Twenty-nine baseball teams had the opportunity to acquire one of the best pitchers in the world for little more than a handful of lottery tickets, and only one jumped at it. If the frozen free-agent market this winter weren't enough of a sign that Major League Baseball has a problem with anti-competitiveness, the trade of Yu Darvish to the San Diego Padres sent a clear reminder that inaction isn't just an on-field problem.
The Padres' aggressiveness in dealing for Darvish and former Cy Young winner Blake Snell over a 24-hour period stands in stark contrast to the vast majority of the rest of the sport, which has been hamstrung by an ownership class using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to pare payroll. Money was the contributing factor in the Chicago Cubs, one of the sport's jewel franchises, shipping off Darvish, their best player in 2020, for a year of starter Zach Davies and four prospects, three of them teenagers who haven't taken a professional at-bat and one a 20-year-old with less than 300 in rookie ball.
Any criticism of the return is vacuous without a deeper dive into why a player of Darvish's ilk brought back a relative pittance. The answer to that question ties together so many of the issues that should worry the game's stewards: the complacency shown by too many franchises; the Pandora's box of expanded playoffs; the bad look of all the highest-revenue teams in the game practicing some version of austerity simultaneously -- and the combined effects on labor relations with a collective bargaining agreement less than a year from expiring.
To say baseball finds itself at a tipping point would be an overdramatization. Yet when multiple high-ranking front-office officials use the same word -- "nadir" -- to describe where the game is in terms of teams' desire to build the best major league roster possible, it should be a warning sign that the sport's focus on efficiency over everything demands a correction.
The Padres are proof that organizations can resist this instinct. They are a middle-of-the-pack-revenue team that operates in MLB's fourth-smallest media market. They are the ones that, in theory, should be getting squashed by the leviathans of a sport without a salary cap. Instead, they are giddy to take advantage of the game's state of affairs. They have an owner, Peter Seidler, who is willing to spend, and a general manager, A.J. Preller, whose creativity and aggressiveness landed Snell and Darvish to complement a team that for the next three seasons also can run out Fernando Tatis Jr., Manny Machado, Dinelson Lamet, Trent Grisham, Chris Paddack, Jake Cronenworth, Ha-seong Kim and a slew of young talent on the cusp of the major leagues.
As San Diego has fortified its roster, the majority of teams have stood pat. The new year is in two days, and teams have spent less than a quarter-billion dollars total on free agents. The New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers are trying to stay below the $210 million competitive balance tax threshold. The Boston Red Sox aren't spending big a year after trading Mookie Betts for financial flexibility. The San Francisco Giants remain in a rebuilding phase. And now the Cubs are looking to clear their books. That's the five highest-revenue teams in baseball, none inclined to maximize its roster -- and not because their baseball operations departments are against it.
This goes to ownership level -- to those who speak about what the pandemic did to their businesses in 2020 and what it could do in 2021 and beyond. It's impossible to know how badly their businesses suffered and will suffer without teams opening their books. The one glimpse baseball offers is the Atlanta Braves, who are owned by the publicly traded Liberty Media. As Craig Edwards wrote at FanGraphs, the Braves' revenues this year were indeed down. So, too, were their expenses. And while they reported losses in 2020, their profits in recent seasons were substantial. While Atlanta isn't a perfect analog for the largest-market teams that draw massive revenue from tickets and the ancillary income fans generate, the idea of teams suffering "biblical" losses, as Cubs owner Tom Ricketts described them to ESPN's Jesse Rogers this summer, simply doesn't square with the Braves' financials.
The Cubs, actually, are a fascinating case. Over the past half-decade, the team claims to have invested nearly $1 billion into renovating Wrigley Field and the surrounding area. The Cubs bought rooftops and razed fast-food joints and raised a boutique hotel. They took on debt because that's what businesses do to accumulate wealth -- and there is always risk in that, even as safe as the sports industry had proved pre-COVID-19. They also could net a nine-figure tax credit thanks to Wrigley being named a National Historic Landmark and will be able to write off losses incurred in 2020, lessening the financial blow.
However badly the pandemic hit the Cubs, there remains the truth: The Ricketts family bought the Cubs and Wrigley Field for $845 million in 2009, and if the team sold today, it would likely fetch in the $3 billion neighborhood. That is quite the biblical gain in franchise value. Enough of one for fans to reasonably ask: Did they really have to trade Darvish coming off a National League Central title?
This is where the ugly reality of baseball -- and the fear players have with expanded playoffs -- comes into play. The NL Central is a bad division. The St. Louis Cardinals are solid. The Milwaukee Brewers are fine. The Cincinnati Reds might take a step back, as they're expected to cut payroll. The Pittsburgh Pirates could be the worst team in baseball. Even without Darvish, the Cubs could ride an easy schedule into playoff contention -- particularly if the postseason expands, as MLB would like, to seven teams per league.
