Barber: MLB players ripped off by 'team control'

Normalcy has returned to baseball. Manny Machado is with the Padres, courtesy of a $300 million investment. The Rockies are re-upping Nolan Arenado for a reported $260 million. And with those dominoes lying prone, Bryce Harper will probably be next. Only a diamond-ful or two of notable free agents remain unsigned.

Finally, after another offseason of grumbling and finger-pointing, we can settle in, listen to the sound of baseballs popping into gloves and soak in the sun-drenched, butterfly-visited fields of the ?national pastime.

Umm, no.

It doesn’t matter if every eligible player lands with a team and Harper signs for $400 mil. Major League Baseball has a problem. And not only is it not going away, it’s bearing down upon the game like Bo Jackson rounding third base and ?heading home.

For the second straight year, January and February were an icebox for MLB transactions. It took veteran free agents weeks to get signed. Some good ones, like Dallas Keuchel and Craig Kimbrel and Adam Jones, still don’t have a team. And many of those who did reach agreements settled for one- or two-year deals. It has been a buyer’s market. Again.

Everyone pretty much assumes at this point that there will be a strike or lockout when the current MLB collective bargaining agreement expires on Dec. 1, 2021. My question: Can the players really wait that long to upend the order?

I’m still a sports fan at heart, and I cringe at the idea of a work stoppage. It’s the ultimate intrusion of business into the world of athletics. It steals our last remaining childlike feelings and tells us to grow up, and to hell with that. But if I represented major-league ballplayers, I would seriously consider lighting a fuse under the current labor agreement.

St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright seems to share my sentiment. “Unless something changes, there’s going to be a strike. One hundred percent,” he recently told InsideSTL.com. “I’m just worried people are going to walk out midseason.”

There are several things serving to suppress the salaries of veteran players. The luxury tax is one of them. The willingness of some teams to shed payroll and rebuild from the farm system is another. But there is a more fundamental flaw in the structure. It’s MLB’s service time rules, and that’s what I want to focus on here.

Get drafted by a Major League Baseball team, and you will spend some time in the minors. If you’re a college draftee or an experienced international player, it might be just a couple seasons. If you’re a high school athlete with some mechanics to work out, it could take most of a decade. And excluding whatever you might receive as an initial signing bonus, you’ll make peanuts until you reach the bigs.

Then you’re ready to earn some real money, right? Not even close. Under the current CBA, a guy has to play three MLB seasons - a threshold that teams can manipulate, but that’s another column - before he is eligible for salary arbitration. Arbitration is likely to bring a sizable raise for a productive player, but nothing like true market value. Only after six accrued seasons does a player qualify for free agency. And because of the way a “season” is defined, it often turns out to be more like seven years.

Imagine telling an NFL or NBA athlete he’d have to wait seven years to negotiate a good-faith contract. He’d fall over unconscious.

Let’s use a few Bay Area baseball players to illustrate the craziness.

Madison Bumgarner is one of the most accomplished starting pitchers of his generation. He came as close to singlehandedly winning a World Series as any player I’ve ever seen. But Bumgarner still has not reached free-agency status. He will make $12 million with the Giants this year and $12 million next year. Bumgarner is 29 years old. He’s one ruptured tendon away from never hitting a true payday.

Khris Davis is the reigning MLB home run champion. He has 335 RBIs over the past three seasons in Oakland. He was eighth in American League MVP voting last season. He’s 31 years old and not eligible for free agency. Davis won in arbitration each of the past two years, bringing his salary up to $16.5 million for 2019 (with no long-term security). By professional sports standards, he is chronically underpaid.

The A’s Matt Chapman might be the best defensive third baseman in the game, and his bat has some pop. He might be on the cusp of superstardom. And he’s paid like a backup. Chapman will make $575,000 this season, and is still under team control next year. He’s 25 now. He’ll be 30 when he becomes a free agent.

Pitcher Dereck Rodriguez was one of the Giants’ best players last season - and earned a paltry $369,180 for the effort. Rodriguez is 26 years old, not exactly a kid. Whether he sticks with the Giants or winds up claimed by another team, he won’t even get to arbitration for a couple more years.

There are other examples on our two local teams, and on every other team in Major League Baseball. It’s a weird system, but it always sort of worked because organizations were willing to pay veterans handsomely when they finally hit the open market. MLB money was backloaded.

The data-analytics movement has turned the system on its ear. Devotees like Billy Beane of the A’s and Farhan Zaidi of the Giants now realize that it’s much more cost-effective to invest in younger players. Why stake yourself to 10 years of Bryce Harper when you can spread that money among a bunch of guys who are under team control or in their arbitration years?

You can’t fault the teams for thinking that way, any more than you can fault Keuchel or Kimbrel for expecting good money. It’s isn’t stinginess or hubris that got us to this place. It’s a salary system that ownership has found a way to game.

Word is that when the CBA expires in 2021, the union will demand that teams grant players arbitration after two years, and free agency after five. Is that really strong enough? Tweaking the system so that Matt Chapman is a free agent at 29 instead of 30? It still seems wrong to me. The whole system of “team control” is an oddity. MLB clubs have never wanted to pay players based on projections of what they’ll do in the future, and now they don’t want to reward them for what they’ve done in the past.

There’s a reckoning coming. It’s going to be painful, and you shouldn’t be shocked if it gets here before the 2021-22 offseason.

You can reach columnist Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Skinny_Post.