High-profile MLB agent Scott Boras has a lot to say about competitive balance in Major League Baseball, and he’s hoping to put pressure on both sides to address it in upcoming CBA negotiations.
Boras criticized the industry’s “competitive hibernation,” and called on the next CBA to include some sort of mechanism to mandate competition going forward.
Scott Boras: “The industry is in a competitive hibernation.”
— Tim Britton (@TimBritton) November 13, 2019
Boras: “Competition has to be mandated in the next CBA.”
— Tim Britton (@TimBritton) November 13, 2019
Boras has a vested interest in this, of course. A third of the league lost 90 or more games in 2019, and four of those ten teams lost over 100. To make matters worse, interest in top free agents was limited due to only a handful of teams making moves to aggressively compete in the near term, which played a role in the likes of Bryce Harper, a Boras client, not signing on with a new team until after spring training had started. The market was so limited that one star player admitted he signed an extension with his current team partially because he saw what happened to Harper and Manny Machado on the open market.
It’s not really clear how one would give the mandate Boras wants. People will suggest a salary cap, but that doesn’t help much when the issue is many teams not spending aggressively. One thing is for sure: the players share Boras’ concerns, and that could mean bad news for the sport’s labor peace going forward.
