Article: You Have to Stop Talking About a Winter Deadline for Hot Stove Movement

[Matthew Trueblood]

The 2023-24 MLB offseason has been frustrating, if you've chosen to let it be so. It's been the kind of crisis that can spur major change, if you're the kind of person who embraces dangerous change on a whim. Taking a clearer view, though, it's really just been another episode of Greedy Billionaires Seek More Billions.

Image courtesy of © Kim Klement Neitzel-USA TODAY Sports

It's not your fault that you feel aggrieved and insane at the end of this long, quiet MLB winter. You've been programmed, and much of the programming has been involuntary. The world has slowly become very fast in its processing of everything, and in our rush to banish boredom, we've pulverized pensiveness and obliterated objectivity. The baseball offseason was, within even my relatively short lifetime, as much about the waiting and the quietude and the opportunities for reflection as about moves, but ESPN long ago learned that people flip away from SportsCenter when they tried to put quietude or reflection on TV, so the hot stove became the enormous, insatiable furnace of a runaway train.

We went from a daily news cycle centered around the two issues of the paper to a 24-hour cable news iteration, and then to the instant, constant, moment-to-moment frenzy of the social media age. The internet is in your pocket, and it's buzzing (sometimes literally) at all times. You might have the willpower to go an hour without checking Twitter. You might be modernity's answer to the Stoic sages, able to check it as rarely as every eight hours, or every day, and no more. But you're probably not capable of fighting the temptation to catastrophize when, over as many as 12 check-ins (that could be half a day, but it could be up to a week and a half!), nothing happens. The world has conditioned you to expect transactions. The same way you get anxious and frustrated if your latest Instagram post gets too few likes, you get anxious and frustrated when your team doesn't do something.

Do something. That's the motto of our times. It's too vague to carry any real value, and its urgency is counterproductive, because it leaves no room for intangible progress. It's better than the last generation's watchwords, which were laissez-faire, because those words ignored the real need for change and progress, but we haven't yet come to the right balance. If you needed more evidence of that, listen to the CHGO Cubs podcast literally any day, or listen to Rob Manfred talk to reporters in Florida this week, or search "MLB deadline" on Twitter. The slow progress of this offseason has people so itchy that they have gone beyond wanting their team to do something. Now, even though a great many of these people are too smart to trust Rob Manfred with literally anything, they want the league he operates to do something. They want the players union to do something.

This is madeness. It's indefensibly stupid talk, because any fan engaged enough to feel the real frustration of this winter should be informed enough to know that an offseason deadline would be (paradoxically) both calamitous and fruitless. In any form yet articulated or imagined, it would crater the market for players, but make no material difference beyond that. I am not a protector of players' pocketbooks. I don't think they should make as much money as they do, in a vacuum. Because player salaries aren't the drivers of fan costs or teams' decisions in the modern game, though, this can't be considered in a vacuum. Money taken from players' pockets will only fall back into the owners'. 

In a deadline-constrained free agency, owners would pin players to the wall. There are always more players than teams with whom a player can sign, and teams can fill needs via trades, whereas free agents have no choice other thatn to find someone who wants them. Deadlines spur action, but they don't permit fair dealing between two sides. The leverage would all be with the clubs, and they would abuse that leverage.

Scott Boras is probably not your favorite person right now, but he's fighting the good fight. It is more than bizarre--it is patently absurd, and not a little outrageous--that Blake Snell is in a position of even beginning to entertain having to take a short-term deal this winter, coming off not only a Cy Young Award season, but his second one. Boras certainly takes a unique approach to free agency with his guys, treating them more like items in a department store window--merchandise that will be sold only when the price is met--than like produce that needs to be moved before it spoils. That can be maddening, when the price he sets feels unreasonable, but much more often than not, it's teams who are being unreasonable by refusing to meet what is a relatively fair price. Sometimes, teams do that just to make a point, and that's more damnable than Boras's conduct.

Now that analytically sound executives have taken over the sport (thanks to cost-conscious owners), we're stuck in this state of affairs, unless and until a cap-and-floor system comes into effect in MLB. The players will never agree to an offseason signing or trade deadline. Nor should they. They also won't accept a cap-and-floor concept; I'm less certain that they're right to draw that hard line. On the other hand, owners are unlikely to assent to many forms of cap-and-floor at this point, because they have a great deal of revenue made possible by baseball but which they would not want to count as baseball revenue when it came time to divide the pie.

So, we wait. Want to do something? Vote down measures that subsidize ballparks to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, be it via tax breaks for the team or new taxes on residents of a given community. Refuse to pay the inflated prices owners have gotten in the habit of charging on everything attached to their product--prices leavened not by players' high salaries, but by the fact that fans have not shown any meaningful resistance to that inflation. Demand legislation that makes it much harder for people as rich as MLB owners (and many players) to hold onto huge shares of their money, to dampen the incentive for such avarice and to improve the lives of yourself and your neighbors. 

Just don't advocate an offseason activity deadline, in any form. It's a non-starter, and if it did come to fruition, it would be a disaster. We've seen some versions of offseason deadlines before. They were accelerators for owners' efforts to collude against the plaowners' efforts to colludeyers, and nothing more. So it would be again. Your life won't be improved by having more moves happen fast. It'll be improved when you shake off your programming and stop wanting that flurry of moves so badly.

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[Bertz]

I think the best idea I've heard came from Meg Rowley.  Not a deadline but a moratorium, let's call it from the end of the winter meetings to the arb deadline.  It probably spurs some movement at the meetings, which is great, but doesn't hurt labor because you can juat pick things back up in January.  I think too just having six weeks where you're not checking Twitter every day for moves would significantly help the average fan's disposition.  Shutting things down for the holidays would also be a big win for all the folks who work in the game and can often be collateral damage to major changes.

