As frustration bubbles among players regarding the state of free agency this offseason, a significant portion of their ranks are pushing for changes in union leadership. Reports from Evan Drellich and Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic and from Jeff Passan of ESPN indicate that during a call between union reps and union leadership earlier this week, players pushed executive director Tony Clark to replace deputy director Bruce Meyer with Harry Marino.
Marino, the former head of Advocates For Minor Leaguers who temporarily joined the MLBPA, worked alongside Meyer to spearhead negotiations on the minor league collective bargaining agreement. That agreement was hammered out last year when minor leaguers unionized and were formally adopted by the MLBPA. Marino and Meyer have a “strained” relationship from their time working together on that effort, per Drellich and Rosenthal.
Meyer, 62, joined the union in Aug. 2018 after the union had been panned for its negotiations of the 2016-21 MLB collective bargaining agreement, which was widely viewed as a success for the league. He’s spent more than three decades working with unions for other major sports, including players unions in the NFL, NHL and NBA.
Frustration from the players’ side of things stems from a number of topics. The stalled market for top free agents, the erosion of the middle class of free agency, an overall decrease in free-agent spending and the peculiar J.D. Davis release after he’d won an arbitration hearing all contribute to the unrest, per the reports.
Passan notes that support for Marino’s ascension to the No. 2 spot in the union was not unanimous among players but was broadly supported. Detractors question his youth (33 years old) and lack of experience in high-profile negotiations prior to his work with the minor league union. Notably, Marino was not involved on the call, and Clark rebuffed player requests that he be present. Support for Marino isn’t a big surprise, given the rather surprising 38-34 split of the union’s 72 executive board slots first reported by Drellich and Rosenthal (38 big leaguers, 34 minor leaguers).
The lingering presence of many top free agents has been attributed to myriad factors: uncertainty surrounding the television broadcast rights of roughly a third of the league due to the ongoing bankruptcy proceedings at Diamond Sports Group (which owns Bally Sports Network), a slate of typically high-spending clubs running into top-level luxury tax penalties, and the large contingent of Boras Corporation clients atop the free agent market. Rival agents, according to both The Athletic and ESPN, have pushed the idea that Meyer is influenced and ideologically aligned with the Boras Corporation more than other agencies. Meyer called allegations of Boras’ influence on collective bargaining negotiations “absurd” back in 2021 and has continued to push back on them.
The presence of Blake Snell, Cody Bellinger, Jordan Montgomery, Matt Chapman (and to a lesser extent, J.D. Martinez) lingering atop the market into the late stages of spring training has been an oft-cited point throughout the winter. Someone as vocal as Scott Boras is always going to have his share of detractors — both in terms of rival agents and a vocal portion of the MLB fanbase that sees him as bad for the game.
It’s undeniably been a tough offseason for the top clients of the game’s most recognizable agent, though it’s worth pointing out that beyond the “Boras Four,” his agency has negotiated Major League contracts for 13 other free agents (Jung Hoo Lee, Rhys Hoskins, Sean Manaea, Nick Martinez, Kenta Maeda, Erick Fedde and Frankie Montas among them). That’s not presented as a means of defending the series of disappointing outcomes for the top of this year’s class but rather to simply provide context on the offseason as a whole. Both reports suggest that fellow agents are the root of a good bit of the pushback regarding Boras and whatever influence he may or may not have, though it stands to reason that many clients of those rival agencies harbor similar suspicions.
More concerning than the top end of the market stalling out — at least for many players — is the fading middle class of free agency. Surprising as it may be to see players like Bellinger and Snell settling on short-term deals with opt outs, it’s surely every bit as concerning for players to see veterans like Gio Urshela ($1.5MM), Amed Rosario ($1.5MM) and Adam Duvall ($3MM) sign for a relative pittance after struggling to find much of a market.
Also telling is the dwindling number of long-term free agent deals. There were 17 contracts of four or more years doled out in free agency last offseason. In the 2021-22 offseason, 19 such deals were brokered. During the current offseason, there have been 11 deals of four-plus seasons — five of which went to international free agents coming over from the KBO or from NPB. Only six established MLB free agents have signed a four-year deal (or longer) this offseason, and one of those was reliever Wandy Peralta, who took an uncommon opt-out laden structure with a light AAV after apparently not finding a deal more commensurate with market norms for a setup reliever of his caliber.
As far as the Davis situation is concerned, it’s understandable if players are uneasy with the manner in which things transpired. Davis’ agent, Matt Hannaford of ALIGND Sports, has accused the Giants of negotiating in bad faith, making only one offer less than an hour before the deadline for players and teams to exchange figures. Hannaford said he and Davis felt they were left with little choice but to go to a hearing, which they won — only for the Giants to release Davis midway through spring training at a point when only one-sixth of his $6.9MM salary (approximately $1.15M) was guaranteed.
Davis spoke to Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle about his frustrations over the manner and his concern that future instances along these same lines may occur. “If one team does this after going to arbitration then it turns into 70% of teams, what’s to stop teams from just making the lowest possible offer knowing no one will take them to arbitration?” Davis asked rhetorically. “That bothers me for future players in this situation.”
Meyer and his defenders (presumably including Clark) can point to the fact that the Davis situation was actually something that could have happened (and in the past has happened) to any player — and not just the ones who go to an arbitration hearing. Under prior collective bargaining agreements, all arbitration salaries were non-guaranteed unless specifically negotiated otherwise (which was rare). Any player who’d agreed to a one-year deal in arbitration was subject to the same rules: they could be cut for 30 days’ termination pay (roughly one-sixth their salary) with 15 or more days remaining in camp or for 45 days’ termination pay with fewer than 15 days until the season commenced.
