Yesterday, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said that the owners asked the Players Association for a free agent signing period.
Sometimes I think these sorts of rules come up not just to save money, but because GMs are lazy. Draft slot bonuses, international bonus pool money, this idea, all let the GMs say, “Sorry, I can’t negotiate any more, my hands are tied.”
This is a bad idea from many angles:
“With the system we have right now, one of the tactics that’s available to player representatives is to stretch out the negotiations in the beliefs they’re going to get a better deal,” Manfred said. “That’s part of the system right now. There’s not a lot we can do about it. Certainly, from an aspirational perspective, we’d rather have two weeks of flurried activity in December, preferably around the winter meetings.”
It is a given that deadlines are created to insure the best deal. Does it matter that it is two weeks or four months? In the case of a sport, it certainly does. If a contender were to lose a star outfielder to an injury tomorrow, would not Cody Bellinger become more valuable? The same with Blake Snell if a front line starter goes down for a year due to surgery.
Likewise for a team, if Snell and Bellinger remain unsigned into March, some team that wasn’t in the mix might be able to swoop in with a cost effective deal that provides some other incentives like opt outs or an extra year. More information benefits both sides.
If the MLBPA is smart, however, they could leverage this into a better free agent environment. A counter could be free agency after six professional seasons, not six years in the majors and no free agent compensation for teams losing players. Getting young players to free agency sooner is the best way to get more money to the players providing the most production.