MLB’s noncompetitive behavior issues are now out there for the world to see

What Kevin Mather did last week was to effectively trigger a klieg light over a pitch-dark, rat-infested corner of baseball. Everybody in the sport is aware of the noncompetitive behavior present among many of the 30 teams. Everybody can hear the gnawing on good faith and on the integrity of competition. Everybody recognizes the financial manifestation, the enormous shift in dollars from the players to the owners.

But when the now former CEO of the Mariners said out loud what almost no one has said on the record before, Mather fully illuminated a creepy part of the sport that fuels the players’ distrust of management — a part of the sport that even a lot of folks on the management side detest, because it’s antithetical to what initially drew them to competitive sports.

This toxic part of the business needs to be excised in the next collective bargaining agreement. That can happen only with a sportwide reset, so that everybody works against the worst use of analytics and focuses on two very simple principles:

1. Teams should be devoted to fielding their best players.
2. Teams should try to win as many games as possible.

And the rules should be reconstructed to foster those principles. But the path back from the bad-faith abyss the game is in now is complicated, and Major League Baseball and the players can get there only if they find a way to work together. Even if MLB tried to build guardrails against tanking and service-time manipulation and close loopholes, the players would have to agree to any set of rule changes — and at the moment, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of hope for a system redesigned by both sides through collaboration

Maybe a mutual fear of the nuclear option — a prolonged labor stoppage — can push them into a constructive alliance. But I’m far from confident that’s a possibility.

The Mariners’ awful week demonstrates the destructiveness of the practices Mather referenced, practices that somehow became standard operating procedure for most teams.

Seattle hasn’t been to the playoffs in almost two decades. General manager Jerry Dipoto — in the midst of a rebuild — tried to distance himself from Mather’s comments in speaking with the Mariners’ players. But Jarred Kelenic, the organization’s top prospect, told USA Today that when Dipoto spoke, “It was literally like someone farted in church. That is the exact expression on everybody’s face.”

The GM’s words lacked credibility in the eyes of the players, because everyone in the sport is well-versed in how often teams have eschewed winning in the short term in order to bend rules to their advantage — and to the players’ disadvantage. Many teams have constructed teams meant to fail — as cheaply as possible, to heighten profit — and delayed the promotion of players to the big leagues for the sake of gaming the system and stunting the earning power of their best young players.

It happened to Kris Bryant. It happened to George Springer. It happens to players all the time.

Kelenic said it had been made clear to him that unless he signed a long-term deal — presumably on terms that benefit the Mariners long-term — he would not be promoted to begin his big league career. Kelenic hasn’t had an inning in the major leagues, and he is already wary of his employer’s motives and doesn’t take his boss’s words at face value; he’s a cynic before his first plate appearance in a ballpark with a third deck, an awful and perhaps irreversible situation for the franchise that would need the outfielder to be an important part of the product sold to patrons.

Instead, the circumstances built by the organization’s noncompetitive behavior and the fallout from Mather’s comments have turned Kelenic into a human litmus test that threatens to be corrosive. If he has a good spring — or even a bad spring — and is left off the roster, the front office will face rhetorical questions from players and the media about why. If he starts the season in the minors and is promoted later, the motives over the timing will be questioned.

In the years ahead, Kelenic will be asked by reporters to assess the ingenuousness of organizational decisions, the integrity of the Mariners’ efforts to field the best players for the best team.

Young, inexperienced players like Kelenic have always been at the mercy of the current system that was shaped through decades of negotiations between the players and the owners. But over the years, the clubs have also adroitly gained financial ground against more experienced players — those who reached free agency, a group that usually did well in the past, and players nearing the end of their careers.

In theory, players like Kelenic would live with minimal salaries in their first years in the big leagues. Down the road, their pay would rise substantially as they accumulated service time. But there’s no guarantee of that happening anymore. Many, many veterans have signed for deals barely above minimum this winter, in the $1 million to $2 million range. The middle class of players is seemingly shrinking. For years, the phrase “haves and have-nots” referred to the big-market and small-market teams. Now, it increasingly refers to the players, many of whom reach the end of their baseball careers without college degrees and without formal preparation for another field.

Aces, the player agency run by the Levinson brothers, did an internal study about recent free-agent trends. The numbers show that reaching the open market is far from the nadir it was long held up to be. It has become saturated with veterans who sign one-year deals or are cut free by teams when eligible for arbitration. This is the percentage of free agents who see a cut in salary after hitting free agency, per Aces:

• 2017: 64%

• 2018: 71%

• 2019: 72%

• 2020: 68%

One club evaluator said that every time a star gets a big contract, like the one for Fernando Tatis Jr. or the front-loaded deal Trevor Bauer got from the Dodgers, it’s an outlier that serves to distract from the overall trend.

“Like shell game,” he said. “It’s like [the players] lose sight of what’s going on.”

On the night that news of the current collective bargaining agreement broke, many agents and executives immediately predicted the players would lose significant ground, and that the terms were incredibly favorable for owners. Based on the numbers dug out by Paul Hembekides, a researcher for ESPN, that is exactly how it played out, contrary to how the players fared over the course of prior CBAs.

