Don’t fall asleep just yet! The MLB offseason might be taking its sweet time, but are things truly that boring? You’re not going to turn your attention to some random sport on a streaming service (or your betting app) just to get some excitement, are you?
No, of course not, partly because you can always just pass the time venting about the offseason and complaining that it’s moving slowly. As of publication, the group of Kyle Tucker, Bo Bichette, Cody Bellinger and Alex Bregman all remained unsigned. Although Tucker worked out at the Toronto Blue Jays’ training facility earlier this offseason, there have been no recent reports indicating he’ll spend the next few years hitting alongside Vladimir Guerrero Jr. The pitching market is mostly untouched, and the trade market is frozen solid.
So, what’s keeping some of the best free agents on the open market? Are the players being unrealistic in their demands? Are owners being tight-fisted? Perhaps both are true, but as for the idea that the threat of an impending lockout is scaring owners away from handing out massive contracts? Come on, baseball fans: You know better than that.
No, don’t blame the threat of a lockout for top MLB free agents remaining unsigned
Blaming the possibility of an impending lockout for a perceived slow offseason is, to put it candidly, lazy. I’d feel much differently if Kyle Schwarber, Pete Alonso and Dylan Cease all remained on the market, but they all found teams willing to meet their lofty demands. The Phillies wanted to keep Schwarber at all costs (pun intended), and shelled out $30 million a year over five years. Baltimore felt a splash signing was needed, and Alonso fit the bill. (Again, pun intended,) As for Cease? The Blue Jays gave him a contract exceeding $200 million, hoping that he’d help Toronto take full advantage of its championship window.
Last we checked, those three teams would be impacted by the lockout. Yet, they’re still spending!
It’s also important to note that there are differences between a team having a slow offseason and a league having a slow offseason. That sounds obvious, right? Well, Yankees fans might consider the overall offseason slow because they haven’t made an impactful signing or trade yet. Red Sox fans, though, will likely happily counter because of all the trades that Craig Breslow has made.
Without veering too much into pro-ownership territory, let’s face facts about the marquee free agents: We have no idea what they are realistically asking for, and we don’t know which teams are willing to meet those demands. Yes, Tucker and Bregman have been linked to the Dodgers, but have the players and their representatives properly discussed contracts with the team? What about Bichette and the Yankees? Just because that kind of move might make sense to us doesn’t automatically mean that Brian Cashman and Hal Steinbrenner are running over the numbers as we speak.
Hypothetically speaking, no one would blame Tucker if he wanted a 10-year, $400 million contract with deferred money and a full no-trade clause. At the same time, this isn’t a video game. Baseball contracts — and player movement as a whole — have never been that simple. I don’t think people really understand how much of a commitment some of these longer contracts are.
Think of it this way. Content creators on sites like Twitch and YouTube allow people to subscribe for a certain number of months. Let’s say you subscribe to someone for 30 months. (That’s 2.5 years, by the way.) Those two numbers, while they have the same overall meaning, are vastly different at first glance. Suddenly, you might not want your favorite team to give Tucker or Bichette such a long-term contract if they asked for one.
The obvious counter is that teams should do whatever it takes to win, and that’s true. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Winning makes it easier to forgive and forget. So let’s stick with Tucker, and let’s say the Yankees sign him to a seven-year contract. Even if Tucker is a .190 hitter by 2031, it might be easier to look past the poor statistical output if the Yankees win the 2026 World Series.
Is the MLB offseason truly moving slowly?
This in itself is an extremely important question, and it is relevant to the threat of a lockout. The owners want a salary cap, and the players have less than zero interest. Yet, some owners are still spending or at least trying to be aggressive. We just saw the Pittsburgh Pirates hand out their first multi-year free agent contract since 2016. Who’d have guessed it’d be Ryan O’Hearn, of all people, to break the team's self-inflicted drought?
Teams that want to spend will spend. We cannot stress this enough — and no, that doesn’t mean every team will have a payroll exceeding $200 million. It means that if an organization enters the offseason wanting to upgrade via free agency or take on a contract, they’ll find a way to do so. Look at the Pirates! We heard they were linked to Schwarber, and then when they missed out, they pivoted to another player they felt deserved a multi-year deal. Two years and $29 million might not sound like much, but it looks like the Anthony Rendon contract by Pittsburgh's standards.
In fact, the offseason as a whole should currently meet our standards of busyness. We’ve seen teams arguably overpay, and we’ve seen contenders stay active. The Orioles — a team fresh off a last-place finish — came out of nowhere to sign Alonso, a perennial All-Star and proven power threat. That’s not a slow winter.
The MLB offseason never moves at the speed of other offseasons, for reasons we’ve covered elsewhere. The idea that every top free agent would be off the market by the time the ball dropped in Times Square wasn’t only unrealistic, it was simply ignorant. But at the same time, that doesn’t excuse the notion that the offseason is slower than Florida snowbirds on a main road. Things are moving fine, and the likes of Bellinger and Tucker will sign at some point.
Of course, now we expect the Dodgers to crank up the speed and spend close to $1 billion in new contracts over the next month, but so it goes.