118 Days of Frigid Free Agency
- micah.paul
- Mar 11, 2019
- 2 min read
By Micah Paul
On Oct 27, 2018 the Boston Red Sox won the 114th Major League baseball world series and started the ever-ticking clock that is “free agency”.
In Baseball, the technical beginning of free agency begins 24 hours after the Fall Classic or World Series. Although technically true, it doesn’t work like that in practice. Open “free agency” doesn’t begin until 5 days later and is referred to as the “quiet period”. For 2018, this was Nov 2.
It took 111 days for Manny Machado to make history with his 10 year 300-million-dollar contract with the San Diego Padres. Followed nine short days later by his fellow superstar Bryce Harper, who signed a 13 year 330-million-dollar deal with the Philadelphia Phillies. Both contracts broke records in all professional sports; however, it shouldn’t have taken 118 days. Even today, there remain 40 unsigned free agents looking for teams to play for, which leads to a lot of uncertainty among the player base.
What’s the “why” behind this sudden market change? Some might hypothesize lower income equals smaller wiser contracts. Unfortunately, since income has doubled in comparison to ten years ago this isn’t the case.
Major League Baseball (MLB), with its 30 teams, generated around 9 billion U.S. dollars in total revenue in the 2016 season, almost twice the revenue generated ten years ago, when total revenue was at 5.5 billion U.S. dollars
This discrepancy comes from the modern era of analytics. Analytics (the systematic computational analysis of player data or statistics) today have provided Major League Baseball with the ability to better gauge the talent of a player. In turn, it has also made it easier to say a player is worth less than he might think. This is what has caused contract disputes the last two years. Teams won’t sign players for multiple years out of fear of losing value in the later years of the contract. This led us to today’s frozen free agency season of 2018-2019. A culture and player base change could be a negative consequences to come as a result.
Waiting 118 days for a contract is obscene when you have the potential of Manny Machado or Bryce Harper. Many fellow players went to Twitter and complained how it doesn’t make sense that this is happening. Justin Verlander of the Houston Astros is quoted saying this:
“100 or so free agents left unsigned. System is broken. They blame “rebuilding” but that’s BS. You’re telling me you couldn’t sign Bryce or Manny for 10 years and go from there? Seems like a good place to start a rebuild to me. 26-36 is a great performance window too.”
This was as of February 11th. Not many days later, the market finally started to settle and players began finding homes. Its sad though, Major league baseball’s off-season is often referred to as the hot stove, but frankly, the last two years its been more like a cold rusty skillet. Players are still having to fight for contracts even 129 days later.
Being this deep in free agency means the market is cold, and that players will have to make compromises they shouldn’t have to make, unfortunately this culture will persist. Something will have to change, because players with talent will only demand more.
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