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Opt-outs are bad for teams because if the player plays well enough to opt out it means he also played well enough to have trade value and him opting out robs his team of the ability to trade him for value.
No team has ever been forced to give a player an opt-out.
But sometimes it’s either that or they don’t sign the player.
Yes, the team has both options.
@gbs Yeah. The opt-out is the cost of doing business for the team. That doesn’t mean the opt-out benefits the team in and of itself. You will never see a situation where a team and a player agree to terms on a contract with no opt-out and then the team says “Oh! But you also have to have a player opt-out halfway through the contract or no deal!”
The interesting thing with opt-outs is in hindsight when ARod opted out of his original deal and when Yoenis Cespedes opted out of his deal with the Mets knowing then what we know now, both teams would have let them walk rather than signing them back to bigger money deals
They do say hindsight is 20-20.
@gbs42 This isn’t even hindsight. No one thought those players opting out benefited their teams at the time and all those people were right.
@Rsox But they would have been better off if those players never had opt-out clauses in the first place. That way they could have either A) Kept the superstar that they had signed for below market value or B) Traded him for a king’s ransom in prospects.
I don’t think the Cards should be worried about spending big on a reliever if it’s just money and not years.
And in Holland’s defense, they signed him right at the start of the season with no spring training and they gave him like a week, maybe two in the minors and called him up when he clearly wasn’t ready. He’s been pretty soild since
I wonder if the league would ever accept a compromise on how commissioner is picked if the players gave them something in return. There could be one representative who votes for the players from every team and one owner who votes for every team. So 60 total votes and they would do runoffs until there are only 2 candidates left. If the vote is split 30/30 then the previous commissioner could be the tiebreaker. The MLBPA would also be responsible for paying half the commissioner’s salary since he would be working for them, too. I’m sure the owners would hate this idea so the players would have to offer them something really good in return for a totally neutral commissioner but if they work something out I could see it possibly being better for the sport as a whole.
Never going to happen. Name one union/business relationship where the union has a vote as to the business management? It’s a ridiculous idea. MLB is a business with contract workers. Those workers would never have a say in who gets hired for the business.
The idea behind it is that the players would also have to make some major sacrifice to get it done. Maybe agree to a hard salary cap or something. The owners could possibly agree to a neutral commissioner if it came along with a hard salary cap of around $210 million or so. Not to mention, as long as the owners always voted together they would still pretty much always get the commissioner they want if the previous commissioner sticks with the owners. That would be a huge win for the owners if it worked out like that. Keep the commissioner you want. Get a hard salary cap. On top of it all, now the players have to pay half of your commissioner’s salary. I mean, I could see the owners going for it. Now that I think about it, it’s probably the players who would turn that down.
Lol I’m posting this is a labor relations subreddit.
It seems like that in the past, the majority of baseball fans have sided with the owners, largely due to seeing one 150 to 350 million dollar contract after another become almost instantly regrettable (over 70% in my estimation). I think the owners know that and are now squeezing every drop of goodwill out of the fans. That’s about to change.
I’m not a big fan of the mega contracts because they handicap the team budget wise in the future and 70% of all mega contracts are busts. (Strasburg & Corbin are great examples) But… I’m definitely siding with the players here.
The owners have had it over on the players since the 1800’s and now it’s time to pay the piper. Just spread out the money and pay the poor (literally) minor leaguers who make less than $2000 per month.
I could agree with that. The issue is that there are still players out there, like Carlos Correa, who have a main goal of increasing the number of those massive long term albatross contracts. I have no issue with players making a lot when they are good but I hate to see franchises hamstrung because they are stuck paying a player a ton of money long term when he isn’t even a good player anymore. In the NBA they have max contracts. I don’t think any team can sign any player for more than 5 years and about $250 million. The players in baseball would never go for that, though. I did some research a few weeks ago. No MLB contract worth over $215 million has ever worked out for any team. You could argue A-Rod’s first $252 million contract with the Texas Rangers was good but it really wasn’t. Texas had to eat a bunch of money just to trade him because it destroyed their payroll so much they stayed in last place. You really have to wonder… If no contract worth over $215 million has ever worked out for the team long term, why do teams keep giving out bigger and longer contracts. I really don’t even blame the players for that. It’s the owners and GM’s who are offering these contracts that are destroying the long term viability. $215 million. That’s it. Every contract larger than that has gone bad for the team.
A contract being good or bad is about more than wins and losses. The teams spend money to make money and that includes marketing the players who play for them. Those long-term, high value contracts can be good for a team even if they never win a pennant.
A-Rod was great in Texas, well worth the money, and that continued in New York. Chan Ho Park’s contract was a problem for the Rangers.
Tell that to Clayton Kershaw and the Dodgers.
There’s plenty of time for it to blow up still, but I don’t think the Phillies are regretting that Harper contract either at $25MM per season.
The Phillies were never going to regret the Harper contract this early into it. It wasn’t the AAV teams were worried about. It was the years.
@lemon: Clayton Kershaw was the $215 million contract I referenced. The $215 million contract the Dodgers gave Kershaw is the largest contract to ever be good for the team. No other contract that large or larger has ever worked out for the franchise that offered it. Bryce Harper’s contract isn’t really even close to halfway over. There is no way to accurately judge that contract until Harper is almost 40 years old. We will have to see how people feel about it then. I am expecting most people will have wanted Harper off the team for years by the time that contract is over.
