Category: International

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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Notes: NPB free agency, NWSL’s new CBA, NBA’s second apron issues

Japan’s baseball players are looking to make a major change, the National Women’s Soccer League already has, and concerns about what the NBA’s new salary cap rules are doing to player movement.

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According to Evan Drellich at The Athletic, Nippon Professional Baseball players are preparing to fight for a major overhaul of the system used to keep them in place, and in Japan, for as long as it does. They plan to combat the reserve system “on antitrust grounds,” per Drellich, which would mean significant changes to not just movement within the NPB, but for leaving Japan for a league such as Major League Baseball, as well.

Players in Japan have two forms of free agency: domestic and international. Domestic free agency, the freedom to switch to another NPB team, is achieved after seven or eight years in the league, depending on whether the player was drafted out of college or high school.

But to leave as a free agent for a foreign league like MLB, the wait is nine years. Players can depart sooner, but only if their team posts them for bidding. Instead, NPB players want what’s in place in MLB: free agency after a blanket six years, regardless of entry or destination.

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Mailbag: Kids with jobs

Celebrating kids celebrating a high school graduation is good, yes, but consider why it’s a notable story, too.

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Mailbag time! This one on international signings and how weird MLB’s behavior with literal children gets to be. If you have a mailbag question you’d like to see answered, either respond to this newsletter email, or hit me up on @Marc_Normandin on Twitter.

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Round-up: Diamond bankruptcy, WBC pitchers, cheap owners

Diamond finally declares bankruptcy, Team USA is struggling with pitching restrictions, and Bomani Jones has something to say to MLB’s cheap owners.

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We’ve got a few things to catch up on, so let’s hit the ground running.

Diamond declares bankruptcy

We knew it was going to happen eventually, but Diamond, the owners of Bally Broadcasting, which serves as the regional broadcasting network for a not insignificant number of MLB’s teams, declared bankruptcy. That sounds scary on the surface, but as I wrote about a few weeks back, it’s more of a sign of things to come than it is a notice of an interruption of how you consume baseball in 2023. Here’s Sportico’s Brendan Coffey with an explanation and quotes:

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Who bargains over the international draft now?

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Last week at Baseball Prospectus, I wrote about how the new minor-league bargaining unit within the Major League Baseball Players Association is going to be bargaining for more than just money. Some of that, as described in the article in question, is in relation to how MLB will no longer be able to just unilaterally change rules in the minors, but instead would have to bargain over rule changes just like they have with the MLBPA in the past. There are other areas where change is coming too, though, also related to the way the PA has bargained in the past.

I’ve said this before, but it’s just weird that… well, let’s just quote me from this past July, shall we? This is from a piece celebrating the fact that the PA and MLB couldn’t come to an agreement on instituting an international draft to replace the current international free agent signing period:

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Michael Harris II’s deal is a team-friendly extension I don’t hate

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The Braves are somewhat notorious for inking severely team-friendly extensions with their pre-arbitration players, to the point I’ve used their past work in this arena as an example of how young players end up pushed into signing deals they feel like they have to sign. Ronald Acuña Jr. was clearly an elite player in the making even as a rookie, and the Braves signed him after that initial season to an eight-year, $100 million contract — the largest-ever extension for a player with less than one year of service time. That sounds like a big deal, but again, Acuña was expected to be the kind of player who would someday command over $300 million on the open market, so, as significant as this deal was, most of the risk really was still on Acuña’s side, not Atlanta’s.

Unlike the Acuña one, where you can at least go, “hey, $100 million is still an absurd amount of money,” the Ozzie Albies extension is maybe the worst one a player has ever signed. As I wrote at the time, the issue was that it made sense: for Albies to accept, for the Braves to offer. It’s a horrid deal, and while Albies isn’t a star like his teammate, he still served to deprive himself of the kind of arbitration payments a player of his caliber could pull in, and was forced to do so because of how changes to international free agency shifted leverage and payouts away from the players, how little minor-league players are paid, and how teams have tried to erode confidence in free agency, and, in turn, the arbitration process its values feed into.

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Rob Manfred is lying about Minor League compensation (again)

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Admittedly, I’m not much of a math guy. I can do basic arithmetic, though, and luckily, with the way Rob Manfred spins his stories, that’s about all you need to show that something is amiss. It’s not that Manfred’s numbers used to show how much MLB teams are spending on minor-league players are inaccurate in a vacuum, necessarily: it’s that everything he says with those figures is intentionally skewed so that it looks like more is being done than is, and that compensation is already in a good place.

This is from Manfred’s letter to the United States Judiciary Committee, in an attempt to justify the continued existence of MLB’s antitrust exemption:

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MLB, MLBPA mercifully fail to come to international draft agreement

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​The threat of an international draft remains, in the sense that there will be negotiations in the future, other collective bargaining agreements around which to discuss the possibility of revamping the entire structure of international player acquisition. The good news, though, is that the most recent conversation is over, and no international draft arose from it. The MLB Players Association rejected MLB’s final proposal on Monday, refusing to give in to MLB’s desire to not only create an international draft, but to do so in a way that would create even more of a discrepancy between the earning potential of domestic and international amateurs.

Per ESPN’s Alden Gonzalez, the PA’s international members (primarily Latin-American players) were opposed to the introduction of a draft, and the union at large listened:

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A reason to be optimistic about the failure of international draft talks

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​The MLB Players Association has been pretty quiet about their feelings on an international draft, which shouldn’t be a surprise: those negotiations are ongoing, with a deadline of July 25 to work out a deal with Major League Baseball’s owners, and the PA rarely comments on ongoing negotiations in public. We know that, at this point, the PA has submitted proposals where a draft does, in fact, exist (boo), but the good news is that submitting proposals isn’t the same thing as a future where a draft is created (hooray).

We received a reminder of this during the All-Star week festivities, where executive director of the MLBPA, Tony Clark, got a chance to speak with the media, and did so in a way that… well, it doesn’t really have me feeling optimistic heading into the weekend before the deadline, but I do feel better about the chances that no agreement is reached than I did. As Evan Drellich tweeted:

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MLB, Players Association resume bargaining over international draft

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In case you had forgotten, Major League Baseball and the Players Association, rather than settling the issue during this winter’s collective bargaining, kicked figuring out whether or not there would be an international draft down the road. The deadline for this second round of discussions is July 25, so you’re going to be seeing quite a bit about the international draft and proposals for it over the coming weeks. As things stand now, the MLBPA countered MLB’s proposal before the weekend, with a source telling The Athletic that it “called for significantly more money than the league’s proposal.”

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