Unhappy with the way the 2009/2010 free agent market played out, the Major League Baseball Players Association is thinking about taking legal action:
Player’s Union Considering Collusion Charge Against Owners
NEW YORK (AP)—Baseball players may file a collusion grievance charging owners with conspiring against free agents last winter.
“We have concerns about the operation of the post-2009 free agent market,” new union head Michael Weiner said Tuesday in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “We have been investigating that market. Our investigation is far along but not yet complete.”
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Agents for players, without going into specifics, have claimed they received multiple similar offers for free-agent clients and have pushed the union to contest the practice.
On the one hand, it seems to be a flimsy argument. For one thing, salaries were driven down by a struggling economy. For another, across-the-board improvements in player evaluation and a greater understanding of the relationship between cost and value serve to reduce wild spending and draw offers closer together. And for a third, it's difficult to reconcile possible collusion with offseason contracts like the ones given to, say, Brandon Lyon and Matt Holliday. A more reasonable, sensible free agent market is unusual, but it is not, on its own, proof of wrongdoing.
On the other hand, writes Craig Calcaterra:
An industry source familiar with the collusion allegations tells me, however, that that this is not a case of teams merely using similar analytical approaches to reach similar valuations for free agents. Rather, the similar offers in question were frequently made to free agents by multiple teams virtually simultaneously, undercutting the notion that they were arrived at independently. More significantly, while the Commissioner’s Office has long -- and legally -- provided advice to individual clubs about how to value given players on the market, my source says that the recommendations have become more insistent in recent years and clubs are now sharing and discussing this information among themselves.
The investigation will continue, and we can not yet be certain how the union will proceed, but if what Calcaterra writes is correct, then there may very well be a fire beneath all the smoke. While it is possible, if not probable, that teams are only guilty of getting better at analysis, any aligning of player valuation between teams would seem to cross the line of collusion, and so, unlike in recent years - when allegations of collusion were dismissed - this time the union might just have a leg on which to stand.
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