FWIW I read that post as descriptive of the owners’ position, not as endorsing it.
Exactly. I’m not endorsing one side or the other. Don’t care who “wins.” I just don’t see the owners agreeing to free agency at five years, which is gonna drive up salaries, without a hard cap. Now if they agree to that it’s fine by me. Again, I don’t care. But I don’t see that happening.
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It’s not a matter of “winning” in my mind, just hammering out a deal that’s fair to all parties. I’m probably more inclined than many to think that the players fairly deserve more than they got under the previous deal.
As for “guaranteed contracts”, traditionally those were just called “contracts.” The whole point of an agreement is that it guarantees rights and obligations. It blows my mind that the NFL players find themselves in the sport with inherently the highest rate of significant injury and with the shortest average career span and aren’t guaranteed full pay if they get hurt.
You can like the sausage without wanting to see how it’s made.
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Bottom line on the players’ position is that they object to the owners getting smarter. The big change in all of this is guys like Tatis and Wander Franco. Here is Franco, age 20, getting locked up through his prime at a fraction of what Correa is demaning in his first FA at age 27. Correa is livid about Franco’s deal. He frames it as the owners being stingy, but really he’s pissed that the owners have come to realize that paying for past performance is a bad strategy. And to some degree at Franco for accepting the deal in the first place.
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Hammer meet nail.
And that is going to be the real difficult part here, as it always is probably. The two parties involved, have their own divisions within them that probably want different outcomes which benefit them more directly individually. For example, let’s say I’m the Royals or some other small market club. I’ve got Alvarez and Tucker whom you want to be free agents at 5 years. No way I can match what the Yankees and Dodgers want to pay them unless I have a salary cap environment. If most of the big market teams are at their cap, I have a better chance to keep them. Yes, it might mean that Alvarez and Tucker get $200M rather than $300M due to cap restraints, but the benefit for the players as a whole is that their group collective is making more because of the salary floor. There is a part of me that would like to see a cap so that it could potentially limit the mega deals we have been seeing. I have nothing to back it up, but it seems to me the sport would be healthier overall with a cap and a floor to help spread the money more evenly across teams and player salaries. But I’m certainly no financier….
This is why they’re pushing for earlier FA
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Especially when they were getting the past performance at highly depressed costs.
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I’m guessing that the Owners’ and Players’ notion of “fair to all parties” doesn’t necessarily include fans.
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David Glass purchased the Royals in 2000 for $96 million and then sold it 19 years later to John Sherman for $1 billion. Don’t fall for the bullshit.
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They should considering the taxpayers subsidize the land deals they all rely upon.
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Well, that is part of the changes the owners are pushing. They want to pay market rate for current performance rather than highly inflated rates for what a player did years ago. It’s a big risk for the owners, but it’s one they’ve embraced and are willing to take. The MLBPA is made up of grizzled journeymen who want to keep salaries ridiculously high for guys well past the point where their performance merits it.
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Man, you are nothing if not consistent.
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These two things are not that related. Free agent salaries are what they are because of the scarcity created by the six or seven years of club control. With a limited supply of talent available on the market, teams have to pay more.
If you want to normalize free agent salaries, let players hit free agency earlier and increase the free agent talent pool. Paying club control guys based on fWAR won’t do much of anything about it.
ETA: well, really what you’d do is get rid of the draft. But that’s a bigger fight.
They are entirely related. The limited talent pool created by club control and later free agency absolutely means that teams pay more for talent on the FA market than they would if they were simply paying the going performance rate year to year.
I don’ know what fWAR is, but getting to FA sooner and paying players based on their current value is exactly what the owners are wanting to do. The players want clubs to keep paying washed up 38 year olds 10x what they’re paying 25 year old All-Stars. Clubs have wised up to that and the players hate it.
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The owners are not proposing getting players to FA sooner. They’ve proposed keeping players under club control until they’re age 29.5. That would keep many players—and essentially all of the best players, who reach the majors younger than most (Harper, Soto, Acuña, Correa, Franco, the list goes on)—under control far longer than the current system. Some big players would hit FA earlier (e.g. Aaron Judge), but not many, and usually not the market-setters.
fWAR is Fangraphs’ version of WAR. It’s the owners’ proposed formula for determining pre-FA player salaries instead of arbitration. But I don’t think the owners’ proposed dollar-per-fWAR rate has been reported (if they proposed one at all), so we don’t know if it was “market rate” or even close to it.
What bullshit? I didn’t say that small market owners weren’t billionaires many times over. I have no illusions about their worth. My comment was about how they choose to operate. Regardless of how much money/worth they have, it’s their choice to operate the business as they see fit. As fans we can not buy tickets if we don’t like it. The players? What choice do they have? They can strike or stay locked out until they have no choice but to submit. Or the owners could have a change of heart and change how they operate. Either way is fine with me as long as we have baseball.
The players have proposed FA at 29.5 or 5 years, whichever comes first. To my knowledge, the owners have not proposed FA longer than the current 6 years of service, no matter the age. Where are you seeing that the owners are proposing this?
Correa is a perfect example of what the owners see as a problem with the system now. They do not object to paying $30MM/year to 28 year old Correa, but under the current rules they cannot get him without also paying 38-year old Correa $30MM/year, far more than he’s likely to be worth then. In response, teams have started to lock up younger players through their prime years at a much lower rate. Franco is a perfect example. They’ll get 28 year old Franco at what someone will be paying 38 year old Correa. The tradefoff is they’ll be paying 21 year old Franco 10x what they would under club control, but that’s a tradeoff they’re willing to make, and the risk that he’ll not be worth that much at age 28 is one they’re willing to take to not be saddled with an albatross of a contract for very little production (see Pujols, Albert).
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Maybe I’m misunderstanding but that proposal came from the MLBPA. The union wants free agency to come at that age (assuming 5 years of service time) OR after 6 years of service time whichever comes first. And in fact that would allow FA sooner than under the current system.