Given how so many teams have slashed their budgets following the COVID-19-impacted 2020 season, it stands to reason that the average player salary will decline for the third time in the past four years, after many years of consistent growth. Per Hembo:

Among those who have seen a major decline in income are the oldest, most experienced players. Consider these numbers for free agents 35 and above.

These are just a few of the really stark numbers for players, who are increasingly angry. In a business that is inherently competitive, the players are angry and competitive. Kelenic’s comments to USA Today’s Bob Nightengale oozed frustration.

But they cannot merely be angry. They must be engaged in the labor relationship, and many, many former players with personal histories in past CBA fights are concerned by what they see as a lack of engagement.

These are complicated issues that require an exchange of priorities and dialogue, not only with ownership but also within their own union. At the time that the union rejected the owners’ proposal for a delay for the start of spring training and a revamped 154-game season for 100% pay, one explanation was that players didn’t support the idea because they didn’t want their preparation altered. Privately, many players and player agents disagree, saying that many would have supported a delay to buy time for vaccinations and potentially safer conditions for the players. Those dissenting opinions, about choices and strategy, must be heard during the process, for the strongest possible union.

Mather provided the means through which everyone — owners, front-office executives and players — could see an ugly and undermining aspect of the sport. Some owners and general managers should watch the Mariners’ front office flounder for internal credibility in the months ahead and understand: There but for the grace of the baseball gods go I. And the players should channel and use their anger and do what they can to get better answers — and win back lost ground.

Arm angles for Syndergaard, Sale

Noah Syndergaard had elbow reconstruction surgery a couple of weeks before Chris Sale did last spring, but their respective timelines for a return to action seem completely different because their circumstances are very different.

Sale is effectively at the beginning of the five-year, $145 million extension he signed in 2019, a deal that runs through the 2025 season. The priority for him and the Red Sox is to be as productive as possible through the duration of the contract, so the player and the team have every reason to slow-play his rehabilitation. That is why his return could occur closer to the All-Star break than Opening Day.

For Syndergaard and the Mets, the context is very, very different: The pitcher will be eligible for free agency after this season. So he could really use a string of strong starts in the last months before he hits the market to augment his bargaining power. Plus, for pitchers coming back from Tommy John surgery, there is typically a transition period, a gradual improvement of command. It would behoove Syndergaard to get back to action sooner rather than later. The Mets elected to bring back the right-hander for $9.7 million this year, rather than non-tender him and use the money for a starter who will be fully ready to go into 2021 — and presumably part of their thinking was they knew Syndergaard would be devoted to getting back as soon as possible.

The Trout defense

Mike Trout‘s defensive metrics waned dramatically last year, which he fully owned in his first conversation with reporters this spring, acknowledging how poorly he played in center field.

“Just going back to the fundamentals,” he said. “I got away from it last year. With every going on, I wasn’t really staying on top of it — and at the end of the year, it showed.”

Trout said he’ll go back to some of the drills he’s done in the past — focusing on getting better jumps, habit-building during batting practice.

“If you don’t work on it, it’ll show,” he said. “At the end of last year, I started seeing the numbers and I knew I had to improve.”

Time and again during his career, Trout has demonstrated full ownership of what he perceives as weaknesses in his game, whether it be developing a counter-attack to the high fastballs that opposing pitchers consistently throw him with two strikes or his defense.

Trout is hardly alone in reflecting how he might have worked differently in the strange 2020 season, how he might have handled the circumstances differently. Francisco Lindor says he didn’t lift weights as he should have, and that he wore down. And Oscar Mercado, Lindor’s former teammate in Cleveland, talked about how he lacked a positive attitude, something he vowed to adjust.

Milestone moments

Some of the milestones that could be reached during the 2021 season:

• Tony La Russa has 2,728 victories as a manager. He needs 45 wins to match John McGraw for second place all-time. (For the record: No one will ever approach Connie Mack’s record of 3,731 wins.)

• Dusty Baker needs four wins to tie Hall of Famer Bill McKechnie for 14th in career victories. Among those top 14, 12 are Hall of Famers. Bruce Bochy, at No. 11, will inevitably make a speech in Cooperstown.

• Miguel Cabrera needs 134 hits to reach 3,000 in his career — and 13 homers to reach 500.

• Joey Votto needs 92 hits to reach 2,000 — and five homers to get to 300.

• With 3,236 career hits, Albert Pujols is seven hits from matching Nap Lajoie’s total. He is 19 removed from tying Eddie Murray.

• Andrew McCutchen needs 26 runs to reach 1,000.

• Max Scherzer is 216 strikeouts away from 3,000.

• David Price needs 19 strikeouts to get to 2,000.

• Jon Lester is seven wins from 200.

Noteworthy

On Friday’s podcast, Braves broadcaster Jeff Francoeur talked about the future of Freddie Freeman, who will be eligible for free agency next fall. Francoeur was part of our ongoing NL East preview. Others who participated: Nationals analyst F.P. Santangelo, Phillies play-by-play man Tom McCarthy, and Mets sideline reporter Steve Gelbs. On Monday, Britt Ghiroli of The Athletic talked about what needs to happen to combat sexual harassment in the sport.