Jon Heyman just dropped an eye-catching report in the New York Post about MLB agents saying that, contrary to the baseball-wide hopes for a hot and active pre-lockout period, the offers right now are unreasonable.
From his piece:
“It’s ugly,” one agent said.
No offers yet?
“One-year deals … ones they can get out of [if there are no games],” that agent responded.
Some agents are expecting a “mixed bag,” with some teams being aggressive before the Dec. 1 lockout in hopes of finding bargains, and others sitting it out.
One agent predicted there would be only “a couple small signings before the lockout to negate collusion.”
There’s more in the report, with about what you’d expect from the interested parties. This feels like one of those situations where everything being said is nominally true or accurate or fair … but also heavily incentivized in the midst of incredibly high stakes negotiations.
On the one hand, I agree that there are significant risks associated with handing out huge, long-term contracts ahead of a CBA fight that may resolve by fundamentally altering the value of that contract you just handed out. It’s a variation on what I wrote yesterday about trading for contracts like Corey Seager’s. This isn’t quite like 2021, when a salary cap was not plausibly on the table. In this fight, while a salary cap may be unlikely in the end, it’s pretty clearly a very real possibility. Getting Freddy Peralta on a six-year, $150 million deal – to pick a random player and a random contract – in a luxury tax environment looks like one thing; getting him on that deal in a $280 million hard cap environment is an entirely different thing.
(That risk goes both ways, too: there are certain players for whom accepting a deal right now might also look like a big mistake, depending on how the CBA shakes out.)
On the other hand, every deal in every situation comes with risk. That doesn’t mean you do no deals. It means you apportion risk, estimate value, and make the best decisions you can when you have the opportunity to make them. You’re telling me there are no front offices and no ownership groups that will be willing to risk a “normal”-looking multi-year deal this month? Knowing that there’s as much chance it could wind up looking like a steal come May as a burden? Get outta here. Of course there will be. And then once a few are interested, it suddenly starts to look like “normal” offseason bidding.
So, then, what of teams being aggressively short-term and low-risk in their offers right now? It’s just front offices trying to see if they can get a bargain. That, too, is “normal”! It is in the owners’ and front offices’ best interest to convey to players and agents that “this time is different,” and they “absolutely cannot justify” long-term, big-dollar offers right now. Of course that’s what they’re saying with their offers at the moment. They’re lowballing, hoping that the pressure of this situation could land them a deal or two.
And from the agents’ perspectives, of course that’s annoying. Of course it feels like collusion. Of course they want to fight back and force some teams to step up much sooner with reasonable offers. Not sure it’ll make much of a difference, but it takes only one or two teams getting aggressive to start a domino effect.
However, if this is the agents trying to fight back and negotiate through the media, who is to say it won’t have the exact opposite effect, scaring some of their clients into thinking no long-term offers of significance are coming in November? So if they want a deal in hand before the lockout, they better take what they can get?
In the end, my gut tells me this is a nothingburger. Legitimate state of affairs and legitimate complaints, perhaps, but not much of a reflection on what will ACTUALLY happen before midnight on December 1, when the lockout begins. There will be activity, and most of it will look like the kinds of deals signed in a “normal” environment, even if most of it comes in that final week.
Hence then, the article about almost no offers coming yet for players in free agency one report indicates that s the case was published today ( ) and is available on Bleacher Nation ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
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