On the same day last week I read two articles dealing with the state of Major League Baseball that presented totally opposite views. One view was offered by Commissioner Rob Manfred, the other by Ryan Zimmerman, veteran first baseman of the Washington Nationals. Had they presented their differing views on a public stage as in a public debate I would have declared Zimmerman the winner by a large margin.
Manfred would get points for being the first commissioner to invoke metric – specifically WAR – in his argument defending teams for not signing free agents, but I’d like to see the commissioner compute players’ WAR scores himself rather than have a staff member hand them to him on a sheet of paper.
Manfred was holding a news gathering in West Palm Beach, Fla., at the start of spring training. A major subject of reporters’ questions was the lagging pace of teams’ signing free agents. At the time barely half of the 164 free agents had signed contracts, and the unsigned players and their agents were beginning to wonder what was going on. Manfred wanted to be helpful so he told them.
Suggesting that most of the unsigned players – I assume he was excluding Bryce Harper and Manny Machado – weren’t very good, he said, “There are 11 players that had a WAR above 1.0 that are unsigned. I believe that, just like last year, that market is going to clear at some point in the next few weeks. Those players are going to get signed.”
Before he became commissioner, Manfred was a labor lawyer, not a baseball scout. If he wants to think all a team has to do is look at WAR scores to find good players, let him wallow in his ignorance. Someone should tell Manfred scouts see intangibles in players that don’t show up on computer screens.
Some of the unsigned free agents with WAR scores under 1.0 very likely have those intangibles that could make them better roster fits than members of the WAR squad. By the way, in case you don’t know, WAR stands for “wins above replacement,” but different systems compute the rating differently so you can’t be sure what Manfred’s WAR scores actually mean. And if you haven’t figured out who the placement is, you’re not alone.
“I think it’s important,” Manfred also said, “to remember that the Major League Baseball Players Association has always wanted a market-based system, and markets change, particularly when the institution around those markets change. We’ve had a lot of change in the game. People think about players differently. They analyze players differently. They negotiate differently.”
For sure, the game changes when management cheats, and nothing that has gone on in this off-season leads me to believe that Manfred’s management executives haven’t cheated. And keep in mind the owners initiated the 1985 collusion only days after owners and players reached agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement.
But I mentioned Ryan Zimmerman and will tell you what he told the Associated Press the same day Manfred was offering his excuses for unsigned players.
Speaking in West Palm Beach in a different location from the commissioner, Zimmerman said he found it odd that teams felt the need to announce that they were trying to win.
“I try and win every day,” Zimmerman said. “I think that’s kind of the point of sports. That’s kind of what the whole basis about professional sports is – you try and win. When you have teams actively saying that we’re going to go into this free-agent market in a win-now mode, I don’t know that you should have to state that it’s a win-now mode, but I guess that’s where we’re at. I think that’s troubling.”
“I don’t think I’m surprised. It happened last year,” Zimmerman added. “We were told it was going to be different this year because those two guys are out there, along with some other pretty good players, and nothing has changed. I don’t think anyone’s surprised.”
By not pursuing, competing for and signing available players, teams appear to be displaying a lack of interest and eagerness to win. Major League Baseball has no rule that teams have to try to win, but fans expect that effort and pay lots of money to see them make that effort.
“I don’t think it takes a genius to see that something’s going on,” Zimmerman said. “I don’t know what it is, but there’s too many good players out there that aren’t on teams. This is an entertainment business. For me, the fans should be able to see the best players in the world play. It doesn’t matter what team they are on.”
I have always felt players should make the most any team is willing to offer. When someone asks me what a player is worth, I answer “whatever a team is willing to pay him.” Manfred is telling us baseball’s economic game has changed and suggests that players should become aware of it.
Teams, he says, are emphasizing younger players and draft choice and would have us believe that all 30 teams came to this radical decision at the same time independent of each other. Owners and general managers say their increasing use of Manfred’s metrics is the reason they are not signing free agents.
When in the 150-year history of major league baseball have all of the owners agreed on this idea that one factor – in this instance metrics – have enlightened them at the same time in the same way? Color me seriously skeptical.
What really bothers me about this winter’s developments is baseball writers are buying into Manfred’s explanation of the unsigned. They don’t even question it in print and even avoid use of the word collusion, as if it were a four-letter expletive that was not allowed in print or on web sites.
It is unsettling to this baseball writer to think that we could be regressing to the early days of the union when reporters either didn’t talk to Marvin Miller, the union’s great and brilliant leader, or criticized him for intruding on their game.
Tony Clark, the current head of the players union and a former player himself, issued a statement the day after Manfred expressed his views, criticizing him for his comments. Most pointedly Clark accused Manfred of trying to shift the blame for unsigned free agents to the players themselves. The players, Manfred said, don’t understand the new system.
What should the players understand? That the owners, with Jerry Reinsdorf of the Chicago White Sox, M.L.B.’s Mad Hatter, as a major player, are so dead set on taking control of their payrolls and everything else that they are willing to gamble on the treble damages collusion could cost them?
Yes, Machado got $300 million in a ridiculous 10-year contract with the San Diego Padres, and Harper will very likely exceed his deal, perhaps with Philadelphia, because his ego-driven agent, Scott Boras, couldn’t tolerate being No. 2, but those two players could be the exceptions in the owners’ metrics game.
Unlike the three-year collusion of the 1980s – George Steinbrenner actually let Jack Morris leave his Tampa, Fla., hotel without having signed him – maybe the owners decided they had to let the heralded free agents sign to avoid obvious attention, but let lesser free agents twist in the wind or force them to accept relatively cheap deals.
This is the second year the owners have played their new game. The Players Association has scrutinized the game but has not talked about it and apparently has not found enough concrete evidence to file a grievance. I suspect that Clark has barred union officials from talking publicly about the off-season events or absence of them.
Nevertheless, the season approaches. If it starts with a few dozen or so veteran players sitting at home listening to their wives screaming about their lack of jobs and income, the union will have to do something to respond to the complaints from veteran players forced into early retirement. Manfred the metric man will not likely be able to boast any longer about 23 years of labor peace.