No Virginia, the big bad Baseball Owners are not being bad to the free agent baseball players. They are just being smarter.

Matt Garza, Jacoby Ellsbury, Yasmany Tomas, Oliver Perez, Jason Heyward, and Ricky Nolasco. What do these baseball players have in common? These are all athletes who at one point had very productive professional careers who signed medium to long range free agent contracts with major league baseball teams and who have failed to consistently perform at the level they maintained before signing the big contract. Baseball owners are understandably leery to sign players to long-term deals longer than five years. Honestly, who can blame them? What business wants to be on the hook paying millions of dollars a year for ballplayers who do not return on the investment. This is not a rebuke on the players. It is common sense. J.D. Martinez, a very good ballplayer has an offer on the table from the Boston Red Sox in the $100-120 million range for five years. What the heck is wrong with that? Eric Hosmer has a seven-year offer to come back to the Royals at about a $140 million total. What is wrong with that? If our leading public servants were paid ten percent of these amounts for each year of their elected terms through the treasury, we would probably not have campaign finance and corruption issues (Maybe?). Players need to grow up and see that owners are not going to take the plunge on ten-year deals again. It is not a good business strategy. 


https://www.si.com/mlb/2018/02/02/brodie-van-wagenen-agent-free-agency-market

https://sports.yahoo.com/baseball-payrolls-drop-first-time-nearly-decade-free-agent-freeze-deepens-163133059.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=fb