“A $90,000 slave is still a slave.”–Curt Flood

Becoming a major league free agent is not an easy task. I’m not talking about non-tendered roster filler type players, I’m discussing the ones that make the headlines: The A-Rods, the Manny Ramirez’s, the C.C Sabathia’s etc. the ones that the Yankees are allegedly expressing a major interest in.

When a team realizes they have a jewel on their hands, they will often go to great length to postpone the player’s time until he qualifies for free agency. In the early part of their career options will be used sending them down to the minors to delay their service clocks for arbitration and free agency right. Once they finally become arbitration-eligible, the young stud will often be tempted with a long term contract that will buy out some free agency years.

To use one example, Johan Santana entered professional baseball in 1995 yet if the Mets pick up the option year in his contract in 2014 it will mean that the two-time Cy Young winner will not have hit the open market in 20 years in the game.

Granted, he’s made some choices along the way but it doesn’t change the fact that the Houston Astros, Florida Marlins, Minnesota Twins and New York Mets have managed to persuade Santana not to have competitive bidding on his services and he will be in major league baseball for two decades without once deciding unilaterally where he wishes to play.

As we know, true free agency did not come easily to the game. Players were indentured servants that forfeited control of their professional careers for pretty much the first three quarters of the 20th century as soon as they inked their first professional contract. Baseball’s antitrust exemption allowed teams to treat and cheat players without any threat of censure or consequence and there was little they could do about it.

They had masters–either they did what they were told or they could find another line of work.

Marvin Miller and a generation of self-sacrificing players (including Curt Flood) hung together and fought the major league cartel until an arbitrator named Peter Seitz ruled that a player option was good only for one year and not perpetually and for the first time in many decades, baseball players were given a right taken for granted by the common man–to change employers when a work contract expired. For the first time in a long time players were free to choose where they wished to work and under what circumstances they wanted to ply their trade.

Now it appears the major league baseball players association is again trying to deprive players of that right.

CC Sabathia told reporters this past week that his experience with the Brewers opened up his world. That no longer was he married to the idea of using his impending free agency to relocate his job near his West Coast home …

But there will be more forces in play than just geography or even the actual dollars. Keep in mind that, in high-profile free agency cases like this, the Players Association also plays a role. And that potential impact should only help the Yankees.

Flash back to the 2002-03 offseason. The country was headed to war, and fresh off a new collective bargaining agreement, teams exhibited (conspired for) self-discipline.

The one free agent set to make big-time money was Jim Thome … The Phillies bid heavily on Thome, offering him a six-year, $85-million package. The Indians … countered with a five-year, $60-million deal …

But the Players Association leaned heavily on Thome to take the Phillies’ offer, saying, essentially: “You can’t turn this down. Not this winter.”

This isn’t to say that Thome chose the Phillies’ offer — which concluded with the Phillies paying a good portion of Thome’s salary for the White Sox the past three seasons — only due to union pressure. But it absolutely was a factor, according to a person familiar with the situation …

Collusion has long been a part of the game. Under the old reserve rules, club owners and G.M.’s often spoke about what they planned to pay players on their clubs. This was done to keep salaries down and there was an unofficial limit on what a superstar player could earn–$100,000. It was this sort of manipulation by the clubs that allowed teams to vastly underpay their best players.

Marvin Miller wished to open up the player marketplace with the simple goal of letting owners decide pay through competitive bidding (as opposed to collusive machination) on players’ services. While Miller knew this would create upward pressure on salaries, his biggest concern was that a player be free to choose where he wanted to play and for how much.

Back in early part of the 1990’s Twins’ Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett was mulling two packages: one from the Twins and a higher one from the Red Sox. Unsure of what to do, he allegedly placed a call to Miller to seek his advice. Miller had one question for the centerfielder ‘where do you want to play?’ Puckett replied ‘Minnesota’ to which Miller countered that he should take Minnesota’s offer.

To Miller it was simple–what the player wanted was the primary concern. After all, the key word in free agent is “free.”

However, it appears that the MLBPA is like ownership used to be pre-Messersmith/McNally–more concerned with manipulating compensation than concern over player well-being. The players have a new master: the salary bar and now free agents have lost their freedom to choose the circumstances in which they wish to work; now, they’re expected to forgo their freedom and go to the highest bidder even if that is not the player’s first choice of where he wishes to play.

Miller realized that the free and open competitive bidding on player services will cause salaries to rise. However, under Don Fehr and Gene Orza, that’s not good enough and they’re deliberately trying to manipulate the market at the cost of player freedom.

How is it any different if owners are restricting player freedom to keep salaries down any worse than the union doing likewise to keep salaries increasing?

If a $90,000 slave is still a slave, doesn’t that principle apply if that total is $90,000, $900,000, $9,000,000, $90,000,000 or more? What’s the point of being a free agent if your future will be decided by someone else–in this case by the team offering the most money?

The thing is, why do players even need agents? Once a player files for free agency, just have the clubs phone in their offers to the MLBPA office and when the bidding is done, inform the player where he’ll be playing for the next few years.

Marvin Miller freed major league players from servitude to ownership, now who is going to unshackle players from servitude to the salary bar? Don Fehr and Gene Orza have forgotten the history of how the MLBPA became the most powerful union in the world–unity and the fact that money splintered the other side.

The players fought for freedom to choose, it was a cause to many of the players under Miller and something that superstar and scrub alike can unite behind. However pushing up the salary bar is only of benefit to a small minority of union members and history shows us that it’s difficult to keep those with differing financial interests on the same page. Bud Selig has managed to unite ownership to a degree not been before in the game’s history but he only has 30 teams to keep together while MLBPA membership is at 1200 with membership undergoing constant turnover whereas the ownership cartel is relatively static.

By restricting the benefits of free agency so that a small minority might be able to make a little more than what they might from competitive bidding on the services and choosing where they go is a recipe for disaster and disunity at a time when the MLBPA needs consensus.

Further, for a body concerned with fairness and competition they seem to have an unhealthy concern for the on field well-being of teams like the Yankees and other big spenders who already have a multitude of advantages. They now have one more–a union that will make sure that the best talent find their way on to their rosters.

If C.C. Sabathia and others like him are being unduly influenced by union and agent when they become free agents then they’re not free agents at all–they have simply changed masters. It’s the union’s job to keep the player marketplace as open and honest as possible and let the chips fall where they may. It takes players a lot of years to reach the point where they can shop their services and choose their next destination.

Neither fan, nor owner, nor media, nor agent or union should interfere with a free agent’s decision-making process.

For more on this, see Who wants to subsidize a billionaire?

Best Regards

John