Time for an NBA-style signing deadline? Why MLB’s free-agent frenzy should be an annual event

MLB

It was fun while it lasted.

For two glorious weeks, we got a glimpse of what baseball’s hot stove season could look like if allowed to flower to its full potential. It began with a few trickles in the middle of November — an Eduardo Rodriguez here, a Noah Syndergaard there — and two weeks later was a full-blown gusher. The signings came so fast it was dizzying, in a good way.

Then, at the end of the first day of December, the fire hose of transactions stopped, as if someone forgot to pay the water bill. Since then, it’s been crickets, save for a few minor league invites. All we’re left with are the last publicly issued, self-serving statements from both sides of baseball’s great money dispute echoing through streets that only a few days ago were filled with shouts and laughter.

Or, to put it in less grandiose terms: An offseason that was so much fun has suddenly turned into a major bummer. Thank goodness for Sunday’s glorious announcements from the Hall of Fame.

Now that baseball’s offseason has been halted by the great cosmic pause button, let’s take a moment to acknowledge that baseball stumbled onto something pretty great when it spurred a frenzy of activity in advance of a jarring shutdown we all knew was coming. Why not learn from that and make an MLB free-agent deadline an annual event?

There have been a lot of topics centered on changes that might or should be made in baseball to better position the sport for the future. Most of those have involved changes to the product on the field, and they have been divisive, as change invariably is, but worth discussing.

In his news conference last week, commissioner Rob Manfred said, “We did not make any specific rule change proposals. We’re in the process of still evaluating changes. Frankly, based on the discussions at the table, we saw it as another contentious issue and tried to put it to one side in order to get to an agreement, in the theory that we could get to it mid-term of the next agreement.”

In other words, changes to the game itself are right now of a lower priority than the economic structures that overlay the industry. Thus the idea of a transaction deadline, which has become a popular one over the past couple of weeks as we’ve seen how it could play out, is currently, at best, a side issue and might not be discussed at all.

So it will be up to us to remember, remember the moves of November, because that is how a vibrant offseason is supposed to look.

For me, the two-week period from the E-Rod signing in Detroit to the CBA’s expiration was a prolonged case of déjà vu because it was reminiscent of the opening of the free-agency period in the NBA, my beat during the first half of the 2010s. It’s all relative, as the pace of moves still didn’t quite match the NBA’s, but compared to the usual flow of a baseball offseason, it was like an avalanche.

It’s great. By the time you consider one major move and what it means and what the teams in question need to do in response, another major move has taken place. And for every actual move you get, three others are rumored.

The drama does more than engage seamheads, because everyone loves moves. At a time of the year when the eyes of most general sports enthusiasts are fixed on football or the nascent basketball season, baseball was earning ears, eyeballs and clicks. It was doing so at a time of the year that is normally a dead period on the baseball calendar, unless you’re just really into the non-tender deadline.

Baseball, as an industry, needs to make this a baked-in feature of its offseason. The stir it created over that two-week period, especially in the days leading up to the lockout, came despite the fact that no one was really quite prepared for it to happen. Oh, there was some foreshadowing, as reporters such as ESPN’s Jeff Passan told us that there could be heavy movement in free agency before the expiration of the CBA. Still, seeing that actually come to pass was equal parts stunning, exhilarating and exhausting.

Now, imagine what it would be like if we actually knew there was going to be a spate of activity like that every November and/or December? Like the trade deadline, only way better. MLB could promote it. Media outlets could cover the heck out of it both in advance and while it’s unfolding. Teams could arrange access accordingly. Such a period would very soon become one of the favorite times of the year on the baseball calendar.

While it does recall the buzz that always surrounds NBA free agency, that dynamic could never be fully replicated in baseball because the dynamics of the sport are so different. Part of the reason the NBA works like it does has to do with its own CBA, which includes a salary cap, midlevel exceptions and other roster-related mechanisms that are ultimately tied to league revenue. The transaction moratorium in that sport exists to prevent teams from making under-the-table agreements before signings can be made official.

Baseball isn’t structured like that and likely never will be, but something that is an echo of the NBA model could work.

There are a lot of ways it could be structured, but the one date that is a clear end point is the last day of the winter meetings. Given what we have witnessed time and again when baseball’s executives operate against a hard deadline, making that date the start of a transaction moratorium would turn the winter meetings into the crown jewel of the baseball offseason, as they are intended to be.

