No new contracts have been able to be discussed since the Collective Bargaining Agreement expired back on December 2. Among those contracts was a reported $350 million extension to Washington Nationals’ outfielder Juan Soto.
Soto, 23, was a key piece of the Nats’ first World Championship in 2020, having already hit 98 home runs since his Major League debut in 2018. The cornerstone of Washington’s future won the National League batting title that season with a .351 average, despite missing time early in the pandemic-shortened season with a positive Covid-19 test.
The alleged contract would have been spread out over 13 years, which would have Soto being paid upwards of $25 million when he would be in his mid-30’s. We all know that these “lifetime” contracts never work as intended, regardless of the sport.
Most baseball fans want to blame Alex Rodriguez for breaking the mold of these ridiculous, and quite frankly asinine, staggered contracts. The truth is that you have to go back a year before Rodriguez signed his 10-year $252 million deal with the Texas Rangers, in addition to switching sports. The New York Islanders of the NHL gave goaltender Rick DiPietro a 15-year, $67.5 million deal in 2006.
The Islanders waived DiPietro three games into the lockout-shortened 2012-13 NHL season. DiPietro was plagued by injuries and underperformance. Rodriguez at least won a World Series with the New York Yankees in 2009, making him only slightly less of a disappointment than DiPietro.
There was also the 2009 positive steroid test and being suspended the entire 2014 MLB season for his part in the Biogenesis steroid scandal that is attached to Rodriguez in this conversation.
Whether Soto’s comments to ESPN were valid or an attempt to overinflate his value, this is the prime example as to why the MLB is in this predicament. Owners want to cry that they are going broke because of players being offered these contracts, while players are the ones requesting these contracts based on a body of work that is in no way indicative of the contract being justified.
If you count the delay of the 2020 season in the wake of the budding pandemic that still rages on, this marks two of the past three years where the MLB regular season will not start on the date posed when the schedule was released the previous summer.
There have been nine labor disputes since the 1972 season, five player strikes and four owner lockouts. No other league has more than three (NFL and NHL - 3, NBA 2). As we all know, only the MLB and NHL have canceled a season where a postseason champion cannot be crowned for something other than a pandemic or a World War (MLB 1994 and NHL the entire 2013-14 season).
The lack of salary cap makes things like the Rodriguez deal almost commonplace in today’s game. Is Francisco Lindor truly worthy of a $345 million contract from the New York Mets? The simple answer is “no.”
The longer and more proper answer is, “Who is the idiot that thought up that contract in the first place, let alone submitted it?”
The Mets are worth a reported $2.45 billion. Lindor’s contract accounts for 14-percent of the entire franchise liquidity.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has a Juris Doctor from Harvard, specializing in labor and employment. Many say attorneys are puppets for their clients. After his handling of the Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal and this ongoing labor dispute, Manfred is far and away the worst of the Big Four commissioners.
Just how far up Manfred’s anatomy are the hands of the 30 MLB owners pushed at this point?
-JC24