[Stratos]

I don't think they should have an offseason deadline because what would happen is many of the signings would simply happen right before the deadline, just like the trade deadline.  However, I find it ridiculous and condescending for the author of the article to suggest that the reason we find this offseason slow and boring is that we've been "programmed" for low attention spans.  Yes many have low attention spans, but it's very clear this offseason is been one of the slowest in memory and still isn't finished by a longshot, and got a late start, and that isn't good for the sport.

I care infinitely more about what's in the best interests of fans than about the interests or salary gains or losses among players vs owners.  I would have no issue whatsoever if players or owners lost hundreds of thousands of dollars every year over some decision that would make the sport better for fans, and I think it's silly that fans back the players when it's against their own interests.  Like the fans who cared more about the players getting a better collective agreement during the lockout than the fact that the lockout was denying them the sport they like to watch as consumers.

Anyways, this offseason ridiculousness is the fault of Boras and Boras alone.  He has obviously created unreasonable demands for his players far above their market value.  Every other significant FA has signed and they didn't get ripped off.  I don't at all  blame teams for being less eager to sign ridiculous FA contracts like Boras has convinced them to do in the past and teams rather putting that money into extending the young stars on their teams that have been severely underpaid forever with virtually no guaranteed contracts until now if they get hurt or flame out a few years down the line.

[BigbadB]

It kinda blows me away that Snell turned down 6 years 150m to pitch every 5 games for the Yankees. Okay, great. He has 2 Cy Young trophies. But, is he not the most flawed Cy Young winner of all time? You need a good 6th and 7th inning guy along with your good 8th and 9th inning guy nearly every time he pitches. And he wants 9 years 270m. Yikes. I'm sensing he may have to seek his fortune in Japan this year.

Being a Boras client doesn't assure the signing team of anything. Kris Bryant was a Boras client. At the end of the day, long contracts and big money should be reserved for the best of the best. Anyone that is not the best of the best probably has no business having Boras as their agent. Because no one wants to pay best of the best contracts for not nearly the best production. 

I don't know if the ugliness that was this offseason will impact future offseasons, but it should. And by that, I mean guys who are not the best of the best can hire the second best agent out there and still do quite well for themselves by having an agent who can more easily work with owners for contracts that the player and the owners can be happy with. 

Boras has set such lofty goals for his not so great clients, that when they settle for way less, I wonder what that does to their overall psyche when they settle for half of what was expected. We always hear about players dogging it once they get their big contract, but how about the guy who didn't get the big contract he wanted? They are still making a ton of money, and you hope you still get 110%, but who wants to be the team that takes that risk?  

I think the world of Bellinger and it would be cool to see him back. But, absolutely no owner in this league thinks he's worth a long term deal at a high cost. Boras, Bellinger and Bellinger's mom are the only ones who think otherwise. The problem here isn't Boras as much as it is Bellinger for choosing Boras to represent him. The high bar that has been created here is hard to walk back. It's February 19th and it doesn't feel like anyone is even negotiating, and that's likely because Boras' is desperate to maintain his power over owners by holding out for the best deal possible, and there isn't willing to meet him even close to their lofty demands.

Love or hate Jed, but I can't hate him for carrying on as if Bellinger won't be here. It's feeling more and more like he won't be. I almost feel like something crazy would need to happen at this point, like Bellinger firing his agent. 

I would hope that players looking for agents in the future are watching this closely.  Maybe these four guys sign deals tomorrow. But maybe they won't be signed at all. If you are the best of the best, by all means, hire Boras. If you aren't, hire the guy who is well respected and gets fair deals for their clients. That fans will love you more for it, and it will be more healthy for the game in general. 

[Transmogrified Tiger]

On 2/18/2024 at 9:42 AM, Matt Trueblood said:

In a deadline-constrained free agency, owners would pin players to the wall. There are always more players than teams with whom a player can sign, and teams can fill needs via trades, whereas free agents have no choice other than to find someone who wants them. Deadlines spur action, but they don't permit fair dealing between two sides. The leverage would all be with the clubs, and they would abuse that leverage.

 

I'm not going to lead the crusade for a signing deadline, but every time it comes up I see this argument that this would shift leverage entirely to teams(and by extension owners), and I'm just not sure if I buy that.  There exists a de facto deadline to the offseason already with the advent of spring training and a new season, and if anything the deals signed that wait the longest are often those less player friendly due to the player/agent misreading their market.  Teams have needs to fill too and they do not view players as perfectly fungible, and the idea that they'll just run with whoever comes to them with a sufficiently low signing point does not strike me as a plausible outcome.

 

We saw this with the insertion of a quasi-deadline with the last CBA negotiation, a flurry of deals that were not particularly team friendly got in under the gun.  Yes, trades are still possible, but the same people who are supposedly going to grind the players out of marginal salary are also the ones who have basically brought the trade market for any player of note who is not a rental to a standstill over the last couple years.  And if they perceive they have additional leverage via FAs not being on the table that part is going to get worse before it gets better.

 

I could see there being pockets of the market where this could have ill effects, relievers and bench bats in particular come to mind, and I can appreciate that those players are numerous even if their contracts are not enormous.  But if being able to drag the collective market's feet is what's making those players more indispensable and marginally increasing the offers they'll get, I'm not sure how certain their market is to begin with and is probably more a product of happenstance than having a long enough runway to wring more money out of teams.  Plus, with a signing deadline teams don't have to hold anything in reserve on the potentially misguided hope they can spend it later, which could drive some salaries higher.  If Bellinger ends up signing for like 4/100 because no one but the Cubs is willing to go there at this point in the offseason, you don't think there's a couple GMs that would look at that deal and wish they could've signed him for more than that before making their own moves, if only Boras had been willing to consider it (looking at you, Farhan Zaidi)?