This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's Dec. 12 issue. Subscribe today!
The elation of the World Series is now behind us, and thus begins the season when every player joins the same team against an opponent that happens to pay them. Major League Baseball is on a tenuous 21-year streak of labor peace since the beginning of the last work stoppage, when the 1994 strike devastated the sport, destroyed the Montreal Expos and paved the way for the steroid era. Uncomfortable truths, all, but truths nevertheless.
The truths of the negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement (the current one expires Dec. 1) aren't necessarily heroic from the selfish eye of the fan, who couldn't care less about labor unless a lockout or a strike looms. It's players vs. owners, millions vs. billions. There don't appear to be any apocalyptic issues that would stop the game, but that doesn't mean a work stoppage won't occur.
The issues that would radically shape baseball for the better-determining once and for all whether the game continues down its path of everyday interleague play and, if so, whether it adds the DH to the National League or abolishes it in the American-are likely not on the table. Nor is the nonstarter of shortening the season to accommodate the increase of playoff teams (which has reduced the necessity of a 162-game season) and to avoid bad postseason weather. What is on the table is, in a sense, climate change. Baseball has slowly been trying to turn its culture closer to football's-look at how the commissioner's office has pushed for more power (see: Alex Rodriguez being suspended for a full season in 2014 during the Biogenesis scandal without failing a drug test), and witness the primacy of baseball's odious qualifying offer, which, although it might survive the negotiations, shouldn't.
On its face, the qualifying offer -- which can be extended to eligible free agents who have been with a team for the entire previous season -- seems to work for everyone. It mimics the NFL's franchise tag with one major exception: Unlike NFL players, MLB players can reject it -- and they have, roundly, over its four-year existence. In football, not one of the 27 quarterbacks in the Hall of Fame was ever a healthy, in-prime unrestricted free agent. In baseball, a player who has accepted the qualifying offer would earn $17.2 million for the 2017 season and would get to become an unrestricted free agent after. The player makes a lot of money and puts off free agency for a year. The team, meanwhile, doesn't have to compete for its own player but isn't tied to a long-term contract. A win-win, right?
Wrong. Since the inception of the new system in 2012, 64 qualifying offers have been made by teams, with only five accepted. This year Neil Walker of the Mets and Jeremy Hellickson of the Phillies accepted. The other eight players offered this year did not, aware of their worth on the open market. Yoenis Cespedes, for example, rejected the Mets' qualifying offer, knowing full well some team will likely commit to him for more than one year; in turn, the Mets will receive a draft pick from whatever team signs him.
The qualifying offer isn't destroying baseball, but it's not helping either because it continues to expose old wounds. The sport is a $10 billion industry and yet, 41 years and untold profits later, ownership still hasn't been willing to accept the concept of player movement without some form of compensation in return. The philosophy behind free agent compensation has always been specious: that if a team loses a player to free agency, it deserves compensation for having developed the talent. The counter is more sensible: Baseball controls a drafted player until he hits six years of service time. Then that player should be free to join the marketplace to shop his services, the debt to his club paid.
The gap between MLB philosophy and reality is wide. The qualifying offer is really designed to dampen free agency and depress salaries, to give teams pause before signing free agents because they don't want to lose the draft picks attached to signing one. On the other side, it discourages teams from retaining their own players with long-term deals and encourages them to acquire draft picks. A team, for example, that needs Cespedes might not sign him because it doesn't want to give up compensation, which means not doing what it takes to win. Winning, in fact, often falls a distant second to making and saving money. The pursuit of the World Series is the summer game. That game is over, giving way to the winter game: owners vs. players battling over money and control.