This was the offseason without closure.
It used to be when the Winter Meetings ended in early-to-mid-December, the offseason essentially was done, save for arbitration cases. Then it became more customary for Scott Boras, in particular, to take some of his best free-agent clients to Christmas and beyond before finding new homes.
Then more and more teams became savvy about patiently dragging the process deeper and deeper into the offseason to try to get panicky players to make more club-friendly deals.
But nothing really prepared us for this, an offseason that never ended, mainly because so many good-to-very-good players remained free agents. There were several reasons why spring camps opened and the offseason had yet to fully close, namely that the market had more quality than buyers to spend on it all — particularly because about half the NL teams were not much in a purchasing mood — and the qualifying offer chilled the appeal of several players.
I recently asked about two dozen executives and scouts what stood out about this offseason, and the most frequent answers involved those two issues: teams not trying to get better (let’s call it what it is, tanking) and the impact of the qualifying offer. These are about to be two of the biggest issues facing the commissioner’s office and union as they begin negotiations on a new collective bargaining agreement.
So whether it is closing this offseason or opening the talks, I thought it was the right time for a few thoughts on these issues:
Tanking
I have been careful to point this out many times over the years: If I ran a team under the current rules, I would rebuild exactly as the Astros and Cubs did, which is to say a complete tear down to have the worst record possible to get not just high draft picks year after year, but also greater pools of money to spend on the draft and internationally.
That is why the rules should be changed.
Look, Pete Rose is barred from baseball because of a philosophy rooted in the Black Sox Scandal that the integrity of the game never can come into question — that teams are trying to win every game. Yet, now we have teams not just giving away a season, but seasons. And we are exulting the architects of the losing.
The Cubs’ Theo Epstein and the Astros’ Jeff Luhnow, in particular, are hailed as geniuses and are role models now for the Phillies and Brewers and Reds to follow — heck, Milwaukee hired one of Luhnow’s right-hand men, David Stearns, to assemble a horrible team for the next few years.
In the AL, pretty much every team is trying to make the playoffs this year. Even a small-market club such as the Indians added Tommy Hunter and Juan Uribe late in the offseason to try to find the extra win or two that might get them to the postseason. The Reds traded Todd Frazier to the White Sox, for example, and could have used Uribe as a one-year stopgap. But why bother, when the goal is not to find an incremental couple of wins, but to foster more losing?
Hurt in this are teams such as the Indians, Rays and A’s who never go into full rebuilds and try to win as much as possible year to year. They never receive the benefits of consistent high draft picks and the associated cash that goes with that.
The next CBA must make it more disadvantageous to be a serial loser — key word in that is “serial.” If a team wants to tear it down and rebuild, fine. But to encourage that to go on for three or four years while charging full price for those who go to their games and to have them impacting playoff spots annually with the unbalanced schedule is just wrong.
I always have thought there should be an “add-five” rule. If you draft in the top five of one draft, you cannot in the next year. Instead, you have to add five so, for example, if you had the first pick in 2016, even if you had the worst record again, you add five and cannot pick before No. 6.
I know the idea of being bad for three or four years is the best path to be good for a longer stretch. I get it. Still, I think the sport cannot condone purposeful losing year after year.
Qualifying offer
Why should there be a system that hurts good-to-very good players?
The exceptional players such as Jason Heyward and Zack Greinke are not impaired by the qualifying offer. Teams are willing to lose draft picks for them. But players such as Howie Kendrick, Dexter Fowler and Yovani Gallardo helped their teams make the playoffs in 2015 and were personally harmed by that. They would have been better off playing for losers who traded them, because players who switch teams during the season cannot be tagged with the qualifying offer. It is ludicrous to hurt a player’s earning power because he is helping his team win.
I have heard that the players just should have accepted the $15.8 million qualifying offer. Yep, it is a lot of money. But either a player has earned the right to be a free agent (emphasis on “free”) or not. Kendrick, Fowler and Gallardo put in their mandatory six years, they are very good players and they should have had the unfettered right to go where they wanted without having their markets artificially restrained. What if they didn’t want to be where they were, even for $15.8 million?
If you want to give draft-pick compensation to a team losing a high-end free agent, fine, that is a good idea. But why does the signing team have to lose a pick?
Come up with a standard for a quality free agent and give teams that lose one compensation. I have always thought it should be tied to service: If you developed the player and kept him the full six years, maybe you should get two or three draft picks as compensation as opposed to, say, a team that has a player for one year and then loses him to free agency.
For example, if the Royals had lost Alex Gordon (whom they drafted in 2005), they should get greater compensation than the Padres got for losing Justin Upton, who played just one year for San Diego.