Twenty-nine baseball teams had the opportunity to purchase one of the best players in the world for just over a handful of lottery tickets and only one jumped on it. If the frozen free agent market this winter was not a sufficient sign that Major League Baseball has an anti-competitive issue, Yu Darvish’s trade with the San Diego Padres sent a clear reminder that inaction is not just a problem in the field. field.
The aggressiveness of the parents in negotiating with Darvish and the former winner of Cy Young, Blake Snell, over a period of 24 hours, contrasts sharply with the vast majority of the rest of the sport, which has been invalidated by a class of owners using the coronavirus pandemic. as an excuse to reduce the salary. The money was the factor that helped the Chicago Cubs, one of the sport’s most iconic franchises, send Darvish, their best player in 2020, for a year since starter Zach Davies and four potentials, three of them they teenagers who didn’t. he had a professional at bat and a 20-year-old with less than 300 in the rookie league.
Any criticism of the reward in the switch is empty without a deeper depth as to why a player in Darvish’s class brought a relative mess. The answer to this question links many of the issues that game administrators should be concerned about: the satisfaction of too many franchises; Pandora’s Box of Extended Playoffs; the unpleasant aspect of all the teams with the highest gains in the game simultaneously practicing a version of austerity and the combined effects on labor relations with a collective bargaining agreement less than a year after its expiration.