We know this largely because of the trade deadline. For weeks in advance, we get rumors and speculation about possible deals, and try to classify teams as adders or subtractors. Then very little happens until the hours, minutes and, often, seconds leading up to the hard deadline. If we instituted a similar offseason deadline for, say, 5 p.m. ET on the last day of the winter meetings, you could imagine a similar dynamic.

So when would the moves start and when could they resume?

On the former, I’d say about a week after the end of the World Series, maybe 10 days. That’s not much different from the way it works now. However, the way things are now, players become free agents more or less as soon as the World Series ends — even if you’re on the team that wins it all. I’d like to see a three-day delay there to at least give the winning team and its fans a short window to just bask in their hard-earned glory. Let them enjoy a parade, for goodness’ sake. After that, you’d want to continue the practice of giving an exclusive negotiating window to a free agent’s most recent club, say seven to nine days.

That puts us roughly into the middle of November, which sounds about right. The end of the winter meetings typically falls somewhere in the second week of December. So you’re looking at a three-plus-week window for baseball’s major moves to be made. If the dynamic is similar to this year’s, it would flow about the same, with a few moves growing into a lot of moves the closer we get to the deadline.

Not every frenzy period would be like 2021, because this was a very strong free-agent class. They aren’t all like this. But you could hope that markets similar to the winter of 2018-19 could be avoided. That one was a drag, when the top players from the class (Bryce Harper and Manny Machado) didn’t sign until after spring training began.

That wasn’t an accident. The union, players and their agents often see the protraction of time as one of their best sources of leverage. Wait it out, because there is (almost) always a better deal to be had around the corner. Sorry, but I’m not buying it. All of the dynamics in play under the existing system would still be there but in a condensed form.

The behavior of the Mets during this year’s frenzy is the perfect example of this. Think about the sequence of events. The first few major moves all involved premier starting pitchers — E-Rod, Syndergaard, Justin Verlander (though his reported signing with Houston has never been officially announced).

The Mets were reportedly factors in that facet of the market and missed out. We know they missed out on an attempt to bring Steven Matz back to New York because of the pique owner Steve Cohen expressed on social media.

In at least a partial response, the Mets moved to sign three position regulars in one day — Mark Canha, Starling Marte and Eduardo Escobar — and later blew the market away with a three-year, $130 million deal with future Hall of Fame starter Max Scherzer. The trio of position players might have also been slight overpays, though not in an egregious way. Would any of this have happened by Dec. 1 had the Mets and the rest of the industry not been operating on a contending timeline?

And for the players: How much extra did Scherzer get because of the Mets’ desire to be bold, and the shrinking window of time they had to express that desire?

Now that it’s done, in normal times the Mets would get to promote their new-look lineup and a starting rotation topped by possibly the two most dynamic pitchers in baseball in Scherzer and Jacob deGrom. And they would get to do that for the next two months, as the Rangers would get to market Corey Seager, Marcus Semien and Jon Gray, and the Tigers would get to entice their fans with Javier Baez and Rodriguez.

Finally, even if an offseason transaction deadline is not the ideal outcome for the agents or players or even the teams, don’t we sometimes have to do something simply because it’s in the best interests of the sport once in a while?

During a moratorium, all moves would not cease. Teams could still offer minor league invites, for example, as long as we’re being strict about what a minor league contract looks like. And I’d open a second window of negotiation between players and their former teams during the moratorium. Give continuity a second chance, especially after some players find that the money isn’t necessarily greener on the other side.

We’d also want some degree of trade conversation to be allowed between executives. General managers always talk about how laying the groundwork for deals is often a gradual process. And we don’t want to delay the execution of the trades too long, because it’s not fair to the players, who have to arrange their lives around where they play. In any overhaul to the transaction calendar, we’ll have to have different standards and different deadlines for different kinds of moves.

Then I’d reopen for full business on Feb. 1. That might seem too extreme in terms of its lateness, but I really want to put the pressure on that end-of-the-winter-meetings deadline to get things done. With Feb. 1, teams still have some time before spring training to make moves.

It’s possible that a premier free agent might decide to wait out a moratorium, but it would be risky if normal practice becomes that teams do the majority of their offseason spending before the hiatus takes effect. Basically, once we get to Feb. 1, we want to start putting our attention on the season to come, not the offseason. There will always be the possibility of a straggler or two.

Look, there isn’t much that has been great about this lockout, and confrontations like this are inherently going to generate negative rhetoric because praising the ideas of the other side, whatever side that might be, isn’t a good negotiating tactic.

We don’t need to see another lockout after this one is settled, but that free-agency frenzy? We need to make that a permanent part of the baseball calendar.

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