That the majority of players were protected from this fate was viewed as a win for the union. Of course, Davis’ concerns that some clubs could just make low-ball offers, push for hearings and then move on from fringe players who best their teams in a hearing is not without merit.
Other perceived wins for players under the leadership of Clark and Meyer were the increase of minimum salary ($570K in 2021; $740K in 2024), the creation of a pre-arbitration bonus pool for young players, a draft lottery designed to cut back on aggressive tanking/rebuilding, and notable increases to the base thresholds for the luxury tax/competitive balance tax ($210MM in 2021; $237MM in 2024). In exchange, the players conceded to the creation of a fourth luxury tier with particularly stiff penalties and the expansion of the playoff field from 10 to 12 teams — among other elements.
Clark has not made a formal declaration on Meyer’s future with the union. Unrest notwithstanding, it’s not yet clear whether any significant changes to union leadership will be made.
“Hello, it’s me. I’m the problem.”-Tony Clark
“I’m the problem”..I cannot remember the movie name, but that was an AWESOME reference.
I don’t listen to Taylor Swift. I’m fairly sure I heard that reference in a movie scene…or maybe not.
Union bosses and owners not going anywhere.
Always amazing and has been for years that it’s always someone else’s fault when it coms to both union and political leaders.
Playing time matters more than money.
Players are just as much to blame.
How are players as much to blame? MLB set a profit revenue in 2023 yet payrolls are down. The problem is, MLB owners won’t set a salary floor based on a percentage of previous years revenue similar to NFL. This enables billionaire owners to collude and pay less to maximize profits. Don’t understands people love of the ultra rich. They’re are always looking to pay people less so they can make more millions/billions.
“How are players”…You’re the same people who give political leaders a complete pass and always blame business are you not?
How are they to blame? They agreed to the CBA. You don’t understand much of anything.
Yes, they agreed to a CBA because the players will strike. Owners cant get richer if their employees aren’t working. Hilarious that is your point and you insult me with not “knowing anything”.
Yeah I’d guess this article misses the point of their complaints by focusing on this offseason. Seems more likely the issues are stemming from the last CBA where it seemed their was more of a focus on the top end than the average player so the players that felt ignored want changes prior to the new negotiations. A voice they see as actually in their corner and not Boras’s or the top 1%.
A Cap and a floor would take care of this
Agreed! Especially if it’s tied to over all MLB revenue year to year. Owners make a consistent profit while players get their fair share.
Budgets are made using projected income – not past income. It’s the 2024 and 2025 income fears driving this reduced spending. The clubs sure of their incomes have record setting payrolls..
In the MLB yes,the NFL can’t do this. The budget is dictated by the years prior revenue. Bet these “fears” will result in another year of record profits for the owners, especially with reduced payroll.
The local media revenue bubble has burst for most teams. Looking at league revenues is irrelevant when half the teams are facing revenue uncertainty. Yes the top 10 will be fine. Many teams will not be fine.
Agreed, revenue sharing in combo with salary floor and cap only way to fix this.
With that being said, I’d love to see how much the owners make after this year after all this crying poor.
I’m shocked that a weak free agent class this winter got less than a very strong free agent class last winter..
Also,, the highest SP deal ever was signed this offseason to an import who hasnt thrown a MLB pitch..
You’d probably be shocked to learn that the ’23 and ’24 FA class earned about the same average value.
‘Average salary is suppose to go up, not plateau. Overall FA spending is down. MLB made record revenues again last season.” – MLB players
Its almost like the quality of FA players are unique variables..
Next years FA class is going to have Soto set a record and shatter the 23-24 FA class spending..
Very much depends how he plays this year. I can easily see him struggling to find those dollars next off-season. Dodgers will be out of the market.
I guarantee expenses and overhead went up to well above the previous record as well. So…..
The Dodgers are never out of the market.
Soto isn’t getting more than Ohtani got this year. Soto isn’t likely to match what the Nationals offered him 2 years ago.
True Wadz. Player salaries are a lot like any other skilled job around.. Equalling those with the most talent are usually paid more than so called general employees, which much of the game is full of, general, averagish mlb talent and probably why nobody has been willing to fork over 200m for a #3-4SP.. Like Montgomery.
What kind of average? The Ohtani contract distorts the mean average too much. Is it also true for the median average?
100%. Using mean instead of median is nearly always deceptive.
Does it though? The current value of that deal was like $46-48 million per year, right? That’s not egregiously higher than the Scherzer/Verlander contracts.
MLBPeeA confirmed
They need to establish a corresponding soft floor similar to the one on the top to push up the salaries of the “middle class” players. No incentive to spend at the bottom.
They should push for a salary cap/floor system like the other sports so they can collectively bargain for team spending. In the current system that allows the team owners to individually decide on spending the players get less as a percent of league revenue. The leagues with salary caps (NHL, NFL, and NBA) pay their players a higher percent of the league than MLB players make because they cant collectively bargain the cap/floor.
Players will never accept a true salary cap. No floor without a cap.
There already is a salary cap.
They should accept the cap because it leads to better pay. Salary cap sports pay their players a higher percent of league revenue because the players can collectively bargain league spending.
No there isn’t. CBT system is not a salary tax system and in no way benefits the players. CBT only serves to help owners and doesn’t allow for minimum spending to be negotiated like a cap system does. The NFL forces teams to use at least 89% of cap space on average.
Yes there is, call it what you want. Luxury tax threshold, whatever they want to brand it to fool the masses….but it is 100% a salary cap because only 1-2 teams ever go over it and even then they are aware of it and try to drop back under it.
You just proved my point. Its not really a cap if you can go over it.
Techincal term is a soft salary cap. Its not a luxury tax threshold like they fooled you with.
