Mike Check Blog
Good news for Braves in new labor deal
Braves GM John Coppolella and president of baseball ops John Hart say the club eventually will be major players in free agency. HYOSUB SHIN / HSHIN@AJC.COM
Dec 1, 2016
While the Braves were in Los Angeles this summer the Dodgers announced that they were eating the remaining $35 million on Carl Crawford’s salary while designating him for assignment. A few days before that the Dodgers DFA’d Alex Guerrero while eating $13 million. They’d already taken a $8.5 million hit on another DFA, Mike Morse. The Dodgers were already paying $14 million to Matt Kemp, who then was playing for the Padres. The year before they’d traded Hector Olivera to the Braves before he’d played for their big-league club, and after they’d paid him a $28 million signing bonus. . . .
You get the picture. The Dodgers—flush with the TV money that comes from playing in a major market where they are always popular—can afford to outspend their mistakes. They and other perpetually rich MLB clubs may still able to do that under the rules of the
five-year collective bargaining agreement tentatively reached on Wednesday
. But chances are that the increased penalties in the new CBA will force them to think a little harder about loose spending and (theoretically) make it harder for them to buy their way out of mistakes and then spend even more.
That should do nothing but help the Braves. They are building through their farm, as they should, but the Two Johns keep saying the club eventually is going to spend on free agents to fill holes on the big-league roster. The new CBA should make the Braves more competitive in that regard because it at least makes the mega-spending clubs think harder about overspending and it makes qualifying free agents a little more attractive to the Braves.
The luxury-tax threshold will not raise substantially under the new deal (from $185 million now to $210 million in the fifth year) and the penalty for mega-spending clubs will increase dramatically. The Associated Press reports that there will be a 12 percent surtax for teams $20 to $40 million over the luxury-tax threshold and a surtax as high as 90 percent for teams more than $40 million over the threshold—“think of it as a Dodger penalty” is how Joel Sherman of the New York Post puts it.
That can do nothing but help the Braves. They will never be able to outspend clubs like the Dodgers or spend their way out of mistakes. But the new CBA penalties means the four teams who already are over the 2017 tax limit (Dodgers, Yankees, Red Sox and Tigers) may eventually curb their spending. That would put more quality free agents on the market at prices that the Braves might actually be able to afford.
Another new CBA provision also should help the Braves with that. Teams under the tax threshold who sign free agents that turned down a qualifying offer from their old club will lose a third-round pick instead of a first. The first-round penalty for signing such players caused the Braves to shy away from them this offseason because they covet those draft picks.
The Braves, unlike the Dodgers, have to be careful with their spending. Their penance for the Olivera blunder was taking on even more money to acquire Matt Kemp. GM John Coppolella understandably sold that trade as the team paying $8.5 million more annually for Kemp over the next three years but really it should be viewed as paying $54 million for Kemp (see sunk cost fallacy). The Braves kept Dan Uggla around long after he was useful before finally eating $18-million plus. Eating the $15 million for Nick Swisher and $14 million for Michael Bourn was a big deal for the Braves, even if that money was offset by the Chris Johnson trade with the Indians.
Those kind of deals still would hurt the Braves under the new CBA but now clubs like the Dodgers will feel a little more pain for their own bad contracts. Eventually the tighter spending decisions of the richer clubs should trickle down market to benefit the Braves.
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