This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.
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"It’s the difference between league action and team action, a dichotomy that has played out many times before. When free agency began in the 1976-77 offseason, the league decried the process collectively and then the individual teams went out and signed players like madmen. Collusion in the 1980s, which had successfully crippled the market for free agents, cracked when some teams began misreporting their free-agent offers to a central database and secretly trying to sign other teams’ players. In 1996, Jerry Reinsdorf was both a labor hawk...well, he still is...in negotiations with the union, and the guy making Albert Belle the highest-paid player in baseball."