Mr. January is a nickname bestowed on Boras by owners flabbergasted by his propensity to snag large free-agent deals after New Year’s Day. Boras, long the sport’s villain, is the protagonist in this tussle, because baseball’s new rules governing the draft have destroyed the free-agent market for Adam LaRoche, Kyle Lohse, Michael Bourn and Rafael Soriano – the latter three of whom are Boras clients…
The new draft format included fixed bonus pools for teams based on the previous year’s record; the worst teams would get the most money. A separate rule transformed compensation for free agents who left. Teams would have to offer a player a one-year deal worth the average of the highest-paid 125 players in the major leagues the previous season – about $13.3 million this year. If another team chose to sign one of those players, it would forfeit its first-round draft choice and the bonus-pool money that came with it – unless it was a top 10 pick, in which case it would lose its second-rounder and the accompanying bonus value…
The pool system limits flexibility and creativity, leaving teams even more reticent to plunge into an already-inflated free-agent market when it’s tied to the draft.
“We’d love any of them if we didn’t have to give up our pick and pool money,” one GM said this week, and others have echoed his sentiment, frustrated that two disparate entities commingle in such fashion. Players are even angrier, and agents say they’ve had trouble explaining how stars in the future could be hindered by a rule that MLB promises it did not implement to create a false market…
When Zack Greinke and Anibal Sanchez got get-out-of-jail-free cards because they were traded midseason – only players who spend the whole season with one team are subject to compensation rules – and the interest in Edwin Jackson dwarfs that of Lohse, the system is broken. There’s a chance Mr. January weasels out of it like he has so many other problems. There’s also a chance some of the best players out there have to pull a Ryan Madson and take a one-year deal, and we saw how well that worked out.
Four players flap in the middle of this hurricane, which seems to spin with no end. Per usual, MLB and Scott Boras, the provoked and the provocateur, are in its ugly eye.
