Brandon Moss calls out MLBPA for letting owners take advantage of them

As you might have seen written in this space and elsewhere at SB Nation over the past few weeks, MLB’s owners are engaging in what we’ve dubbed a “legalized” form of collusion: The cartoonish villainy of the collusion of the ’80s has been replaced by a far more subtle force that has given nearly all power to the owners over the past couple of decades.

The players are responsible for this happening as well, as they’ve been outnegotiated by ownership again and again. Veteran slugger Brandon Moss, recently traded to the A’s, was on MLB Network on Wednesday, and pointed out that the players need to take responsibility for their actions in making this offseason happen the way it has.

This isn’t Moss siding with ownership — far from it. This is a veteran who has job security in the moment using a major baseball platform to speak directly to his fellow players, to plead with them to stop making the mistakes they’ve been making. Transcription courtesy MLB Trade Rumors:

“My career’s almost finished, so I don’t have to deal with this much longer, but the worry is there for me for players in the future that enough attention is not being paid to the way we allow our system to be run. I feel like we put more things that are of less value at the forefront.

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But what we’ve done is we have incentivized owners, we have incentivized teams to say ’We don’t want to meet that price. It costs us too much to meet that price. It costs us draft picks. It costs us international signing money.

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We’re going to have to pay a tax if we go over a certain threshold’ that we (the players) set ourselves... And the only reason those things are there is because we bargained them in.

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You have to be willing to dig your heels in a little bit — fight for the things the guys in the past have fought for. I just hate to see players like me taking advantage of a system that was set up for me, by other players, and not passing it along to the next generation of players.

Moss is 100 percent correct. This was all avoidable, had the MLBPA been less willing to aim for labor peace and amenities, and more willing to fight hard for everything, big or small, as Marvin Miller used to when the union was first getting off the ground. Instead, the MLBPA leveraged away the rights of future members — amateurs, international players, minor-league players — in exchange for, in theory, better free agent payouts.

Now, we’re in an offseason where a potential superstar like Shohei Ohtani is only getting the league minimum after signing with the Angels for a capped international bonus figure; where one of the very best hitters in the game, J.D. Martinez, still can’t find a reasonable offer with less than two weeks to go before spring training; where Yu Darvish can’t sign with either of the teams he would like to (the richest out there, the Yankees and Dodgers), despite their having a need for a starter of his caliber, because they “need” to clear salary in order to avoid paying the luxury tax. Moss is right: The players let this happen.

That doesn’t mean the players should just deal with the situation they find themselves in by signing whatever is put in front of them — that’s how they got here in the first place. The MLBPA needs to dig its heels in, as Moss said: Fight now, fight later, and stop giving away the major gains the players that came before earned by not giving in to the owners and the lie of labor peace.