Twenty-one baseball teams had a chance to acquire one of the best pitchers in the world for little more than a handful of lottery tickets, and only one jumped on it. If the frozen free agent market this winter wasn’t a sufficient signal that the Major Leagues have an anti-competitive issue, Yu Darvish’s exchange with the San Diego Padres sent a clear reminder that inaction is not just a problem in the rural area.
Parents’ aggressiveness in negotiating with Darvish and former Cy Young winner Blake Snell over a 24-hour period contrasts sharply with the vast majority of the rest of the sport, which has been paralyzed by a class of owners using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to cut payroll. Money was the contributing factor for the Chicago Cubs, one of the sport’s most iconic franchises, to send Darvish, its best player in 2020, for a year of opener Zach Davies — four prospects, three of them teenagers who have not had a turn in the professional bat and a 20-year-old with less than 300 in the rookie league.
Any criticism of the reward in change is empty without a deeper dive into why a Darvish-class player brought relative misery. The answer to this question unites many of the issues that should worry game administrators: the complacency shown by too many franchises; the Pandora’s box of extended playoffs; the bad looks of all the higher-income teams in the game who practice some version of austerity simultaneously, and the combined effects on labor relations with a collective agreement less than a year from its expiration.