system by drawing out these contract negotiations.
It’s the first week of pitchers and catchers and we’re still waiting for a few certain superstars to show up and get ready to work. The current system is broken. If a team wants to rebuild and shed payroll, that’s fine. But, if you’re not checking the boxes on a true rebuild and just being cheap, owners should face the consequence of losing licensing and tv money.
This, on the whole, is bad for baseball and both the owners and players are to blame for this offseason nightmare. While the teams will play the “good guy” in this scenario, what I’m referring to is the culture of baseball at the moment. While a team like the White Sox is in an honest to goodness rebuild, a team like the Pirates are tanking on purpose with a $70M payroll and still soaking up the juices from all of that shared owner revenue. Even if there aren’t any asses in seats, the team is making plenty of money through other income streams. I could go on about blackouts, but that’s its own headache.
It’s obvious the next collective bargaining agreement is going to become contentious between owners, players, and agents. Baseball makes money, to the tune of $10B but basketball has leapfrogged the sport by $9B because of their embracement of new technology and allowing the players to be salable personalities. If baseball endures another strike, it could cripple the game permanently.
This inherent cheapness is affecting how people are spending money to further the team resolve in the long run. These elite players thought they were going to get paid, while no one is coming close to the numbers projected at the beginning of the free agent process, which segues into the next obvious elephant in the room: if you’re going to sign with a new team, there needs to be a deadline. The deadline for players to sign with a new organization should be before pitchers and catchers report, say November 1st – February 1st. (Basketball has a hard free agent deadline, too.)
This is ridiculous when there are starting pitchers sitting at home when they should be conditioning with their teams. If you want to sign a Japanese player there’s a deadline, so why not here?
Fans deserve to be excited in the offseason, it’s our time to plot and plan like a mini-GM, but really, there should be a realistic end date so we can make arrangements to buy tickets, grab jerseys, and plan road trips. We are the heart of the money machine and simply robbing it from us for the sake of squabbling over a couple of bucks is stupid. Some projections don’t have any of the elite players signing for another two weeks. Sorry, but when you’ve been playing cat and mouse for almost half a year, that’s unfair.
