Should MLB Explore Ways to Speed Up Free Agency?
With just days to go before pitchers and catchers report to spring training, Trevor Bauer and Marcell Ozuna finally found their free-agent homes. It's becoming increasingly common for top free agents to wait out the winter and sign big deals just before teams break off to Arizona and Florida. Given the financial parameters of every sport, it's not fair to compare MLB's offseason with the NBA's. But there is no denying the baseball offseason moves at a glacial pace. It's long. It's slow. It's a drag. (Especially when the parents—er, make that the MLB owners and players union—are fighting.)
Should the sport explore ways to increase the pace of offseason activity or incentivize teams to sign free agents early instead of late? SI's MLB experts weigh in.
Tom Verducci
I don’t get the idea of “speeding up” free agency. This benefits who and what exactly? The media wants to be spoon-fed a narrow window? Baseball wants to copy football and basketball? Players think owners will pay them more money if forced to make hastier decisions?
The idea of free agency is a free market. A free market means few to no governors. Only a small percentage of pro ballplayers manage to accumulate enough service time in a career with no freedom of choice until then to decide where they want to play.
Free agency isn’t a game show where the idea is to generate the biggest audience possible. If Bryce Harper wants to sign a $330 million contract in February—essentially deciding where he wants to raise a family—why insist he has to make such a decision quickly? Keep the “free” in free agency. No gimmicks.
Stephanie Apstein
This is a hard one. The most obvious way to speed things up would be to implement a salary cap; much of why we see such madness on the first day of free agency in the other leagues is that they need to figure out how to allocate their money. But the union would never agree to that, as well it shouldn't. An artificial measure such as a transaction deadline would suppress player salaries because teams could say, "Take this amount or don't play."
I think the answer is actually to leave the offseason alone and focus on the season. The league needs to find a way to entwine finances with winning. With the dilution of the postseason, why would you pay a top free agent an exorbitant amount to get you to 95 wins when 90 will get you into the tournament? Maybe MLB can waive the luxury tax for any team that wins its division, or redistribute playoff money in a more top-heavy fashion. I'm sure there are other, more clever ideas. But I don't think you can fix the winter on its own. The slow offseason is a symptom of the same disease as many of the other problems plaguing the sport: Teams aren't trying hard enough to win.
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Emma Baccellieri
One easy change that MLB could make is moving up the arbitration deadline. I don't think this would solve the problem, but it would at least let teams nail down specific dollar values for some of their roster more quickly, and ideally that would lead to some free agents signing sooner. The current January arb deadline seems far too late to me—it seems perfectly feasible to bump it up to at least December. Is this the sort of sweeping change that would revolutionize the system? No. But it's a simple thing to do that could potentially add a little speed to what's become a grueling slog.
Connor Grossman
Among many reasons the baseball offseason drags on, I think a driving factor is teams simply wanting to play the waiting game. Why deliver your best offer on Dec. 15 when the same player may be more desperate and willing to take a lower "best offer" on Feb. 15? That's why MLB should incentivize teams to spend early by instituting a one-week (or longer) luxury tax grace period. Free agents signed in the first week of the offseason wouldn't count against a team's luxury tax number. Suddenly those "best and final offers" will start coming in November rather than February and baseball's top free agents should, in theory, sign in a hurry.
Will Laws
The next collective bargaining agreement, which is set to be negotiated this year, should soften the competitive balance tax (or "luxury tax") and establish a team salary floor. Currently, if a team's total player salaries exceed the competitive balance tax threshold for one season ($208 million in 2020, $210M in 2021), they must sink below it the following year or have their tax rate rise from 20% to 50% for every dollar they exceed the threshold. That scared the Boston Red Sox enough to trade Mookie Betts. Reducing that penalty should incentivize clubs to halt that sort of behavior.
The greater issue may lie on the other end of the spectrum, though. There are too many teams sitting out free agency. If a salary floor of 40% of the luxury tax threshold were implemented, that would require teams to have payrolls of at least $84 million in 2021. Barely half of MLB teams would currently meet that requirement (though arbitration salaries, once settled, would push many teams above that figure). It's fine if some teams want to tank for draft position. But they should be obligated to at least compete with the rest of the league from a financial standpoint once fans are allowed back in stadiums and pouring money in owners' pockets.
Matt Martell
Yes, MLB should explore ways to increase offseason activity sooner, but that should not include a deadline to sign players. Instead, the league should make it so teams do not emphasize cheap labor or cost efficiency over using free agency to put the most competitive team possible on the field. My suggestion is one I've mentioned before: Institute a salary floor for teams. Similar to the competitive balance tax threshold that punishes teams with a progressive tax for exceeding $X million in total payroll (this year it's $210 million), teams that fail to reach the "competitive balance floor" would be taxed. This would incentivize clubs to compete on the free agent market and thus should create a more active offseason.
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Nick Selbe
There are many reasons why the glacial pace of baseball's free agency is bad for the game. The lack of rapid player movement causes baseball to recede further into the background amid the sports in season from November to March. Even the most ardent fans are forced to tune out from following their favorite team's dealings because there really isn't anything worth paying attention to (unless you live in Southern California or Queens).
As for what can be done on the league level, there don't appear to be any quick fixes. A salary floor would force the many cost-cutting clubs to at least invest some money into their on-field product, though that likely wouldn't cause much of a change at the top and middle of the free agent market. A bigger-picture change would be to drastically alter the way baseball free agency is structured. The NBA's free agency is the polar opposite of MLB's, in that many of the top players sign with their new teams within minutes of free agency beginning. A big reason for that is players enter the open market at a much younger age, often in their early- to mid-twenties. Baseball players typically reach the big leagues much older than NBA rookies. In addition, they're tied to the franchises for six years before reaching the market, resulting in the vast majority of players arriving at free agency in their late twenties to early thirties. In most cases, a player's best days are already behind him. Adjusting the system so that players hit the open market sooner, thus making them more appealing, would likely crank up the heat on what's annually become a dormant stove.
Michael Shapiro
We don't need to necessarily run free agency at a breakneck pace, but the current slog of the offseason reinforces the need for some sort of adjustment. Perhaps a middle ground can be struck. MLB could institute a monthlong free-agency period, starting in December and rolling through mid-January. Rosters can be settled by the time pitchers and catchers report, and perhaps baseball can win the news cycle in spurts during the holiday season. Teams would likely groan about jamming free agency into a weeklong frenzy, though they should be able to manage a whole month. Let's hope MLB eyes some offseason innovation in the coming seasons.
