How MLB Can (and should) Imitate NBA's Free Agency Madness
Originally Posted in the Florida Sports Report blog
So the free agency period for the NBA is set to begin on Sunday, and what is going to follow is mayhem to the likes we’ve probably never seen before.
Imagine if the season after Jordan first retired back in 1993, Pippen, Ewing, Olajuwon, Shaq, Penny, and Stockton were available to sign to a lengthy contract and improve your team’s fortunes. The chaos that it could have been, as the door was left wide open as a legacy disintigrated and for the first time in six years it wasn’t going to be the Bulls or the Pistons winning it all. Today, the Beast known as the Golden State Warriors was finally slayed, and for the time being will remain defeated for at least a season while key components (Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson) recover from injury granted they doesn’t leave. With Steph Curry missing two of among the greatest teammates you could ever possess, the door is wide wide open for the NBA Finals and the next champion. For all we know the Warriors could be back, but it would require for Steph Curry to play at his Peak MVP level to have a chance.
Can it be the Raptors as they convince the mysterious yet viciously talented Kawhi Leonard to remain and keep the championship lineup fully intact? Can it be the Rockets as they approach Jimmy Butler and try to convince him that he is their final and only hope before Harden and Paul have a fistfight in the middle of a preseason game? Can it be the Clippers or Nets, two franchises with dominant deep benches and missing a superstar to make the convincing push to the finals? What about the Lakers with LeBron, Davis, and potentially a third major talent seeking the max? Maybe even the Knicks and Celti---just kidding, they are screwed.
Let’s also not forget the Orlando Magic….yes I know how impossible it seems and how it’s clear I’m just illogically rooting for them.
But there are thousands of potential storylines that will emerge from Sunday 6:00 P.M., which keeps the NBA in the conversation with the Draft just occurring and the Finals still fresh in everyone’s minds. And with this off-season being even wilder than normal, it’s just helping the NBA make its push towards the silver medal in North American sports. The league currently holding said silver medal but on the brink to sharing or even losing it?
Major League Baseball: with no salary cap, no salary base, no draft lottery, and no free agency period. And with the strongest competitive balance amongst all the leagues making this all the more frustrating.
This decade has seen 24 of the 30 teams in Major League Baseball winning the division at some point. 26 of the 30 teams have made the playoffs as well, and this is with a smaller playoff window than the competitors. Then, we’ve seen 11 different World Series teams. During the 2000s, we had 15 of them. So this means there is indeed enough of a balance to allow the hope fester and marinade with the fanbases.
Despite baseball being more luck-based and less-reliant on individual talent, some players can indeed make a huge difference. The Astros had finally looked like a World Series contender after many bad years and a couple early playoff exits. But it was the Justin Verlander trade made at the deadline that truly put them over the top. If Mookie Betts had been injured during the 2018 playoffs, no way the Red Sox would have cruised through the postseason and the World Series. Special players creates special scenarios, and in time creates special storylines. But Major League Baseball has no good focus on creating headlines when it comes to talent signings and movement.
The 2019 off-season was a disaster, because it took months for Hall of Fame caliber talent to find a team, and it took even longer for good role players to find a home. Craig Kimbrel, despite the World Series win, lost a chunk of the regular season simply because all the general managers league-wide were playing hardball. Argue all you want about the closer position and its importance, take a team like the Rays as an example of the importance of modern-day baseball: they are 5-10 in one-run games. If they had reversed that, they would have the third-best record in the American League. But with no free agency window closing, they could bide their time, and what should be big news turns into throwaway lines. I bet everyone around here has forgotten that Mike Trout signed to what is basically a lifetime contract with the Los Angeles Angels.
If MLB wants to create better storylines while maintaining its salary cap-free ways and bring more starpower into the mainstream, they need a strict free agency signing period—a strict beginning and a strict deadline. Better yet, they need to schedule everything tighter, from the All-Star voting period (June) to the All-Star Game (July 4th, duh…) to the MLB Draft to even the regular season award ceremony. The NBA has created this culture of a schedule, with the NBA Draft, the NBA Awards, and the wild free agency period occurring within a month after the Finals----followed by the silently-expanding NBA Summer League. It feels like there is compelling basketball storylines year-round. MLB can create this, they just have to find a way to ease the calendar chaos.
To me, the Major League Baseball Free Agency Period should last from Black Friday to New Year’s Day with the Winter Meetings occurring the weekend before the final holidays of the year. With this schedule, you are guaranteed to know what your baseball team’s roster is going to be leading up to Spring Training. With the hard deadline, those teams that strike out on landing a talent in the off-season can know that their remaining options are within the farm system. If we want even more chaos, we can open up the free agency period for just a week during the All-Star Break to give teams in the playoff hunt a final chance to collect an extra player or two to boost the team’s fortunes. Now, MLB has that infamous stretch where the rosters expand for a period of time, under my proposal for two hardline free agency periods we can extend the expanded lineups to happen immediately after the All-Star Break.
With this idea in place, there is a storyline for Major League Baseball shortly after the World Series finishes in October, and it allows for speculation about lineups throughout the holidays, and then sets up a much clearer picture come January. The 2019 off-season was full of uncertainty, even during spring training because Bryce Harper and Manny Machado awkwardly had not landed a team at that point. Even known talent like Dallas Kerchel and Craig Kimbrel JUST landed deals a couple weeks ago. That can’t happen, you can’t expect the world to go crazy over Mike Trout’s $400 million payday and what it means to his legacy and what it means to the Los Angeles Angels if…..it happens on a random day. Putting a deadline on extensions and signings and trades would guarantee news making madness, especially in a league full of teams consistently on the cusp of being World Series caliber.
Major League Baseball with its massive length of season and abundance of talent is an embarrassment of riches that’s hard to keep track of. With a strict free agency period this packaging of madness can be better organized, better digested, and can be put under a more coherent spotlight for fans and sports journalists to follow. Because nowadays, Major League Baseball can use an ounce of the mad attention the NBA has been receiving from the sports media.
And P.S., Kawhi will be a Raptor, Durant will join the Knicks, Kyrie and Terence Ross joins the Lakers, Vucevic stays with the Magic, Kemba Walker remains with the Hornets, Russell stays with the Nets, Tobias Harris joins the 76ers, and Jimmy Butler will join THE MAGIC---kidding, he’ll join THE MAGIC----alright, alright, I’ll stop, I meant to say the Nets.