From the Windup is FanHouse's extended look at a particular portion of America's pastime.
Baseball has a dirty c-word that's not ever thrown around lightly -- collusion. It made a brief appearance on the stage earlier this year when Barry Bonds couldn't find a team, despite still being a better hitter than most of the players that suited up this year. No one is mentioning it yet this offseason, but after a very slow start to free agency and an odd slew of good players not being offered arbitration, I have a feeling we're going to hear a lot more about it in the very near future.
I suppose it's wisest to start this off with a bit of a primer on collusion. In the simplest terms, collusion in baseball is when the owners work together to suppress the salaries of the players. It's nothing new in baseball; there was no Collective Bargaining Agreement before 1968 and the owners could basically pay the players whatever they wanted. I don't know if there's direct evidence of collusion pre-1968, but it seems almost certain that the teams were working together to keep player salaries down.
When the CBA and free agency came in to the game, things changed rapidly. Player salaries went through the roof and some teams started spending money wildly. By 1979, the Pittsburgh Pirates had made Dave Parker the first $1-million-per-season player. Needless to say, the owners were not pleased with this development.
As a result, the owners (under the guidance of then commissioner Peter Ueberroth) got together in the '80s and tried to drive salaries down, which is really exactly why collusion is legal. For a full rundown of the 80s collusion, Maury Brown wrote a chapter about it for Rob Neyer's book and that chapter is available for download at his blog. The short story, though, is that things were bad enough that at one point George Steinbrenner made an offer to Carlton Fisk (then of the White Sox), only to rescind it after a phone call from Jerry Reinsdorf. The owners' plan briefly worked as salary increases slowed and shrunk, but in the end the players filed three grievances (known as Collusion I, Collusion II, and Collusion III) and won a $280 million judgment against the owners. One would assume that such a hefty penalty would keep the owners from attempting such a stunt again, but I suppose baseball owners aren't known for being the sharpest knives in the drawer, especially when compared to the MLBPA. During the winters prior to the 2002 and 2003 seasons, free agent signings were slow. Very slow. So very slow that guys like Kenny Lofton and Reggie Sanders ended up playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2003 for salaries of around $1 million. When the CBA was re-negotiated in 2006, the owners agreed to pay the players $12 million in response to the charge of collusion in those offseasons without actually admitting guilt.
OK -- the history lesson is over. What does this have to do with this offseason? For starters, a slow beginning to the free agency period is a hallmark of collusion. In 1985, the year of Collusion I, only four free agents signed with new teams and that was because their original teams didn't want them back. Nothing like this will happen in the winter of 2008-2009, but when Bob Howry is the biggest name to ink a contract three weeks before Christmas, it's a sign that something might be up.
The owners are claiming that that something that's up is the economy and that the economic downturn is why the market is so slow. I suppose this is possible. But even then, does it explain the Yankees not offering Bobby Abreu arbitration? Or the Diamondbacks not offering it to Adam Dunn? CC Sabathia's $140 million offer from the Yankees means we're clearly not operating in a market like the ones in the 80s, but if a bunch of owners all simultaneously decided not to offer arbitration to people for the same reason, what's to say the same thing won't happen with free agency?
Actually, thinking about this whole situation brings up some interesting questions. We can assume that the economic recession is affecting all of the owners, so if one makes a public statement about not offering arbitration or backs out of a negotiation citing a similar concern, isn't that a not so subtle message to other owners to keep the salaries down? I'm aware that it seems like I'm reaching for something here, but all of the problems in the 80s started with Ueberroth telling the owners that their revenues were down, implying that they should work together to hold salaries down and bring revenues back up. Is this really all that different?The interesting thing to watch will be how the big market clubs operate. As Maury Brown points out at Baseball Prospectus today, some of the big clubs like the Yankees, Red Sox, and Mets won't suffer nearly as much as the medium and smaller market clubs. How will the market affect them? How will they claim the market is affecting them?
At this point, it's still far to early to accuse anyone of collusion. Still, there are some early signs that are worth keeping an eye on as this off-season wears on through the recession.
