What the MLBPA needs in the next contract

One slow-walked free agency season? Maybe not a deal.

Two in a row? Yes. As Bryce Harper and Manny Machado remain unsigned, even after pitchers and catchers have reported, pushing my poll at right into its fourth time block, it's clear that the baseball free-agency world is banged up, even if not fully broken, as everybody from Justin Verlander to Pat Neshek and a number of other players have said.

That said, it cuts both ways. Dallas Keuchel, for example, is not worth seven years at $30M a year, which is the high end of what his agent, Scott Boras, reportedly has been seeking. Harper is not worth 10 years, period, unless management as well as Harper get multiple opt-outs. At least two, if not three. GMs have caught up to Boras and his analytics dog-and-pony show.

So, what does Major League Baseball Players Association President Tony Clark need to get for the union in the next contract — and preferably an agreement in principle already by the end of this year?

A few thoughts of mine.

1. I'm OK with the qualifying offer still existing, since the penalties on it have already lessened.

2. What we need to start with is more revenue sharing, and a higher portion of the lux tax going to revenue sharing.

3. We need to combine that with an actual spending basement for low-market teams along with fines for not spending X percent of their revenue sharing money.

4. Something needs to be done to loosen up international draft money, so teams don't fetishize it quite as much. That issue is ridiculous.

5. Biggie No. 1 — shorten arbitration time frames. As from three years to two.

6. Biggie No. 2 — look at higher built-in accelerators for pre-arb rookie scale contracts.

7. Consider some other contract ideas from other leagues. Maybe adopt NBA and NFL ideas on guaranteed vs non-guaranteed money on what counts against the lux tax or not.

These are better and less gimmicky than a 3-batter requirement for pitchers, or even a universal DH.

At the same time, the analytics revolution, prodded for years by agents like Scott Boras on the labor side to sell their player, and embraced early on by Billy Beane on the management side as a way to find good players cheap, has now spread throughout the sport. Players and agents simply need to adjust to that. Cards owner Bill DeWitt, and more straightforwardly, his son, Bill DeWitt III, just said this.

And, that's why we're not going to see a spate of craptacularly bad contracts, unlike 2016.

Not needed in this analysis is bullshit, like that from M.C. Baumann of The Ringer in January, who said Yasmani Grandal had to settle for his 1-year deal. Nope, Baumann knows well that Grandal reportedly had better offers. It's also a lie to claim Grandal was better than Russell Martin when Martin got a bigger FA contract. Martin had posted a 5.4 WAR year and a 4.0 before that, while Grandal has never busted 3.5 WAR. Baumann also cheated by saying at the time that, at 3$50, Andrew McCutchen had the best FA contract available, while ignoring the six years of Patrick Corbin and even the four, at better AAV, of Nathan Eovaldi.

Beyond that, it's fun to bust Baumann's chops just because he works for Bill Simmons.

Jeff Passan, in his new digs at ESPN, is much more correct. Verlander et al are overstating the case of unsigned free agents, though it's still not negligible. They're also overlooking the Alphonse-and-Gaston nature of Bryce-vs-Manny, or more, their agents, Boras-vs-Lozano.

As far as how well off, or poorly off, lower market teams are financially, per this piece from the San Diego Union Tribune, the Padres are pretty transparent, within MLB allowances, in their financials. But, they're not spending that much themselves, transparency aside.

Baseball fans need to stop buying cable TV packages with regional sports networks, among other things. Declaring a larger pox on the owners' houses, a minor pox on players' house, and a big fat one on the telecommunications industry would be the deal.