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Thursday, April 01, 2010
The renewables
Boo-hoo-hoo:
The renewal process is a frustrating fact of life for “zero-to-three” players, those who lack the nearly three years of major-league service needed to qualify for salary arbitration. With little or no negotiating leverage, a player and his agent view a renewal as a vehicle to emphasize their belief that the player deserved a better offer.
MLB players simply don’t care, at all, for other players. They’ve all gone through the slave-wage process, they’ve all seen how highly inequitable it is for players in the lower-rung to get paid peanuts compared to the veterans. And yet, when it’s time to speak up, once they are already in arbitration and free agency, those very same players who lament the process.... say nothing. Nothing!
They figured out by the time they are veterans that the inequity in the front-end helps to drive the salaries on the back-end in free agency. And as long as the overpriced free agency market can remain overheated (and it still is), it helps to pull the salaries up of everyone below them. The price to pay for all this is those players who are not good enough to play three MLB seasons. And those guys, MLB players have decided that they don’t care about them. It’s their young baseball carcasses that paves the way for the veterans.
The young star ballplayers that lament the process obviously have not been told the secret well enough. Adam Jones? You are a star player already. Shut up, because you are going to get your fair share, and the fair share of all the young players who will be out of MLB by the age of 26. Or, speak up, if you are lamenting the fate of those guys. But don’t lament yourself: this system is setup perfectly for guys like you.
And it’s this system that helps the small-market teams in being competitive on the field. This process works out great for all concerned, except the bench players. And the 300 bench players would have a tremendous voice in the union… if they saw themselves as 300 bench players. But, no, they all see themselves as so close to being starters that they don’t see that they are the ones who are making everyone else rich.
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