Baseball's owners seem unwilling to budge on paying players more than about a third of their 2020 salaries. But in the interests of compromise, they offered the union a carrot this week.
Too bad it's rotten.
MLB's proposed 76-game season for 50-75 percent of prorated pay included the elimination of draft-pick compensation, long a bone of contention among players who feel it depresses the markets of all but the highest-tier free agents.
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On the surface, the offer looks like a meaningful concession. In reality, it's cynically irrelevant, because if players think a robust free agent market awaits them this winter, they're living a fantasy.
Players suspect, but can't prove, that owners have colluded to depress free-agent deals in recent years. When Red Sox slugger J.D. Martinez hit the market in 2017 after blasting a career-high 45 homers, for instance, he sat on Boston's five-year, $110 million offer all winter before finally signing in February. He never received a meaningful proposal from anyone else. All he has done since is make a pair of All-Star teams while averaging 40 homers a year.
Because Martinez had been traded halfway through the 2017 season, a draft pick was not attached to his free agency. It didn't matter. He languished anyway.
The pick has impacted other free agents, though. Neither former AL Cy Young Award winner Dallas Keuchel nor All-Star reliever Craig Kimbrel signed until after last year's draft, because no one wanted to surrender the pick to add them during the offseason.
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Giving those players the flexibility to choose a team without any strings attached would theoretically improve their markets this winter. But considering how bruising the fight has been to return to action in 2020, with players demanding at least a half season of games at fully prorated pay, and management consistently making offers that limit them to around 33 percent of their original earnings, the players are in denial if they think free agency will play out under the old economic rules.
Owners won't even have to collude to drive prices down. Players may be skeptical of how vociferously the owners cry poor, but there's no denying the damage the pandemic has wreaked on their bottom lines, especially without the gate that typically makes up about 40 percent of revenues.
It's implausible that owners hellbent on cutting costs now plan to return to business as usual this winter. Much of the world will still be locked down when a second wave of coronavirus could blast us, and it remains unclear when fans will be allowed to fill ballparks again.
So yes, in a vacuum, a lack of compensation should hearten any potential free agent. But talk about an empty gesture — it won't matter if owners plan on turning free agency into a wasteland.