Many baseball fans, including myself, have been infuriated by the glacier pace of the MLB “Hot Stove” since the Astros brought the World Series trophy home to Houston.
Teams are gearing up to head to Spring Training in the coming days, yet many of the big free agent fish — Yu Darvish, J.D. Martinez, Jake Arrieta, Eric Hosmer and a plethora of starting-caliber players — remain unsigned.
So what gives? There have been many theories as to why teams have shied away from shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars, which is usually the case, this offseason. For me, there are two particular reasons why many of these big names remain unsigned.
The first being the “qualifying offer.” Players who are set to reach free agency can be tagged by their teams with the qualifying offer, which is a one-year deal with a salary that is determined by the average of the top 125 salaries throughout the league. This offseason, that number was $17.9 million. When a player is offered and rejects the qualifying offer, which every player who received it did this year, any team who signs that player is required to forfeit its top pick in the upcoming draft. Also, the team who makes the qualifying offer and loses the player in free agency receives a compensation pick at the end of the first round.
The system was put in place to discourage teams like the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers from essentially buying championships because they have more money to spend than every other team. However, it has become a detriment to the players who receive the qualifying offer because teams don’t want to lose draft picks. I understand discouraging big-market teams from signing big-time free agents every offseason, but penalizing the player because his former team can’t afford him and wants a compensation pick is hurting the sport.
A small tweak can fix this. They can leave the current system in place and reward the player’s former team with a compensation pick, but dock the team who signs the player its third pick rather than the first. It would still be a penalty but an easier one to swallow.
The second reason is in this new age of analytics being king, teams have realized that more often than not they are paying for past production rather than future production in free agency. A player’s peak typically comes between years five and eight of his career. Yet players aren’t able to reach free agency until they have spent six seasons in the major leagues. Often times, players sign big-money deals for five or six years, but their production dips after the first couple years of their contract.
Major League Baseball would stand to benefit from reducing the years until free agency down from to six to five. Look at the NFL and the NBA. In the NFL, rookies get four-year contracts with first-round picks having a team option for a fifth year. In the NBA, first-round picks get four-year deals but enter restricted free agency after the fourth year if they receive a qualifying offer then hit unrestricted free agency after five years.
Baseball is the only sport that allows teams to keep their players without having to sign them to big-money deals for longer than five years. If MLB reduced that number down to five, more players in their prime would reach free agency, and teams would be a little less scared to throw money their way because they still have several years of great baseball left in them.
The MLB Player’s Association is widely regarded as the most powerful union in any of the major of the sports, and it needs to take a stand in order to allow its players to reap the rewards of their skills. Also, fans want to see a ton of money being thrown around in the offseason. These two tweaks allow that to happen.
