Twenty-nine baseball teams had the chance to get one of the best pitchers in the world for just over a handful of tickets, and just one jumped on him. If this winter’s frozen free market wasn’t a sufficient sign that Major League Baseball has an anti-competitive problem, Yu Darvish’s trade sent to the San Diego Padres a grim reminder that passivity isn’t just a problem in the field. field.
The Padres’ aggressiveness in negotiating with Darvish and former Cy Young winner Blake Snell over a 24-hour period is in stark contrast to the vast majority of the rest of the sport, which is paralyzed by a class of owners who use of the coronavirus pandemic. as an excuse to cut payroll. Money was the driving factor for the Chicago Cubs, one of the sport’s most iconic franchises, to send Darvish, their best player in 2020, away from starter Zach Davies and four prospects for a year, three of them teens who aren’t. have done. had a professional at bat and a 20-year old with less than 300 in the rookie league.
Any criticism of the switch payout is empty without a deeper dive into why a player of Darvish’s class brought relative misery. The answer to that question links many of the issues that game managers should be concerned about: the complacency of too many franchises; Pandora’s Box of Extended Playoffs; the poor appearance of all top-earning teams in the game simultaneously practicing some version of austerity, and the combined effects on industrial relations with a collective bargaining agreement less than a year after it ends.