No, a hard salary cap by itself only leads to lower salaries for players. That’s the very point of a salary cap, after all, to force the biggest markets to spend less, while the other markets spend about the same amount as they would without the cap. It’s just that every team is able to close to the cap in the NFL due to an incredible amount of revenue sharing that is just not possible in MLB (and the floor you mentioned also helps). It’s only in combination with a salary floor that the players can be helped.
A salary cap is mainly used to improve competitive balance. In that sense, the CBT does indeed serve as a soft salary cap.
The leagues with caps have floors too. That is my point. The leagues with Hard cap/floor models end up spending more as a percent of revenue than the MLB. In addition to a hard cap in the NFL teams are also required to spend at minimum 89% of the cap.
right now the players lost 1.2 $B total last year or 40$MM per team. Only 39% of the revenue went back to the players. That number is decresing each year. Until its back to 50/50 where the union states, there will always be this problem. Have to implement a floor to keep these teams from all tanking and pocketing the money.
That’s the point I was making. The NFL has pay collectively negotiated to be a minimum of 47% of the previous years revenue. They enforce this with a salary cap/floor system where the NFLPA negotiates the cap and floor numbers collectively.
Its a false cap. Its nothing like the other three sports
It’s far more than 1-2 teams. There are 4 tiers of penalty, the last of which is 110% penalty. Mets and Yanks are in that one. There may be others, maybe Dodgers. Perhaps you’re confusing the 4th tier with the lower ones which are more prevalent in exceeding.
No cap is the problem for the fading of the middle class. Teams are throwing all their money to the star players leaving them only enough to spend $3M on the Duvall’s lol
You’re on the wrong site hockey boy, move along. Ahahaha!
Yes, what baseball really needs is the Royals and Athletics adding DH’s for 1/$12m the day before ST so they can get in over a salary ‘floor.’
That’ll fix things!
How much do the other leagues spend on foreign facilities, scouting, and minor league systems? The NFL and NBA have the NCAA as their minor leagues. Baseball is totally different than the other sports.
How does this impact a salary cap? You want another few % of the revenue to go to ownership to cover the foreign facility. Hockey has minor leagues and a large international presence and they spend a higher % of their income on player salaries than baseball.
Possibly, but what would the penalty be for not spending up to the floor? They can’t really use a monetary penalty, as the teams (who have the least amount of money in the first place) would be stuck either paying the penalty or spending more on the payroll to meet that floor….
Hmm, maybe that’s the point. If they’ll be forced to spend extra money either way, they might as well use it to make the team better.
Yeah you pretty much got it. If you can’t spend to the salary floor in the NFL you lose draft picks and get fined. The NFL requires teams to use 89% of the salary cap on average
The Market has spoken.
driven by collusion, its just been 20 years since it was last proven…..still happening right now
The owners, players, agents, tv/streaming companies, and sponsors are all greedy. Then they all get mad at each other’s greed.
Sure, it’s collusion just because a few star players have falsely overpriced themselves as superstars, while a number of free agents on the fringe are frozen out every offseason simply because it’s often cheaper to replace them with prospects that don’t provide much of a drop in performance. [/sarcasm]
Blake Snell just won the cy young. Bellinger finished in the top 10 in MVP votes. Chapman won a Gold Glove.
Snell hasn’t had back to back good seasons. Cody was horrible for multiple years before one good year and Chapman can’t hit.
The reality is, I don’t think anybody objectively felt that adding these guys to their team made them appreciably better. Matt Chapman is a solid pick up for third base. Cody Bellinger is a pretty good hitter with some potential to be a superstar, but just as much potential to disappoint. Blake Snell I think is seen as a guy that can enhance an already-World-Series-contender’s chances, but wasn’t necessarily making the difference for anyone.
On the other hand, when we’re talking about guys, like Machado, Harper, Soto, Ohtani.. these are the types of guys you can build teams around. The expectation of players recently to get 8+ year contracts for one good platform year, or to pay them well into their 40s, goes against common sense. Anybody with common sense can see that the majority of these super contracts turns out terribly, and even for teams that can afford them, how many of them can you honestly expect to have on their books at once? Just think about if it was your money, would you be willing to drastically overpay someone when you know nobody else will come close to what they’re asking for?
If you take out the personal feelings whether they be pro player or pro owner, it’s not that hard to understand. Your gut tells you what a guy’s worth.
You make all of these pro-players point yet assume a FAs value is the most recent season alone…..
Half the league being worried about future revenue combined with most of the other teams well over the CBT is not collutsion. It’s simple market dynamics.
Funny how, whenever markets generate absurd outcomes, it’s always because they’re not really ‘true’ or ‘free’ markets.
Tony Clark is extremely handsome
This is the RSN fiasco boiling over leaving some players unable to obtain the contracts they sought. Organizational strife happens when players are unhappy. Meyer seems to be the fall guy.
YBC – This is it exactly! The rest of the noise is BS.
The agents did a lousy job of anticipating that the money wouldn’t be there this year because of the “RSN fiasco”.
Crying collusion is a joke too. There is so much analytics data now and every team copies what the best teams do, so of course the offers are all similar.
In other words, A decision has been deferred!
Players have never had it better than they have it now.
That’s different than saying they have it as good as it should be.
Need to get rid of Tony clark. Been saying that for years. The players need someone to represent them. They haven’t had legit representation maybe ever. The commissioner should absolutely hate the MLBPA leader if he was doing his job, and the fact that Tony Clark and Manfred are best buddies scratching each others back up in NYC tells you all you need to know.
If the alternative is someone like Fehr or Orza…I’ll pass.
I miss Marvin Miller too
Eating their own. Let’s keep asking the moon for salaries and then act shocked when eventually salaries take up more of the cost sheet than teams are comfortable with.
