Jeff Gordon takes a fairly balanced look at the economic landscape of baseball and hopes both sides navigate through the next collective bargaining agreement. He notes the debt taken on by owners to stay afloat. He notes that good players will be let go rather than face arbitration, and that the swollen free agent ranks will depress salaries. One point where I disagree with the article comes here.

Now that players are experiencing the down side of the free market — the pain of cratering revenues — they should rethink their aversion to the sort of revenue-sharing models that serve the NBA and NHL well.

StLToday.com

The free market produces down sides, but it also tends to produce tremendous upsides. My advice to the players would be take one-year contracts until the game is on it’s feet again, and fight now for a shorter path to free agency. The owners, after many decades, figured out that a 30-year-old is not worth the money of a 27-year-old. If the Major League Baseball Players Association can move free agency into the early prime years, teams will be happy to pay players what they are worth long term. We saw that with Mookie Betts this season in a non-free agent deal. Their focus should be simply, “Shorten the Window.”