As the offseason heads toward a likely lockout, one message is starting to ripple through baseball’s biggest spenders: don’t wait around.
The New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Mets, Boston Red Sox and other teams with deep pockets may be better off striking now, before a new collective bargaining agreement changes the rules. The concern is simple enough. If MLB winds up with a salary cap, clubs that are currently willing to spend could find themselves working under restrictions they don’t have today.
What happens to existing contracts in that kind of scenario is still unclear. But the expectation is that the league would have to protect deals already signed.
There would be no realistic way, the thinking goes, for a player to agree to a $300 million contract only to have the number chopped in half later. That would create the kind of legal and labor mess baseball would want no part of.
Agents are paying attention, too.
Scott Boras, the sport’s most powerful representative, recently told The Athletic that some teams should move now instead of waiting for the next CBA.
“For many teams, I can make an argument it’s clearly best for them to sign players currently, before the (new) CBA, than it is after,” Boras said, per The Athletic. “Because they have more freedom to do what they’re going to do.
They can react later. Now they can get the talent.
They can get what they want.”
That stance hardly comes as a shock. Boras represents Tarik Skubal, the biggest free agent in baseball, and a potential salary cap would only make his job harder. He wants his client to land the kind of deal that resets the market, and he knows those figures are tougher to chase in a capped system.
Even so, Boras has a long track record of getting his players paid. Lockout or no lockout, the expectation is that he will still have a strong shot at landing Skubal a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
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