The RSN drama has affected some team’s books and forced them to cut spending. Or in the Padres case they have no RSN deal. Eventually we get to a point where only a handful of teams can carry multiple nine-figure salaries.
Less money coming in and more going out is not a successful business plan.
What happened to JD Davis needs to be fixed before next season. Thats absolutely ludicrous. Also the DFA merry-go-round where a player can be on 10 different teams in 10 days needs to stop.
The truth is that without the the ability to release Davis at a prorated rate SF likely doesn’t even tender him a contract. Even if you include his buyout his market rate was half the value of arbitration. He was cheap insurance that was utilized until they had Soler and Chapman under contract.
If they had not tendered him a contract, they wouldn’t have had the leverage to lowball Matt Chapman and drive down his contract. See how it all works together?
100%…..once you tender a player in oct/nov you have to have him on the roster and be locked in at either what you agree or what the panel says you are worth if you got to arb.. You can’t cut him 1 week before the start of the season because you are mad you lost.
If Davis had been released near the start of the free agent season rather than the end, he might have had a higher market value. A lot of teams needed 3B help, Maybe the timing of the process just needs to be adjusted?
This. What needs to happen is arbitration contracts remain non-guaranteed right up until the arbitrator rules. Then it’s set in stone. That’s almost all of the off-season. If they want to push the arb ruling into ST, that’s fine too. But once a salary is set, it’s set.
The Giants could’ve done just that with absolutely no penalty if they had non-tendered him. The problem is that they were expecting him to be their 3B at that point, but their plans later changed when Chapman later became affordable to them.
I doubt these things can be fixed before the next CBA, but I agree on the DFA merry-go-round.
“What happened to JD”…The MLBPA has NEVER cared about the JD Davises of the world. All they’ve EVER cared about was whether the Verlanders, Harpers & Scherzers of the world get their bag of life altering money. So, let’s not pretend the MLBPA or Scott Boras is broken up over what happened to J.D.
The MLBPA board is now almost half minor league players. The years when it was completely driven by older, got-my-bag MLB stars are long over.
@ mlb
players are ALL making life altering money
How does one fix the issue in the middle of a CBA? The requirements for termination pay are set and have been agreed to by both parties, To be sure, this hinders the rise of player salaries in general as the calculus of accepting a guaranteed money offer needs to be weighed with the potential for loss of salary. But a player would need to be 1) expendable by the existing team that they would terminate the contract, and 2) have a salary that no other team sees as the market value to take on. It only impacts those players that are getting more than what the market truly sees as reasonable, unless collusion is occurring.
Was Davis used as a bargaining chip to be cast aside when there was no further use for him? Sure looks like it, but that is part if the business.
JD Davis went to Arbitration. Presented his case and the panel agreed with him that he was worth over 6$MM. An independent panel. He’s actually worth 15 $MM+ /Yr. Because in Arb 1 you get roughly just 20% of your value, Arb 2 you get 40% of your value, arb 3 you get 60% of your value. The fact that the panel agreed his arb 3 was worth 6.9 $MM would put his FA value at 12$MM dollar/yr. Also lines up with his forecasted modeled production of 2.2 War next yr. 1 War is worth 9$MM. He won his case, they cut him and now the A’s picked him up for a couple million dollars total.
100% collusion going on. Players in Arbitration are getting no where near their value on the open market.
Arbitration has nothing to do with market value
Which is why being released from an arbitration salary should be a boon to a player, they can get the market value they deserve. Yet when a player was allowed to get a free agent salary, it was less than half of what the arbitrators decided.
I used to work in appraisal appeals, where valuations were being contested. At the heart of every argument was how the market actually would treat the property if it was available. But when Davis was allowed to have the market give offers, we cry foul and collusion, when the simpler answer was the arbitration panel was wrong on his true value and the amount he should be paid..
its 100% tied to performance and free agency value. FG has studied this extensively.
Ok, so the giants initial offer and the arbitrators and this site and FG and 2 other sites, and his agencies team were wrong about his value. gotcha.
Hes projected to put up 2.2 war this year by pretty much every single model out there…which is worth north of 15$MM a year……but his true value according to you in this non collusion free market is just 1$MMish
The stalled market was really mostly about Boras. I am sorry but if you are a guy like Clevinger or Lorenzen and you are still looking for a job then you are the problem not the system. Pretty much all teams in baseball could have used guys like that back in November. If your greed leads to you screwing up this gravy train then that’s your fault.
The only guy who has a case is Bauer. That’s a different situation the rest of these guys messed up.
Clevinger is probably unsigned because of his past connections to DV.. proven or not..
Lorenzen still wants 2 years… which at this point is lol… Montys reported demand was 7 years..
The top of the market after Ohtani and Yamamoto were all heavily flawed Boras guys asking for peak value.
Chapman has ties to domestic violence. He got a contract.
We shouldn’t be at this point that’s the problem. The season starts in about a week. Pitchers can’t just up and jump in a rotation.
I am a big believer in employee rights and that sort of thing. But you need to to get a job. Get on the phone go find people to talk to and get hired.
No market floor is the real problem here
I agree you need both a cap and a floor that’s what makes it all work.
That would help guys like Lorenzen and Clevinger, but a team like the A’s isn’t signing Montgomery or Martinez even if they did need to meet a payroll floor.
Having the payroll floor means bad teams have to spend. What happens in the NBA is a rebuilding team will take on a bad contract and get picks or prospects back for it so the bad team can reach the floor and still tank. And that works because long term that team has a chance to be good.
Cap and a floor. No more super teams. No more teams not spending. All teams should be within a range. You could argue how much that range should be but it shouldn’t be that large.
If we scaled the NFL cap/floor to the MLB’s revenue the cap/floor would be about 200m/180m.
Sounds like a Boras issue. This is just scapegoating.