@gbs: I see why you can say the first A-Rod contract worked out because he did do everything expected of him under that deal. In reality, it didn’t work out at all for the team though. The Texas Rangers agreed to pay A-Rod over $9 million a year for him to go play against them for another team. Whether A-Rod was good or not is a little besides the point in this case just because of the outcome. The Rangers very clearly regretted signing that contract. Any time a team is willing to eat over $9 million a year for several years in a row just to get a player and his remaining salary off their team, it cannot be considered a good contract for the team. Even if you do consider that A-Rod contract good (which the Texas Rangers did not) he would be the only contract larger than Kershaw’s $215 million to even kind of work out. A-Rod’s contract was $252 million total and that was before he opted out of the last 3 years. Absolutely no contract larger than that $252 million has ever come close to being good. I would still consider the A-Rod contract bad though because it hurt the Texas Rangers enough for them to eat a bunch of money just to get rid of him in a partial salary dump. Good contracts don’t turn out like that. If the contract is good, the signing team is happy to keep the player on the roster at that salary. There really has never been a contract larger than Kershaw’s $215 million that didn’t hurt the signing team. Truthfully, Kershaw and Scherzer’s $210 million are the biggest 2 contracts to ever work out but they are actually rare. For every Kershaw or Scherzer, there are a bunch of Davis’, Heyward’s, Pujols’, Cabrera’s, etc. Kershaw’s $215 million was the biggest and it’s even rare for a contract close to that big to work out.
Hammer: The caveat that this evaluation only considers the signing team certainly changes things. While the Rangers received great production from A-Rod while he was in Texas, the team paying him $9M not to play for them certainly wasn’t good.
The seven seasons he did play under that contract – for the Rangers and Yankees – were worth what he was paid. Three MVPs and, all All-Star every season for under $22.7M average per year? That’s tough to beat.
Based off what everyone was getting at the start of the offseason, that Harper contract looks like a steal now.
@Kevin Johnson While your statement is generally true, I’ve been one to always side with the players until now. I think both sides are being ridiculous and stubborn. And while I blame the owners for a lot of the delay tactics, I lost a lot of respect for the players as well. At this point, I doubt baseball will ever be the same in my eyes.
Nobody mentions that a player opting out relieves a team of the latter years of a contract, which tend to be more expensive, sees declining results and riskier.
Opt-outs mitigate risk for the team.
Yes and no. Opting out saves one team but costs another. And some of the biggest contracts (Trout, Harper, Betts) contain no opt-outs. Guys like Castellanos went to a team no one thought he would sign with and immediately opted out first chance he got and J.D. Martinez got a deal with multiple opt-outs probably kmowing he would never use them.
Opting out doesn’t save the team from anything. If they are worried about the player declining they can simply trade him. They don’t need the opt-out to get rid of him. Take Nick Castellanos for instance. Even if the Reds would rather not pay the remainder of his contract, it stands to reason that they could have traded him this offseason for a top 100 prospect or two had he not opted out. And trading a player for prospects will always beat losing him for nothing (which is what will happen now).
In addition to that, a player who opts out most likely had a good year and is looking for a larger contract. If there were no opt out the team gets a player for a few years under is market value. Opt outs are definitely not good for the team.
No one mentions it because the team doesn’t NEED the opt-out to mitigate the risk of the decline years. If the player doesn’t have an opt-out but plays well, the team can, in a sense, opt themselves out of the decline years by trading the player during what would have been his opt-out offseason. Trading a player for prospects will always beat losing him for nothing and the opt-out robs the team of the ability to trade the player. So no, the team does not benefit from the player opting out. Even if his production falls off a cliff in his first season post-opt-out.
It’s childish to place blame solely on the owners. The players reject a salary-cap. the players would reject non-guaranteed contracts, the players sign the mega contracts with no regard as to how that affects the fans and “poor” minor leaguers.
This whole notion that the owners are evil and the players union is a group of virtuous underdogs is exhausting.
This. Look at the NBA you have 6 players with AAV contracts over $40 million per year and two each play for the Nets and Lakers. Anthony Davis is the 3rd highest paid player on the Lakers at $35 million and then the 4th highest paid player makes $9.5 mil and the 5th makes $5 mil. The Nets have 4 total players on their roster with at least $17 million+ salaries, 5th highest paid is under $6 million, that is a significant drop-off. This is a sport with a salary cap, its also a sport with a max contract amount and only has to pay 11 players. The MLBPA will never agree to either a cap or max salary yet everyone is quick to blame owners for being cheap.
I guarantee the players who signed big free agent mega deals, who had to play to earn that when they hit free agency would resent and probably vote down any proposal that pay players mega dollars through arbitration years as it would devalue the contracts they had to wait to get
Rsox: I agree with your sentiment but I don’t think your last statement rings true. Max Scherzer had to play to earn that $210 million contract he got and then he got another contract that pays him over $43 million AAV. He is squarely on the side of trying to get younger players (and all players) paid more. Be it through arbitration or any other avenue.
Remember though that this likely is Scherzer’s last contract and definitely last CBA negotiation
Also remember, now that Scherzer signed his huge contract, he is all for the minor leaguers. He did not mention being concerned before the new contract, in my memory.
@fox: I mentioned that a few weeks ago, too. I find it funny that Scherzer really started pushing hard for younger players salaries only after he signed a contract that pays him over $43 million a year into his 40’s. He didn’t want owners shifting their payroll down to the younger players at all until after we he got his guaranteed old guy money.
“Would Luis Castillo get me Marte, Hancock and Williamson from Seattle or would I have to give up a little more?”
Got a great laugh at out of this proposal!