No free agent has ever accepted a qualifying offer, and if all 20 of this winter’s QO players reject their offers as well, FOX Sports’ Ken Rosenthal figures it may inspire changes to the free agent process in the next collective bargaining agreement. (The current CBA expires on December 1, 2016.) The large number of QOs in play, Rosenthal reasons, might actually make some teams with their own qualifying offer players less hesitant to give up draft picks to sign such free agents. The Royals, for instance, would only drop a few spots in the draft order if they gave up their 27th overall pick to sign a QO free agent and then let Alex Gordon leave, thus netting them a supplemental first-rounder back. Here’s some more from around baseball…
- The Yankees generally haven’t made recent free agent splashes unless they had money coming off the books and could recoup surrendered draft picks via their own departing free agents, so Joel Sherman of the New York Post wonders if the Bombers could be fairly quiet this winter, especially when it comes to qualifying offer players. While the draft pick compensation is certainly a concern, I’m not sure the payroll is necessarily an obstacle. As I noted in my Yankees Offseason Outlook piece, the club could sign a major free agent to a backloaded deal, as Carlos Beltran, Mark Teixeira, Alex Rodriguez and C.C. Sabathia will all have their contracts end within the next two years.
- The Orioles have been very active in the Rule 5 draft in recent years, though MASNsports.com’s Roch Kubatko notes that the club may not be able to pick a reliever this year due to Dylan Bundy’s situation. The former top prospect is out of options and recovering from a spate of injuries, so the O’s could ease Bundy back in via a bullpen role. It would therefore be difficult for the club to manage with two pen spots filled with a rehab project and a raw minor league talent.
- New Padres manager Andy Green is profiled by MLB.com’s Corey Brock, detailing Green’s playing career in the Majors and Japan, his move into coaching and his funny negotiation with then-Diamondbacks executive Mike Rizzo after being drafted in 2000.
- Mets fans often clamor for their team to be bigger players in free agency, though Mike Puma of the New York Post notes that the club hasn’t had much success on the open market under Sandy Alderson’s tenure.
- Also from Puma’s piece, he writes that the Mets could be open to re-signing Bartolo Colon if the veteran is willing to pitch as a swingman, and if the team is able to deal Jon Niese to create rotation space.
- ESPN’s Keith Law (Insider-only link) provides his ranking of the offseason’s top 50 free agents, complete with contract valuations based on what Law would feel comfortable giving each player, not what they’ll actually receive in the open market. For instance, Law would only offer Yoenis Cespedes a three-year, $60MM contract due to concerns about his on-base skills and a desire to avoid Cespedes’ decline years — MLBTR’s Tim Dierkes’ Top 50 Free Agents list, which predicts real-world contract values, has Cespedes receiving over twice Law’s number at six years and $140MM.
The free agent rankings by Klaw are always interesting, but what he would pay free agents is of little value. It is not based on the market. If he worked in a front office again and was responsible for recommending contracts for free agents, his team would never sign a free agent. Ever. Hmmm, maybe he is on to something.
Exactly. Almost every team in baseball would want Cespedes at 3/60, so he’s able to negotiate a larger deal that pays for decline years. Law may as well just say that he wants him on a one year deal at $10MM with club options at the same price ad infinitum.
The Yankees backloading a contract is not really the point. They don’t need to backload a deal, and in fact their history is to do an even spread, and in some cases to even frontload the deal slightly as they did with A-Rod. The Yankees under Hal Steinbrenner have a goal to eventually get under the luxury tax threshold, which will be reset again with the next CBA at the end of 2016. The luxury tax threshold is based on the annual average of the deal, not how much money is spent in a given year. Based on that, backloading the deal will make no difference.
While it’s true that a backloaded deal wouldn’t stop them from getting hit by a large tax bill, it would at least help them financially somewhat by keeping this year’s payroll down slightly to partially compensate for a large tax bill. But yeah, they aren’t going to sign multiple, or probably even any, major free agents this year just because they can get them to take relatively little in the first and second years. The tax bill would be astronomical.
I think the talk of dropping only a few spots when you sign a restricted free agent then collect a compensatory pick for someone signing your own such free agent is misleading. For instance last year if the Orioles has signed a qualifying offer player and then went on to collect the pick they got for Nelson Cruz, they would have only “dropped” from 25 to 35. I don’t consider a drop of ten spots to be “just a few,” especially within the first round.
Looking at it this way you’re basically “dropping” by the number of qualifying offer players from teams worse than you who sign with other teams minus the number of teams better than you that sign qualifying offer players. So the Royals would probably “drop” something like 16-17 places in the first round this year if they signed, say, Marco Estrada, and let Gordon walk. That’s a pretty darned big drop.
The idea of having some type of compensation pick is a good one, but there will always be one team that will find loop holes to exploit it and that’s one reason there is no compensation pick for FA losses any longer. Tampa was that team before. They always ended up with multiple comp picks, 2011 class alone they had 10 top 100 from a sad collection of relievers mixed in who qualified.
Maybe if each team could be limited to a single comp pick each it could work.. Maybe 2, otherwise another team, like the Rays would go looking to game the system yet again.
Yeah, so unfair for teams like the Rays and A’s to “intentionally” lose high priced Free Agents. How dare the try to find a “loop-hole” to compete with teams that can spend infinite amount of cash due to Larger than Life TV contracts.
Weird that Puma left out one of Alderson’s biggest FA successes in Marlon Byrd while penalizing him for a similar deal in Mayberry. Byrd gave them 3-4 WAR in 117 games at almost no money and netted them (with John Buck) Vic Black and Herrera via trade.
On the whole, Sandy’s been OK in FA, but the majority of the reason they haven’t ‘had much success’ under Sandy is because of the reason the article was written in the first place: they’re not big players. They’re bargain hunters due to the Wilpons refusing to spend.
Green seems like a good guy, but it remains to be seen what he does with the team come next season.
A backloaded deal really does not help the Yankees much. They are cash rich and their percentage of revenue spent on payroll is at a least a 20 yr low. LT is calculated by AAV though, so each dollar spent will come with a 50% tax until they get under the LT threshold in 2017 or 2018. Again, the Yankees can afford it but Hal wants to do it differently than his Daddy and win with a budget