You have the causality backwards. Boras doesn’t sign players and THEN negotiate the way he does, he signs players BECAUSE they’re the ones who want him to negotiate the way he does. You want to take the best early offer and compromise on your expectations, that’s fine, you just have a different agent.
I don’t think any of the last 3 Boras clients that signed are pleased with how it went down. None of them. If Boras had a history of doing this he wouldn’t have the clients he has. His reputation has taken a huge gigantic hit this offseason.
Snell and Bellinger both rejected very generous offers. Both have had great seasons, but not consistently. Bellinger had one good season after three bad ones, and he wants to be paid like Mookie Betts. Snell had a couple great seasons amid some mediocre ones, and he thinks he’s Clayton Kershaw.
JD Martinez is a very good hitter. But not every team has room on the roster for an older player who can only DH and strikes out a lot.
Perhaps the teams aren’t the problem?
Maybe teams are reluctant to give long-term deals with opt-outs that allow the player to leave if he’s good and stay (and collect his fortune) if he stinks. That’s the work of Scott Boras, not cheap owners.
You think incredibly poorly of major league players, like they’re children. They tell HIM what they want and they hire him knowing exactly that he will take it to the absolute limit.
Well, major league players are acting out of hand. Research the ’94 strike and the fans’ response. When the strike ended, players were met with choruses of boos, offensive signs, and low attendance. The players then had halted the season in a large part due to the fact that they wanted to make their wallets fatter. We as fans today should feel the same. Why should we have sympathy for guys like Snell, Montgomery, JD Martinez, Lorenzen, etc when all they’re doing is trying to milk more obscene amounts of money? MLB players have it good and yet they almost delayed the season again (in 2022 I think) because of greed. The players don’t represent us and they have nothing in common with us anymore.
Yeah nobody has sympathy for a guy who Gera offered 5 million and wants 6. Literally nobody. The system is jacked the salaries are gonna come down soon but that’s a different issue. Take what you can get and play ball. Baseball isn’t going to miss you if you dont.
Exactly
2022 was a lockout by the owners, not a strike by the players.
“You think incredibly poorly of major league players”….”What’s the biggest surprise in my long career as a Major League baseball general manager?..How disconnected, unaware and uninvolved the players were during the free agency process..most of the time they had no idea what the offers were or exactly where we were in the negotiating process” – MLB Network’s long time Major League general manager Dan O’Dowd.
The Diamond Sports fiasco is probably more to blame than anything else for the “erosian of middle class free agency” however, players seeking decade long, hundreds of millions of dollars commitments when they are not worth it doesn’t help
The game has also steered younger.. Post steroids era.. players generally are not as good as they used to be into their mid 30s.. So the market has devalued solid vets of a certain age.
It steered younger because you don’t have to pay the players for 3 years until they hit arb. Then when they hit arb you cut them like JD Davis. Thats the reason these FA are still without a job because its not about being good.
Yet the service time salary system is a necessary evil to allow the small markets to compete every once in a while.
That, and analytics. The marginal production of the middle class free agents over younger controllable players is minimal. Certainly not worth the extra money the players themselves are asking for. The best will always get their money.
Players Union, don’t overreact. It’s been a boomtime of $300M+ contracts the last few years($700M for Ohtani)and this year of RSN flops could be just a short-term bump in the road.
Player pay has gone down in 7-8 years in a row now while MLB revenue has increased over 50% in that same time frame.
MLB player pay needs to be tied to MLB revenue. Its a union and symbiotic relationship…50/50. That’s how its designed. Owners are nothing without the players and visa versa.
That means that 50% of the MLB revenue needs to go to the players. This means, parking, concesions, tv revenue….everything hidden in multiple LLC’s that’s not disclosed in the MLB revenue numbers needs to be revealed with open book and transparency policies. Should include anything that the owners are making a profit off of the players backs, this all needs to be shown in the books.
MLB disclosed 11.8 $B revenue last year. The numbers is way higher than that due to accounting tactics where they hide the revenue in outside LLC’s. But for simplicity purposes we will stick to that 11.8 $B number.
11.8 $B 2023 revenue. That means that 5.9$B or 50% of the revenue should have went back to the players. In 2023 that number was 4.6 $B went to the players or only 39%, and that number is trending down every single year. That means the players lost out on 1.2 $B that the owners pocketed. This is an additional 40$MM per team of revenue that should’ve have been spent on players.
This is disclosed revenue too….the number is way higher. They’ll try to use that money in international player pools etc and not give to MLB players. Owners will try to say benefits are expensive…..that number is another accounting tactic largely inflated falsely. Its like paying sticker price versus invoice prices.
If you are going to have a salary cap like we do now, then you have to have a salary floor too. This number should be floating year to year based on MLB revenue and the average should be tied to 50% going back to players. Or just have a blanket salary cap for every single team like NFL has.
Right now a team would rather go young because they only have to pay them league minimum for 3 yrs before arb……they don’t want the best players they want the cheapest which is why these good players are still on the market. So when a player hits arb they just trade him instead of paying him and rinse repeat.
No team should have 13 years of control of a player, and no MLB team should have 6 years of control of MLB player before they’re a FA. Theres a reason the avg mlb player career is just 3 years. That happens to be when arbitration is. When a player is a Free agent then all of sudden the teams don’t want them because they’re too expensive.
You should make your worth and get paid accordingly. Some guys right now making 700k/yr but worth 35$MM per year, and then when theyre a FA they won’t get paid…they’ll just get f’d around like JD Davis.
Part if not most of that has simply been because we now have the CBT, which has been mostly a good thing for competitive balance. When teams like the Dodgers and Yankees are no longer spending on payroll in proportion to their revenues, of course the overall proportion is also going to drop somewhat.
