Why Yu Darvish’s trade is frightening to all of baseball

Twenty-nine baseball teams had the chance to get one of the best pitchers in the world for little more than a handful of tickets, and just one jump in. If the frozen free-agents market this winter wasn’t enough of a sign that Major League Baseball has a problem with competitiveness, Yu Darvish’s trade sent to the San Diego Padres a clear reminder that passivity isn’t just a field problem.

The Padres’ aggressiveness in dealing 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 being paralyzed by an ownership class that is the coronavirus pandemic. as an excuse to cut payroll. Money was the contributing factor in the Chicago Cubs, one of the sport’s jewel franchises, shipping Darvish, their best player in 2020, for a year from starter Zach Davies and four prospective clients, three of which were teenagers who didn’t turn pro at – bat and one a 20 year old with less than 300 in rookie ball.

Any criticism of the return is meaningless without elaborating on why a player from Darvish returned a relative pittance. The answer to that question links so many of the issues that should concern the game’s administrators: the complacency of too many franchises; Pandora’s Extended Playoffs Box; the poor appearance of all the highest-income teams in the game simultaneously practicing some version of austerity – and the combined effects on industrial relations with a collective bargaining agreement that expired less than a year after its expiration.