Much has been made of the glacial pace of baseball’s free agent market the last two offseasons. However, three of the five biggest contracts in MLB history were signed in just the past week:
Bryce Harper - 13 years, $330 million
Manny Machado - 10 years, $300 million
Nolan Arenado - 8 years, $260 million.
Clearly, the game’s biggest stars are still getting paid quite well. However, the star players are getting a disproportionately large slice of the pie. The rank-and-file players aren’t getting their fair share.
The Major League minimum salary in 2018 was $545,000 and will increase to $555,000 this season.
The average Major League salary in 2018 was $4.095 million, down from $4.097 million in 2017. It was the first decline since 2004 and only the fourth since record-keeping started 50 years ago, according to the players' association.
The average career of a Major League Baseball player is 5.6 years, according to a 2007 study by the University of Colorado at Boulder. The study also revealed that one in five position players will have only a single-year career.
In other words, these young men have a very small window in which to maximize their earning potential.
Expect the players' association to fight for a higher minimum salary and for players to reach free agency in four or five years, rather than six. The players will also fight to prevent teams from holding premiere players in the minors at the start of the season in order to extend their control of those players.
For example, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is widely viewed as the top prospect in baseball. If the Blue Jays wait until April 12 to purchase his contract, Guerrero will not become a free agent until after the 2025 season. That would effectively give Toronto control of Guerrero for seven seasons, rather than six.
Why?
A year of service takes 172 days in the major leagues. Teams control a player's rights for six full years. All a team needs to do is keep a player in the minor leagues for 15 days and it can get almost an entire extra year of the player's service without exposing him to free agency.
The current Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) incentivizes teams to keep major-league-ready players in the minors, rather than letting them break camp with the big league club. This will surely be revisited by the Players Association in the next collective bargaining negotiations.
However, the current CBA runs through the end of the 2021 season, so the players — who are said to be quite angry about the current state of free agency — will have to live with it for another three years.
What’s obvious is that baseball's compensation system is completely out of whack. It takes 4-6 years for a minor league player to make it to the majors, according to Business Insider.
The average age of a major league player was 28.91 years on opening day last year, and that was down from 29.13 at the start of the previous season.
If a player is drafted out of high school at age 18 and takes six years to reach the majors, he arrives at age 24. If a college player is drafted at age 22 and takes just two years to break in, he also gets there at age 24. Either way, the team controls that player for at least six years, which takes him through age 29.
As more than 100 years of historical evidence shows, the weighted-average OPS of a major league player peaks at age 29 and begins to plummet by age 32. This is why the free agent market for hitters has been so weak the last two offseasons and why it will likely remain so into the future. For the most part, 30-year-olds will no longer get seven or eight-year deals, much less decade-long pacts.
This presents a problem for the players; their earnings are lowest when they are at their youngest and in their prime. Then, when they reach free agency, they’re asking teams to pay them based on past performance, though they are generally entering their decline phase. The owners have become too smart to continue what amounted to an unwise business practice.
The current system clearly benefits the owners. Players should be paid based on merit from Year One. On the other hand, aging, underperforming players shouldn’t be getting paid massive salaries (i.e., Albert Pujols, Jacoby Ellsbury, Miguel Cabrera, Robinson Cano, Jason Heyward, etc.).
The system is broken and it needs to be fixed. The next Collective Bargaining negotiations will present an opportunity to correct the problem and finally make it right.
2 comments:
It would make sense to me to just pay everyone a base salary with incentives. No one can complain then when someone turns in a .220 batting average over 500 PAs with little or no power, no speed and only marginal fielding skills. Pay players based on what they did at the end of the season. Right now they are signing players to contracts and rewarding them based on their past and on what they believe to be their future. Setup baselines that are considered an average player at each position, including all of the criteria for that position, range, arm, fielding%, batting average, obp,slg, etc. If you are a below average player you get paid below average money, if you have a standout season you get rewarded for it. Now the big drawback, to what I stated is that it could make each player act as a one man team, he only gets paid for what he does. If he is asked to sacrifice a runner up, he loses money because "what if" he hit a double? The scenario can play out in a various number of ways where the manager may ask the player to do something for the team which may cost him "personal gains". No system is perfect, but paying a player for what he just did is closer than what we have right now.
There are several areas of concern with the CBA, but the biggest is this fractionalizing of the season for control purposes. There's the April deadline to extend control another season and the late June deadline to prevent inclusion as a Super Two. The solution to both problems, which generate negative PR aplenty, is to declare that playing one non-September game qualifies as a year played and that there will be no Super Two delineation moving forward. Problem One solved.
A second area of concern is the contentious renewing of players at contracts that can seem punitive. For example, offering a contract in hopes of possibly generating a multi-year contract and then renewing at a local figure when the young player doesn't give in. It's good business because future contracts are built on earlier ones as well as by performance. I think MLB should just disqualify all contract negotiations and set all contracts for non-arb rights' players. This will take out the bad feelings that some of these renewals generate that often fester for years, until actual free agency occurs.
Now, as to five versus six years, better pay for minor leaguers, the length of the injury list, trade deadlines, September roster limitations, pre-September roster sizes, playing rules, etc. that will all be part of the new CBA next decade... well there's lots to argue about in the game. Let's try to cut down on the things that are easiest to eliminate ill will over.
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