Los Angeles Dodgers designated hitter Shohei Ohtani waits for a pitch during the fourth inning of a spring training baseball game against the Chicago White Sox in Phoenix, on March 6.Ashley Landis/The Associated Press
Last August, ESPN projected last season’s Blue Jays third baseman, Matt Chapman, would clean up in free agency.
He would “easily get into nine figures,” it said. His ceiling was somewhere around Marcus Semien’s seven-year, US$175-million deal with the Rangers, it said.
There were vague asides from baseball insiders about all the money Chapman had already turned down – a US$150-million deal when he was with the A’s; a US$125-million offer from the Jays.
Chapman had a few reasons to feel good about his prospects. He was the right age (30). He had the right profile (six seasons as an MLB regular). He had the right build (no tendency to pudge or knees that sometimes bent backward).
He also isn’t that great. A defensive titan, his offence falls somewhere between serviceable and disappointing. His best years are already in the rearview.
But in baseball terms, Chapman was due. You show up on time, don’t say or do anything really stupid and one day you wake up and your yard is filled with money. This is just how it works.
Then 2023 came and went. Chapman’s agent, Scott Boras, continued to chirp about how desperate teams would eventually come begging – again, because that’s just how it’s always gone. January got behind him. Then February. Then the first three weeks of training camp.
This week Chapman signed in San Francisco for US$54-million. By the time this deal is over, he will be 34 years old and no one will be talking about how he is easily getting into anything.
Fifty-four million for the Yankees or the Dodgers is one thing. Fifty-four million for the Giants, a team that’s moving in the wrong direction and already has a third baseman, is another.
“Couldn’t be more excited to be here,” Chapman said at his introductory presser.
He sounded like he’d be more excited to be at the endodontist.
Cody Bellinger was another Boras guy looking for a Marcus Semien deal. He got about half that. They’re the lucky ones – they have jobs.
Blake Snell won his second Cy Young Award last year, and is currently unemployed. Ditto World Series winner Jordan Montgomery. Everywhere you look, a brand-name baseball player is sitting around twiddling his thumbs.
This week, unsigned, first-ballot Hall of Famer Joey Votto re-enacted the ‘Sad Keanu (Reeves)’ meme on Instagram, the one where Reeves sits miserably on a park bench. Votto captioned it ‘Missing baseball’.
Online, people agreed it was hilarious. Offline, everybody knows it’s kind of pathetic. The Canadian star made a quarter-of-a-billion dollars in his career, and now he’s out here begging for baseball charity.
It worked, I guess. Toronto gave Votto a non-roster tryout on Friday. He may not fit on the team, but that doesn’t mean the Jays are above wringing some free publicity out of the guy.
The key figure in baseball’s underemployment wave is Boras.
He created the system wherein players hold off until the last instant in order to drive the market into a frenzy. It’s his rule that clients should never negotiate extensions while they are under contract.
Boras built what, in the Milton Friedman sense, might be called realbaseball. All of his negotiations reduce to total dollars, and most end up at the brink.
It doesn’t work in a salary-cap sport – too much risk that clubs will have spent their money by the time you’re ready to talk. But it has worked in baseball, where budgets are vulnerable to grandiosity.
This year, it stopped working.
It isn’t that teams have finally realized that putting your team together days before the season starts is not tactically optimal. More likely it’s got to do with the Joneses. They can’t keep up.
Everyone knows who the best-on-paper team in baseball is – the Dodgers. They’ve spent a billion dollars on two players. Neither was a Boras client. Their business was done before New Year’s.
Compared to Shohei Ohtani’s US$700-million deal, all others will appear insignificant. So, the thinking seems to be, why bother? Robbed of the opportunity to one-up each other, the free-agent market has gone dormant. That’s robbed Boras of his greatest advantage – status panic.
The Dodgers (and, to a lesser extent, the Yankees after trading for Juan Soto) have given everyone else their built-in excuses. Spending a hundred million on a guy who will probably turn out to be an average player isn’t going to alter that perception. The old way of doing things has up and died.
If someone other than L.A. or New York wins, they get to crow about how they did it with smarts, not money.
Meanwhile, all the guys who thought they would hit the jackpot just because are going bust. They’ll find work eventually, but no one’s getting private-jet money now.
If nothing else, it’s proof that every financial system tends toward equilibrium. Baseball has divided itself into thirds. The upper tier (payrolls of US$200-million plus) are the contenders. The middle tier (US$100-million to US$200-million) contains some former upper-tier teams on the way down and a few lower-tier teams on the way up. The final third (sub US$100-million) are the tankers, the no-hopers and the Tampa Bay Rays.
It’s like planting a Macy’s on the same block as Bergdorf’s. They both sell the same junk, but at different price points. Despite their superficial dissimilarity, both are able to make money doing the exact same thing.
With a couple of exceptions, baseball teams have always been cheap. Most spend just enough to keep the players’ union off their necks. That has meant in the past occasionally giving a lot of money to a veteran just because he’s put in his time.
But what if that’s changed? What if people are willing to pay absurd amounts for the very top-level talent, and next to nothing for anything less than that? What if baseball’s luxury market – like watches and handbags – is in the middle of sudden contraction?
It may be a one-time blip owing to a historic signing of maybe the greatest player in history. Or it may the first shots in the labour war to end all labour wars.