Meanwhile, the service time salary system is a necessary evil for competitive balance so that the smaller markets can actually compete every once in a while.
Guru: I wish revenue would plummet by 70 or 80 percent. Then maybe they could Reset. The current game is Garbage.
Forgot to add theres even additional revenue in the RSN’s thats not included currently in the mlb revenue. THat numbers should absolutely be included in the revenues ….since it isn’t the players lost out on an even more significant amount,
“I FEEL LIKE I’M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!!!!”
-Me watching discussions of why Matt Chapman didn’t get $175 million covering every subject except for the fact that he sucks
Teams can already release any arbitration-eligible player (or even pre-arb) they want with absolutely no penalty. It’s called a non-tender. There’s just a deadline early in the offseason for it.
However, even with that deadline, if a team bothers to tender a contract to a player in the first place, it means they have plans to either keep or trade the player. Davis was an unusual situation in which the Giants’ plans for 3B changed late in the offseason. So no, it’s never going to be a common tactic.
As for this theoretical tactic (now that it’s been brought up) of purposely lowballing an arbitration salary under the threat of the player being released if he doesn’t accept, it would only work if it was clear the player wouldn’t be able to get more money than the lowball offer in free agency, which would be rare considering that arbitration salaries are designed to usually be significantly below market value in the first place.
Still, I agree that this loophole should be closed ASAP. There are sometimes other cases when plans change after the non-tender deadline, and a more unethically run team could very well attempt the lowball arbitration tactic in rare situations where it might actually work.
Where is it written that player salaries have to go up every year? Do these overpaid athletes have a clue about what it’s like for rest of the American workforce? I am not against the players, or the union, but let’s face it, they are overpaid.
At the same time, if the owners are foolish enough to keep shelling it out, who can blame the players for taking it? Steve Cohen can spend his money as he sees fit, but I think he has a responsibility to think about what he’s doing when he’s paying players like Scherzer and Verlander 43 million a year.
As others have pointed out, this was a weaker free agent class, so they were never going to make as much. The players really need to take a step back and put things in perspective.
They’re not overpaid at all except in some moral sense. In the economic sense, 3 million people a year, and tens of millions on their TV’s, watch the Dodgers, sending $600 or $700m in revenue into the team. They aren’t watching the Dodgers’ owners. They’re watching 26 players. That’s where the money should go. Those 26 men create all that value. Exact same argument for why college football players are now being paid.
The interesting thing is it doesn’t even matter if those players play well or not. If the fans show up and the revenue comes in, the players and the players alone earned it. Same if consumers buy a crappy product. The company that made it still earned that money.
Get rid of the luxury tax and any ideas of a salary cap. Let teams spend how they want. We got the Rays who get good value out of the low budget and are very competitive and then you got the Yankees and Mets that spend like crazy and get nothing. I’d rather teams decide what their budgets are, without some luxury or salary cap.
Seems to work great for all the other sports.
@Seamaholic
Salary caps don’t help anyone but the owners. We have seen across every other sport that salary caps have no impact on competitiveness between teams. All they do is lower player salaries while keeping revenue the same, driving more money to the owners.
Look at the NFL – that has to be the biggest example of why salary caps don’t work
Who’s the guy who commented about collision and a bunch of people on here acted as if he was a crazy conspiracy theorist? Seems that he may have had some merit to his assumptions. There are definitely certain things that need to be addressed, but it most likely won’t happen until this collective bargaining agreement ends, resulting in yet another strike. It’s sad that it ever has to get to this point, but hey MLB is a business, and business owners have to do what they can to make the most money while doing their best to not grant the other sides of their business incentives to really anything, which leads to them fighting back and striking.
Crying collusion is the laziest takeaway imaginable from a nuanced situation
I’m not crying collusion, I said the dude that cried out collusion might have some merit to what he was saying. Big difference. Also just because I said there are things that need to be addressed doesn’t mean I’m crying collusion either. So think what you want to think.
Braves_saints_celts: That’s how it always goes. Anyone who’s intuitive and/or brilliant enough to see through nonsense call b.s. on it gets swarmed by idiots and paid agents and defamed as a tinfoil nut. It’s all part of the silencing process to keep people in line and “troublemakers” out of the way.
I completely agree. It’s not just about baseball stuff either, there are all sorts of things going on and people who call them out are labeled as stupid, ignorant, crazy, etc. then things that turn out to be true, the narrative still remains that they are crazy and aren’t able to fully recover from that. You see it all the time.
Who does # 2 Work for?
Plus, Baseball should handle free agency like the NFL does!!!!
Cripes, most of the Free Agency was resolved in a week!!!
Wouldn’t that be the end of guaranteed contracts?
It would not bring tears to my eyes
I understand the players perspective but the Bora$$ four (Snell, Chapman, Bellinger and Montgomery) have flaws/questions in their game that make a large payoff unlikely. Bellinger had a great year but is it an aberration given he had 3 subpar seasons before that? Also some questions based on his batted ball metrics if last season is sustainable. Chapman being 30 and a top defender at third, but same thing, some questions based on his batted ball metrics. Snell has had two pretty decent seasons in a row, including the Cy Young last year. But at age 31 there are teams that expect him to do as most do and start declining at 33. At 28 teams are more willing to pay for a few seasons of decline when you are getting 5 in the prime. But teams are unwilling to do that when you are only getting two prime seasons. Hence he gets a 2 year deal. Another good season he may opt out but doubt he’ll get that 5 or 6 year deal next off season. Montgomery is the same age as Snell so he is probably facing the same issue.
The fact is that all 4 players are good, and will help the teams they sign with. But Bora$$ is overstating their market and teams have been burned too often signing older free agents to long term deals. Want that life altering free agent deal? Better be exceptional and hit the market at 28 or 29 at the latest.
