Tag: mlb free agency

Notes: Cubs already giving up, Pride Nights, Dodgers and Trout

The Cubs, at best, think you’re stupid. And more from the week that was.

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Free agency has already started, in the sense that players are declaring their free agency, qualifying offers have been sent out, and all of that happy stuff that kicks off the period. Free agency hasn’t really truly gotten moving, though, even if players are able to sign already. There hasn’t been a ton of movement yet, just like there never is right at the beginning of what is a slow-burn process (that seems to move a little slower every year, too).

And yet, the Cubs have already quit on bringing in either the top free agent hitter or pitcher available, according to The Athletic’s Sahadev Sharma and Patrick Mooney:

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The Juan Soto sweepstakes begins

And there is no basically no excuse for the Yankees to not come out on top.

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Juan Soto is going to get paid. That much is known. Which team will be paying him is a bit more up in the air, as Jon Heyman reminded everyone before the weekend with a report that 11 teams had already checked in on him the second they could post-World Series.

Heyman mentions that Soto is looking for $700 million, and not deferred like with Shohei Ohtani’s major deal. The chances of Soto actually getting $700 million are basically nil, sure, but you ask for $700 million and negotiate down to what a team will give you. If you start with what a team will give you, you’re still going to end up negotiating down. That’s just how these things work, which is a lesson a lot of folks seem to need to relearn every November.

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What was Ken Kendrick trying to do, exactly?

Ken Kendrick took the blame for signing Jordan Montgomery by talking about how bad of a decision it was to sign Jordan Montgomery. Oh boy.

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Jordan Montgomery’s 2024 season didn’t exactly go as planned, either for Montgomery or the team that signed him, the Diamondbacks. Montgomery was real good for the Cardinals in 2023 before a midseason trade shipped him to the Rangers, where he was a revelation, and a significant part of their first-ever World Series championship — a title they won for besting the Diamondbacks. This year, though, Montgomery made just 21 starts (and 25 appearances), totaling 117 innings, and produced an ERA+ of 67 in the process.

Given an ERA+ of 100 is supposed to represent an average performance, Montgomery was awful. Throw in that he managed a 136 mark in the stat in 2023, and entered 2024 at 116 for his career, and that 67, somehow, looks even worse. It’s not an entirely unexpected outcome, however. Montgomery, despite his strong 2023 and years of above-average work, sat on the sidelines as a free agent for the entire offseason, and then some. He didn’t agree to a deal with the Diamondbacks until March 29 — not only was this after the start of spring training, it was after the start of the actual regular season, which had begun the day before.

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A set free agency age won’t fix service time, or the obsession with cheap players

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Earlier this week, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal wrote about a service time solution presented to him by an anonymous team executive. The idea is a set age for free agency for all players: “Make all players who celebrate their 28th birthday by a specified date eligible for free agency at the end of that season.” Rosenthal discusses some pros and cons of the plan, and ends on the idea that both MLB and the Players Association should be focusing on making sure service time considerations are no longer the impetus for whether a prospect is ready to reach the bigs.

I’d like to go in a little further on the issues with this kind of system, though, separate from the concerns Rosenthal raised. Primarily, I don’t think it even solves the problem it supposedly seeks to address. The idea is that, knowing a player might reach free agency sooner than six years (or seven years) after reaching the majors, a team would promote them to the bigs sooner. The more likely scenario, given what we know about how teams operate and view players, is that we’d just see more of a churn through players to ensure the roster was always stocked full of young-enough pre-arbitration players. So, an exacerbation of a pre-existing problem.

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