The best teams in both leagues met in this year's World Series, but a wild-card team won the World Series in 2019. There are plenty of other examples of good regular-season teams turning great in October. One of baseball's beauties is that the most talented team doesn't always win. That also creates a perverse incentive: Even if more talent may offer a better chance at a ring, the difference can be so marginal that teams are not inclined to pursue difference-makers, not when a club's model deems the return on investment negligible.
The Cubs could have held on to Darvish and signed George Springer or Trevor Bauer. They could have traded catcher Willson Contreras to replenish their farm system and signed J.T. Realmuto. Had they done that, though, would they have been better than the Dodgers? The Padres? The Braves? No. Probably not. If having a lesser chance in 2021 means having a greater chance in 2022 and beyond, is it worth it?
That's the questions teams ask themselves. The premise is false, of course; who's to say they can't win in 2021 and 2022 and beyond? The answer, dissatisfactory though it may be, is most owners. With Darvish gone and Javier Baez's, Kris Bryant's and Anthony Rizzo's contracts expiring after this season, the Cubs theoretically could take their relatively empty balance sheet and use free agency and trades to reload before '22 -- and do so with a farm system that, with a few more moves in the coming months, could wind up as the one of the strongest, if not the best, in the NL Central.
Outside of the New York Mets, who were just bought by someone worth $14 billion, and the Toronto Blue Jays, that sort of approach is the prevailing sentiment in baseball today. Maybe Washington or Houston or the Los Angeles Angels jump into the free-agent fray. Philadelphia wants to bring Realmuto back. But his market is murky, and Springer's isn't much less opaque, and after the Cubs-Padres trade, one high-ranking executive said: "Can't believe that is the most Darvish would yield. If so, Bauer isn't getting even close to what he's expecting. Bauer's asking price and Darvish's return don't compute."
Bauer and Darvish are different players, of course. Bauer will be 30 on Opening Day, Darvish 34. Bauer is coming off a Cy Young-winning season, Darvish a runner-up showing. And the fact that next to no free agents have signed may illustrate that the market simply hasn't blossomed yet -- that when teams get a better sense of how the pandemic may affect attendance this year, they'll be less tight-fisted with their money. The best free agents always have managed to grab their bag.
At the same time, teams believe free agency to be the most inefficient player-procurement tool, a philosophy that has wrecked the middle class. They also know that spending money does not necessarily equal winning -- not when a team like Tampa Bay can make the World Series with one of baseball's lowest payrolls and a habit of trading its best players. The Padres' approach doesn't diverge entirely from the Rays' -- San Diego pulled off the Snell and Darvish deals because of its farm-system depth -- but it registers almost as novel because no one is emulating it.
"I hope it works," one executive said, "because if it doesn't, it reinforces the keep-your-neck-in-the-turtle-shell mentality."
There certainly is a paralysis-by-analysis culture in some front offices, and the pandemic has prompted ownership groups across the sport to lean into it -- to suggest executives wait on free agents because the longer players remain jobless, the likelier they are to accept less money. It's a tactic that increasingly has crept into the sport and reached critical mass this winter.
Perhaps nothing illustrated that as well as the Darvish trade. A player on a three-year, $62 million deal came off a season in which he inarguably was one of the five best starting pitchers in baseball and generated barely a whit of interest. A few teams inquired about his availability. Only the Padres pursued Darvish with any fervor.
The Cubs, committed to cutting payroll, took the best deal there was. Because prospects are so highly valued -- which is the case because MLB has restricted draft and international spending, limiting teams' avenues for acquiring amateur talent -- it didn't net the Cubs a MacKenzie Gore or CJ Abrams but a bunch of kids. Maybe one pans out -- or, if they're lucky, two -- and this trade that is being lambasted today winds up being a win for Chicago after all.
It will take years to adjudicate that. What's clear right now is the fallout from the deal. The questions of whether Darvish's age and salary and injury history really were enough to prompt 28 of 29 teams, many with playoff aspirations, to not even entertain the thought of acquiring him. Or the trade's potential impact on the free-agent market, which could deepen the mistrust players have toward clubs at the absolute worst time possible.
It's not just the labor agreement's expiration next Dec. 1, either. It's some owners pushing for a shortened 2021 season and players saying there's no legal standing for the league to cut back on games and the fight that could come of that. It's players' years-old cries of anti-competitiveness being met with rather damning evidence of it. It's the game wrapping up 2020 with no sign that some of the sport's clearest ills will be answered in 2021.
It's one trade that says everything about where baseball is and where it needs to go.