My proposal for a soft salary cap/floor system:
Floor of 100 million, 50% of a teams salary difference to 100 million will be taken off their competitive balance pay.
So a team salary of 70 million would get 15 million less.
Ceiling starts at 210 million.
Just a 10% tax over that, no other penalty.
20% tax for over 220
30% for over 230
40% for over 240
Etc..
There are more players than jobs. So not every player can make $70 million per year.
It’s just supply and demand.
Perhaps the owners and GM’s are finally realizing that these long term contracts rarely work out for the team. Contracts over 5 years are not wise.
Until both the league and players association can agree that a competitive player floor and cap need to put into place similar to the NFL and NBA these issues will continue.
Right now teams are being rewarded for being bad, it should be the opposite.
Boras holds out for mega deals on a few players that don’t materialize, and some flunky in the players union is supposed to take the fall? Yeah, that makes sense.
Also, the at best mediocre J.D. Davis (0.9 bWAR in 2023) will be making a “relative pittance” of $2,500,000 this season from Oakland, $1,112,903 in termination pay from the Giants, and a possible $1,000,000 in plate appearance incentives.
If you’re counting, that”s a pittance of $4,612,903 for the season, assuming the PA incentives which shouldn’t be too hard on the A’s. Pardon me if my heart doesn’t burst with indignation over this tiny salary for a player who barely beat replacement level last year.
I don’t feel bad for the players at all. They are the most greedy out of the four major sports. They complain about not getting long-term contracts, but if they were honest they would admit those contracts turn out to be a disaster for teams. If any of these players owned a team they wouldn’t give out long-term deals either. Baseball is the only sport without a cap and give me the luxury tax is a cap, because that’s a joke. Everytime the league wants to make a change to better the game, the union has to approve it. The only way to get the change is for the owners to give something up to the player’s. That makes zero sense. I’m not sticking up for the owners either, but I think the players are greedy as hell and don’t care about the health of the game.
Tony Clark worries more about maintaining his beard than at actually doing his job.
This is an easily discernible cause, when the Union is making it out to be more nefarious than it is. The “middle class” is eroding because the players wanted more benefits (specifically pay), thus giving up more control of a player’s early years. Moreover, the top-tier guys asking for, and receiving, astronomical salaries for unprecedented numbers of years pushes the disparity even wider.
This is just as much the players’ fault as the owners. So, ironically they’re mad at the monster they created. I mean, do they honestly expect to have salaries exponentially increase from top to bottom? They’re out of touch if they expect teams to consistently meet their pay demands.
@Yankee Clipper
Sadly, players only see the short-term gain which is max money and assume the party will go on and on forever. The market will pay what it is willing to pay. When once, teams would shell out big money for the name and then the player just collapses off the face of the earth, we have have much smarter contracts where guys get paid for their early productive years but no more of these sweetheart deals when the guy turns 33 and expects a big pay day.
This is not a market in the traditional economic sense, and talking about “the market setting the price” in this context is just gibberish. It’s a completely artificial system in which 30 team owners and 780 players divide up $10b or something each year. The question isn’t what the market will bear, it’s simply how to divide up the pie. If you assume 50% goes to running the business (stadiums, front offices, marketing), that’s about $6m per person, including the owners if divided equally. Which is actually higher, I bet, than the average salary.
Much like politics, the plebes get left out. 2 wolves and a sheep deciding on dinner
Players broadening their horizons. Good for baseball.
Why not just say screw having a salary cap/floor/whatever and just pay players for production. Get a certain amount for Ks the previous year, a certain amount for HRs. Test for steroids like crazy, though.
Good luck getting teams to play like teams. Every man for himself!
Think it’s time for expansion..
Yes. Go big. Add at least 6 teams.
First year they spend in a 2nd division league (call it MLB2). The rest of this division consists of the MLB teams with the worst 6 records from the previous MLB season (relegation). So initially a 12 team 2nd division.
After the 2nd year, relegation is parred down from 6 to 4 teams. And over time, MLB continues to expand this division possibly including it with teams from around the globe and rename it World League Baseball (WBL) as it gets bigger relegation goes back up from 4 to 6 teams.
No luxury tax.
Also, go big before someone else swoops in like what a money bags LIV type org is doing to the PGA.
The easy solution would be to copy the NFL’s salary cap/floor model that requires teams to spend to at least 89% of the salary cap at a minimum. The players would earn more money since the cap would be based on league revenue like the NFL cap is where players are guaranteed at least 47% of league revenue as opposed to the 39% they received last year.
Additionally the competitive balance would likely help bring in more money for the league because more franchises would be competitive.
By the way, the average salary for major league players hit a record $4,907,108 in 2023, according to the AP. That outpaced the previous record by almost a half-million. The numbers for 2024 aren’t final yet, but with some of the big 2024 salaries doled out this year in free agent contracts, the average could go over $5,000,000.
So yeah, fire some flunky in the players union for this sad state of affairs.
Wealthy business owners avoiding long term commitments… but the economy is great!!! Go have a 20 dollar burger and relax
Raymond: I just cooked $20 worth of certified organic 100% grass-fed USA burgers: 12 delicious quarter-pounders. NEVER eat in a restaurant!
The players are idiots. You don’t hear them complaining about Rendon robbing the Angels or Strasburg stealing from Was or Stanton fleecing the Yankees. The list goes on, most players don’t live up to their contracts
Uhh what? 2 way street. You don’ t hear about kyle tucker making league min, or bryce harper making league min when he was worth 50$MM/yr. You also don’t hear about Alex rodriguez securing 2 of those mega contracts and being worth way more. You don’t hear about jose Altuve, mookie betts, freddie freeman, gerrit cole, or Seagor, Trout, Kershaw…etc. These players are worth and performed way more than they got paid from their so called “mega contracts”
Just because you say they’re worth more doesn’t mean they are.
