MLB hot stove freeze reaches a dangerous boiling point
If THIS baseball offseason gets any uglier, we might yearn for the good faith and honest dealings of Capitol Hill.
Spring-training boycotts? Collusion accusations? Good grief. Ever see an implosion before? The Players Association is laying the dynamite around itself as we speak.
This historically slow free-agent market reached a boiling point of sorts Friday, when Brodie Van Wagenen, one of the game’s most accomplished and respected player representatives, published a statement on Twitter that threatened a mass spurning of spring training “if behavior doesn’t change” and noted team owners’ behavior “feels coordinated, rightly or wrongly.”
“There is a rising tide among players for radical change,” Van Wagenen wrote. “A fight is brewing.”
A second player representative, Joshua Kusnick, backed up Van Wagenen with a tweet of his own: “[It] has certainly felt like an external force has held things up.”
What in the name of Marvin Miller is going on here? What gets accomplished by this saber-rattling?
First of all, don’t bet your house, or even a roll of toilet paper in your house, on a spring-training boycott, which would represent a historically outrageous violation of the collective bargaining agreement. Suffice it to say not every agent — and hence not every player — is on board with this anger. So let’s shrug off the imminent threat and pivot to the animosity, fueled further by pace-of-play negotiations, which could pose a long-term headache.
Any unionized industry functions best when both sides are run competently, and baseball’s routine work stoppages of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s can be attributed 99 percent to the stick-in-the-mud owners who wanted to destroy the Players Association rather than welcome it as a
partner.
Now, with Van Wagenen writing of a player population “uniting in a way that has not been seen since 1994,” the ineptitude has swung 180 degrees. It is the union that signed off on the CBA that rewarded tanking and penalized clubs that spent too much. As veteran Oakland outfielder/first baseman Brandon Moss told the MLB Network this past week: “Sooner or later, you have to take responsibility for a system you created for yourself. It’s our fault.”
MLB, with that reality in mind, opted not to comment in response to Friday’s Jerry Maguire-esque outbursts. Tony Clark, the union’s executive director, released a statement that read, in part: “Each time [free agency] has been attacked, Players, their representatives and the Association have united to defend it. That will never change.”
That seems only right of Clark to support his agents, since Van Wagenen took pains in his words not to blame Clark.
Van Wagenen’s firm, CAA, boasts nearly 200 clients in the major and minor leagues who collected more than $350 million in salaries last year. The Mets’ Yoenis Cespedes, Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard all use CAA. Van Wagenen arguably has attained this level of success because he is not one to get emotional or write checks his body can’t cash. That Van Wagenen would act so out of character — in a telephone conversation, he reiterated the sentiments in his statement, although he agreed with my thought he shouldn’t have referred to the players as “1,200 alpha males” — speaks to the environment’s heightened tension. CAA still has a fleet of unsigned free agents, headlined by former Yankee Todd Frazier.
Look, if the union can prove collusion, an offense far more threatening to the game’s integrity than illegal performance-enhancing drug usage, that would be awesome. Yet I’m highly skeptical because we’ve seen this trend of late signings for multiple offseasons — remember the rush of February contracts last year? — and because no collusion is necessary to see that 1) many blockbuster contracts turn disastrous; and 2) players over 30 represent a bad lengthy investment.
Kusnick ended his statement with the famous quote, “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” He was referring to players’ strikes of decades ago. Too bad he didn’t present that to his own union in November 2016, when it declined to fight for better financial terms. He would have spared baseball fans of (famous quote alert) this current sound and fury, signifying nothing.