In the eyes of many agents, it's as if teams have unleashed a generation of Terminator executives and analysts -- emotionless, killer negotiators relentlessly seeking value, never swayed by the arguments that might've distracted their front-office ancestors.
Past performance? Irrelevant. Extra compensation for leadership? Laughable. The status quo? Something to be questioned, always. It used to be that a veteran on a minor league contract could count on a $1 million salary for a roster spot in the big leagues, but the Terminators now even haggle over those nickels. They haggle over everything.
It's important to remember this, amid the most significant wave of contract extensions in baseball history. Players who aren't free agents have been guaranteed well over $1 billion since the start of training camp. Mike Trout got a lot of money, and so did Paul Goldschmidt, Nolan Arenado, Alex Bregman, Eloy Jimenez and even Whit Merrifield. It's easy to forget that Merrifield's $16 million deal is a life-changing amount of cash.
But these deals extend a management winning streak that is becoming like a labor relations version of Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak. The owners won the collective bargaining negotiations of 2016 in a complete rout. They won the free-agent market of 2017-18 and won it again this offseason, gnawing away at the expectations of what players might expect to get.
Some on the union side understand this as well: Front offices wouldn't be doling out the spring extensions unless they are great business for the teams.
The Terminators wouldn't have it any other way. "They're being opportunistic," said one person involved in negotiations this winter.
According to the MLB Trade Rumors extension tracker, the number of spring contract extensions had been pretty steady in recent years, in the preseason window of Feb. 10 to March 31, as reflected in the numbers dug out by ESPN researcher Paul Hembekides:
2015: 5
2016: 4
2017: 6
2018: 6
This spring so far?
Seventeen.
Yes, that's 17, if you include the recently reported deals for the Rays' Blake Snell and the Cardinals' Goldschmidt, and look, those contracts are executed at the behest of the player.
Aaron Nola is known by teammates as someone whose greatest expenditure might be a tricked-out pickup truck, and he just got $45 million. Trout already has constructed the home in which he intends to live in his hometown of Millville, New Jersey, and heck, now he could probably buy the whole town if he wants. Goldschmidt is assured of the big payday that he would've never had if he had struggled in the summer of 2019 and then gone into free agency at age 32 next fall.
But in the way the Terminators view these deals, they are a value bonanza. The Terminators are not wired to do anything other than win.
Nola turns 26 in June, and the Phillies just bought out the most productive years of his pitching lifetime for an average of $11 million a year -- or about one-third of what the Red Sox will pay David Price. Sam Miller explained the other day how even with a record-setting deal, Trout is a relative bargain. Merrifield finished 15th in the majors among position players in WAR last season, at 5.5 (Baseball Reference WAR), and if you assess the value of each win above replacement at $8 million, then he might generate more than double the value of his entire four-year deal in the first year alone.
Bregman posted 6.9 WAR (BR) last season, and if you apply the same exercise in his case, then the third baseman -- one of the game's best and most improved players -- might provide more than enough value to offset his deal by the middle of the second year of a six-year contract.
These are incredible contracts for multibillion-dollar companies, and they just keep on coming, with the teams capitalizing on the high anxiety in the ranks of the players.
Andrew McCutchen, newly signed by the Phillies when he finally reached the open market, explained on the podcast the other day how free agency hasn't been the bonanza players once expected it to be, and that perspective -- shared by many of his peers -- has been a factor in stoking the concern about getting proper compensation.
They see that the Terminators aren't rewarding free agents -- especially those players in their late 20s or early 30s -- for time served. They know that baseball's financial system is stacked against the young players, usually blocking seven-figure compensation until after the player has reached the big leagues and then served 2½ seasons. The players see that even some big-market teams are simply declining to participate in the pursuit of free agents.
Meanwhile, the union leadership has stoked the fears, perhaps inadvertently or unwittingly. As written about in February, some players and agents believed that Tony Clark's aggressive warnings to players of a possible work stoppage on the distant horizon ran the risk of rendering collateral damage -- of causing players to grab financial lifeboats that would guarantee them big dollars, to save them from the labor uncertainty. Before spring training began, those agents and players predicted there would be a wave of team-friendly contract extensions -- and that's exactly what has happened.
The union is in the early stages of a counterattack to reacquire some of the lost financial landscape. The leadership will look to curb tanking, get players paid more earlier in their respective careers, and end -- or at least restrict -- service time manipulation.
But now the union will have to work against the growing impact of these extensions and the market precedents they have set. Trout is the acknowledged best player in the game, and he won't make more than $36 million in any season in a time when his production value is already regarded by teams as perhaps more than twice that annually.
Alex Rodriguez's average annual salary in 2001 was $25.2 million. Three decades later, in the summer of 2030, after billions of dollars of growth in the industry and in franchise value, Trout's annual salary will be just $10 million more than that.
One by one, the Terminators are picking off the best players on the teams' terms. They are winning, and they wouldn't have it any other way.