Its clearly been proven that 1 war is worth more than 9$MM/yr in value.
Stanton fleeced the Marlins.
The Marlins fleeced the Yankees.
The players and union have been short sighted in their greed.
By refusing a cap/floor system, the players never locked in a set % of the revenue as players in other sports have done.
MLB also does not want that because they want the large market teams to always have an advantage.
Not a peep from pitchers in regards to the growing serious injury issue and the possibility of this occuring due to speeding up the game via the pitch clock rule(s).
Seriously, has there been one public complaint from a pitcher? Are they afraid to say something fearing a heavy handed backlash from the PA, owners and/or both? Because let’s face it, speeding up the game in anyway possible is about one thing. Making more money.
By speeding things up the powers that be believe it will grow fan base thus revenue. Greed eventually trumps game integrity. This speeding up thing, IMO, also jeopardizes player health. Tread lightly owners, pa and agents.
And it’s stupid rule anyway. Now I spend more time driving to a game then at the game and I cant talk to my distanced family because there are no more pauses. They’re killing baseball pandering to people with the attention span of a goldfish
Have a barbeque and invite your family over.
Games should be 4 hours to even out your commute?
Reliable sources out there reporting game has gotten a WHOLE 20 to 25 minutes faster. Wowwww.
I go to a lot of games at OPACY, this time change is not noticable thus negligible to me when there. In fairness though, I’m an old fart set in his ways. When the MLB PR machine shows stats improving in positive ways because of these changes, I do believe that’s healthy in that it could attract new demographics to the game. But again, not noticable in real game time action thus negligible, IMO. Plus is it being done at the risk of increasing number of serious injuries to pitchers?
Don’t forget, the Padres went on a spending spree the last few years and we’re relatively quiet this off season. Red Sox ownership essentially refused to invest in the team this year while investing in the the PGA. Two possible big free agent spenders were essentially non-existent this winter.
Imagine how dumb the MLBPA leadership must be to get bent over and done without lube by a moron like Rob Manfred.
Chump: Manfred’s merely the figurehead of MLB, running cover for the “owners” (and whichever other agencies actually control the entire sport) while pretending to be battling the union, which is not only in cahoots with MLB and the owners/agencies but is a front for MLB and the owners/agencies. That is, Controlled Opps.
Anyone who thinks that Rob makes even one one-hundredth of his reported salary has not yet figured out jack squat and should really begin sifting the wind for actually-plausible information about how the world really works and who runs it. No one’s going to learn anything True from history textbooks, the “news”, etc.
The reason the years they want are long is because they have to play for 6 years for free compared to their worth. So when they finally hit FA they want to get paid. Now teams aren’t paying them, they know they can rob them for their 1st 6 years, then when they become a FA they cut them like JD Davis.
How is it free? What is Soto making in arbitration? I’m sorry you consider $30 million playing for free
“Fading Middle Class”….boy that sounds familiar. Guess sports aren’t immune.
That was my thought. Since 1978, regardless of which party was in power, we have seen a shrinking middle class in the US. Incomes at the top have grown dramatically while middle class wages shrank. Now, the same seems to be happening in baseball. Most interesting.
MLBPA is circling the wagons and the guns are pointed inward. The backbenchers are looking to take out Boras’s proxy.
What’s to stop the owners from doing what the Giants did to Davis? wanting to keep the players for one.
Davis and his agent did not read the room very well. Knowing that his numbers declined all year and knowing that Chapamn was a free agent and the new Manager is Melvin ( with ties to Chapman) should have clued in Davis and his agent into a possible scenario where he gets screwed.
Davis sucks, do you think he would have been released if he was actually a good player? Oh no they didn’t want to spend 9 million on a guy that hit 248, what are they thinking
Scott Boras has always been the main reason why free agency is the way that it is.
so players are crying to their union because of a stagnant free agent market? Maybe someone should buy them a mirror – look at what Bellinger , Chapman and Snell were orginally asking for and what they signed for
Replace some poor guy in the PA to cover up for Boras. And Rosenthal and Drellich are in it with both feet.
Are we seriously mad that teams are no longer willing to overpay far beyond market value for non generational talents? I don’t care how many billions baseball and the owners make I don’t get to walk into McDonald’s and demand 30/H from a multi billion dollar corporation.
“Exactly!
Who cares if the rich take everything as long as a fellow peon doesn’t get more than me!!!”
Signed,
38% of America
If you think Blake Snell was worth 200M then you’re beyond saving. Oh no Chapman and Bellringer didn’t get massively overpayed how evil of the billionaires why doesn’t Jeff Bezos pay Amazon workers 6 figures a year when he has soo much. Please…
Appreciate you proving my point by missing it.
what happened to JD is pretty bad, that needs to be fixed. Its just wrong how that played out. It is hard to believe that it wasn’t intentional.
Other wise I really don’t care. Players are worth what people are willing to give them for their services. If the Player doesn’t like what people will pay well then I guess they are not playing. The teams are changing the way they evaluate players and the Agents and Free Agents dont’ like that.
Other than the obvious generational players like Ohtani I expect that trend to generally continue.
Lets hope that also means costs for fans reflects the reduced spending in general.
deGrom: I’m not saying true capitalism does not exist in certain industries, but it certainly does not in sports! MLB is a fascist outfit.
poor Millionaires, just can’t ever catch a break
Who knew that corruption amongst a union, Tony Clark (& his lackeys) and Scott Boras was a thing?! As long as Boras gets paid, he does not care…not about the owners, not about the players, not about the union, not about Major League Baseball and most importantly not about the general population (i.e. fans). Shameful.