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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: Penny Wise, $2.5 Million Foolish
Vol. 16, No. 137
January 10, 2025
Yesterday was the deadline for teams and players to swap figures for arbitration. This always leads to a spate of one-year contract agreements. Arbitration isn’t about the process itself. It’s about forcing both sides to negotiate. Nevertheless, in 17 cases, the team and player couldn’t agree on a deal. The filing figures make it clear how little ground there is between the sides in so many of these disputes. Of the 17 disagreements, 11 have spreads of less than a half a million dollars, with Luis Rengifo filing at just $150,000 more than the Angels did.
The biggest gap is between Kyle Tucker and the Cubs. Tucker, coming off an injury-riddled season, filed at just $17.5 million, while the Cubs offered $15 million. Tucker was worth almost five wins in half a season last year, and has been worth five to six wins in each of his three full seasons. On the market, he’d approach a salary of $50 million a year on a long-term deal.
Here’s a longish excerpt, from early 2023, about how I feel about this situation in general.
A few weeks back, a subscriber reached out on Twitter to ask my opinion of the Brewers’ roughing up Corbin Burnes in the player’s arbitration hearing. Burnes was explicit afterward:
"There's no denying that the relationship is definitely hurt from what [transpired] over the last couple weeks. There's really no way of getting around that."
I don’t doubt that Burnes’s feelings were hurt in the room, where the Brewers painted his ace-like performance for them in 2022 -- 2.94 ERA in 202 innings, 4 bWAR, some downballot Cy Young votes -- in the worst light possible as a means of saving $740,000 in salary. While the arbitration process is a net good for baseball, eliminating holdouts and forcing both sides to present reasonable demands, the hearings themselves are contentious. With most teams now taking the position that they won’t negotiate after figures are exchanged, a practice known as “file and trial,” their hardline stance naturally extends to the hearing room.
Where I differ from many is in thinking that there are ramifications to these interactions. Plenty of players have been stung by what they’ve heard in arbitration, then gone on to play well and even stay with their teams in the long term. Corbin Burnes doesn’t play for the executives of the Brewers, he plays for himself and his family and his teammates and Brewers fans, he plays to win championships and make money. He’s a professional, and I do not see any way he’ll be less professional because he got dunked on in a conference room.
Moreover, I don’t anticipate any long-term effects. Burnes won’t be a free agent until after the 2024 season, and if the Brewers make him a market-value offer to stay past that, he’ll probably accept it, because the math of “stay healthy for another 400 innings” is worse than “stay mad for another two years.” The Brewers didn’t burn any chance to get Burnes for less than that because the concept of the “hometown discount” is nonsense. Corbin Burnes is from California, not Wisconsin, and calls Milwaukee home now because the Brewers were the only team that he was allowed to negotiate with out of college. “Drafttown discount” is what we’re talking about here. “Carteltown discount.”
Burnes would have a good season for the Brewers before being traded to the Orioles, so we don’t know how Milwaukee's attempt to sign him to an extension would have played out. Still, over time, I don’t see much evidence that playing hardball with a young player changes a team’s chance of retaining him in the long term.
The Cubs, though, are in a much different situation with Tucker. They have no relationship with him, and they’re introducing themselves by haggling over whether to underpay Tucker by 60% or 65%. They are already getting him for 2025 at a steep discount from what his talent and performance warrant after Tucker missed three months last season with a broken shin. Rather than accept this gift, they’re squabbling over nickels and setting themselves up to start this relationship in a conference room where they will talk about the reasons Kyle Tucker isn’t worth what he wants to be paid.
Moreover, they’re doing this when Tucker’s decision on whether he wants to stay with the Cubs isn’t some abstraction -- it’s right around the corner. When a team does this with a pre-arb player, I think “time heals all wounds.” With Tucker, there’s not going to be enough time for healing; he will become a free agent about eight months after his arbitration hearing. Time, in this case, will wound all heels. Whatever the Cubs’ chances of getting Tucker to sign a long-term deal are, they can’t be helped by their efforts to fight him for $2.5 million right out of the gate.
What makes this more exasperating is that the Cubs have already, in the sequence that led to this moment, shaved an incredible amount off their payroll. By effectively trading Cody Bellinger and Isaac Paredes for Tucker, they knocked about $12 million off the 2025 payroll. Overall, the Cubs’ projected 2025 cash payroll is $47 million less than the 2024 payroll. They’re going to battle with Tucker before ever seeing him in a Cubs uniform over about 1.5% of the payroll, about 0.5% of the team’s revenue.
Some defended the Bellinger trade, which was a joke from a baseball standpoint, with the claim that the Cubs would use the money they would have paid Bellinger on other players. That was always stupid because the Chicago Cubs have no reason to economize; this roster with Bellinger would still be $40 million below the first tax threshold.
More relevant, though, was that there was no reasonable place to spend the money unless they signed Burnes. If you look at the free-agent market today, the best available player is Alex Bregman, and the Cubs can’t sign him without perma-blocking Matt Shaw, given the contract Nico Hoerner has. Then it’s a fall-off to a bunch of #3 starters and #5 hitters with terrible risk profiles. The last free agent the Cubs could really use is Tanner Scott, who will probably make about $15 million a year on his next deal.
Can they trade for an expensive player? Dylan Cease, the best starting pitcher rumored to be available, just settled for $13.8 million with the Padres. You didn’t need to trade Bellinger to add that. It doesn’t look like the Astros will trade Framber Valdez now, and he’s also not terribly expensive. Luis Castillo is the most expensive starter available at about $23 million a year. The Cubs match up pretty well with the Padres and Mariners, who both need hitters. None of these pitchers, though, would be burdens on the payroll.
The Cubs going to the mattresses with Kyle Tucker for the right to underpay him by just a little more underlines that their entire winter hasn’t been about getting better, but about getting less expensive. The Cubs’ projected payroll is 13th in MLB, and there aren’t good ways for it to go much higher. We’re not going to do the breakdown today, but for that money they have a miserable bench, are relying on a rookie to take over at third base (backed up by a Rule 5 pick who has never played above Double-A), a sophomore whose hit tool is a question mark in center, a double-play combination coming off surgeries, and a #4 starter who hasn’t thrown 80 innings in a season since 2019.
This isn’t a serious franchise any longer. Maybe it’s best for Kyle Tucker that he’s learned that as quickly as possible.
