Marco's Baseball Blog-O-Roonie 2018: Mutinous Mutterings of the Millionaires

MARCO'S BASEBALL BLOG-O-ROONIE 2018: MUTINOUS MUTTERINGS OF THE MILLIONAIRES

Yes, Dear Friends, the millionaires are mad. Those nasty old owners and general managers of the baseball pantheon have refused to acknowledge the sacred right of free agents to demand and receive 7 and 8 year contracts at $20 mil plus a year when they are 31 and all statistical precedents indicate that they will be dead-meat-weight on the teams that sign them for at least the last 3 or 4 years of those bloated deals.

“So what?” say Scott Boras and the other Super Agents who rep these players. “These franchises must pay our players this money for as long as we say they must or else they're guilty of collusion! How dare they think that they and they alone should determine how much money our baseball stars are worth and for how long! Un-American Communist Socialist Cheaters and Capitalist Pigs all at once, that's what they are! Cry Freedom! Cry Boycott! Line up the GMs and shoot them!”

Boycott away, I say to them. Sit out a couple of seasons or go play in Japan for less money. Or you can be smart and realize that baseball execs have finally caught on that overpaying for baseball players is not the way to win or make a profit in baseball these days.

Listen up, Free Agents: Take a one-year “pillow contract” for a lousy $17 million and see if you survive for a year or so on that. Make a contingency contract based on productivity in your fifth year and go out and prove your worth. And remember that for the first 110 years of professional baseball, all players...even Babe Ruth...worked on one-year contracts and had to renegotiate every new season. I've used this example before, but remember Mickey Mantle! He won the triple crown in 1956 (.353/52 homers/130 rbi's) and the next year the league walked him 146 times in 144 games and Mick “only” hit .365/34/94. The Yankees cut his salary.

The Free Agents of today are living in the Garden of Delights and complaining about hay fever.

I don't blame the players and their agents for asking for whatever they think they're worth. I do blame them for not realizing that they really aren't worth as much as they think.

On the other side of this debate, management has miscalculated something very important. About half the teams don't think they have to put a competitive team on the field to make money. Too many teams...especially the small market teams...have figured out that when they don't have a good enough team to win, they should dump their stars for prospects and reload with a five-year plan of zombiehood and high draft choices and try to be good again in 2023 or something. Houston just did this turnaround. 2017 was glorious for them, but ask Houston fans what they thought of 2010-2015. The Cubs executed this nifty little tanking maneuver too and the White Sox are in mid-tank. Florida has just started a maximum tank job. Detroit likewise. Pittsburgh? Are you next?

The miscalculation is that the fans were paying to see their favorite stars. They don't demand a winner every year (except the Yankee fans), just a competitive team. What they don't support is a truly bad team with no stars that limps along for five years or more without even trying to win. And yet these teams expect fans to pay the same high seat prices and the TV networks to give them the same lucrative deals for broadcast rights? Forget it!

If you scratch fifteen teams from contention before the season even starts, the lack of playoff possibilities and the lack of true star players to root for is a definite damper on attendance. So Boras and others are right when they criticize these teams for tanking. It's not going to increase the long term profitability of the game. If it was just one or two teams a year playing for draft position and prospects, that's one thing. But what if fifteen teams decide to tank for five years? When fifteen teams do it, baseball is in trouble.

My tirade is almost complete. What we have now is a frozen market, with everybody waiting for somebody else to blink. It's not collusion on the part of management: it's statistics.

The Brewers knew they had to pay Lorenzo Cain a little more to entice him onto their roster so they ponied up for 5 years. That's a good deal for the oft injured outfielder. J.D. Martinez is not a good bet to be worth a seven-year contract. He's 31, gets hurt every year and is not a good defensive player. He's a hell of a power hitter, probably for the next 5 years. The Red Sox want to pay for the privilege of having him on their team for 5 years. That's the calculation of his worth in their eyes. Quit whining and sign on the dotted line, J.D.! You'll be making $140 million+ and you can go fishing when you're 36.

San Diego and KC are both offering Eric Hosmer at least 7 years and $160 million. How is that collusion? Sign somewhere Eric and stop whining. At the end of the 7 years you'll only be 35 and if you're still productive you can get 3 more good paying years out of somebody.

The one lamentable fact about a frozen market is that the failure of the big stars to make a deal keeps the lesser players from knowing where they'll be next season.

I'm sure the Red Sox would like to have Eduardo Nunez back. He was a valuable multi-positional player for them last season and they need somebody like him. But they don't want to go over the luxury tax threshhold and pay a huge penalty so they have to wait and see what they have to pay Martinez before they know how much they have left to offer soomebody like Nunez. So...welcome to the Free Agent Ice Age, Eduardo!

And you beloved Blogomites out there...here's hoping you're an NBA fan if you get bored waiting to find out who is going to be on your favorite baseball team in 2018.

Until Spring Training starts...!

--Marco