One of this off-season’s biggest surprises came when outfielder Dexter Fowler, who had reportedly signed a three-year, $35 million deal with the Baltimore Orioles, suddenly appeared in camp with his former team, the Chicago Cubs. Everyone assumed that negotiations had, at some point, broken down between Fowler’s agents and Baltimore, but nobody knew why. That is, until Monday.
As reported by Bill Baer of NBCSports.com, Fowler revealed in an interview with Peter Gammons exactly why he chose to leave a seemingly lucrative deal on the table. In short, the Orioles wanted Fowler to pay them the value of the draft pick they would lose by signing him. He said that he would, but wanted them to give him an opt-out after one year in return. The Orioles refused, and so Fowler returned to Chicago on a one-year, $13 million deal.
The culprit is the qualifying offer system. Because the Cubs had made a qualifying offer to Fowler, any team that signed him would have had to surrender their first unprotected draft pick in the following year’s draft. Those picks are not given to other teams; they just go away. The system has many purposes, but its main effect is to allow teams a chance to keep their free agents for less money by making it riskier for other teams to sign them. The qualifying offer is generally lower than the player’s market value and so allows the offering team to allocate money elsewhere while still giving them a chance to retain their free agents. In theory, competing teams will be more reluctant sign a player if they must lose a draft pick.
The problem is that the system works, and hurts players like Fowler in the process. The system has been in place since the 2012-13 off-season, yet prior to this year, no player had ever accepted a qualifying offer.
Fowler is a good player, well worth the $35 million the Orioles offered him. He is coming off a career-year with the Cubs, in which he set personal bests in hits, doubles, home runs, and RBI. And an opt-out is nothing that should have scared the Orioles away. Those clauses are so common these days they are almost boiler-plate in nature.
The loss of the draft pick is the issue. It has such a negative impact on the value of quality free agents, like Fowler, that it essentially precludes a fair negotiation process. How can a player negotiate for his actual value when an artificial weight, put in place to protect front offices, is dragging it down from the beginning? It doesn’t help matters that the weight just keeps getting heavier.
Draft picks are more valuable than ever, thanks to the rapidly ascending price tags attached to free agents. This off-season, we saw players like Zack Greinke and David Price sign for record dollar figures, numbers unthinkable just a few years ago. And the 2018 fee agent class, which features the likes of Jose Fernandez and Bryce Harper, is looming. Already, pundits are suggesting that it is not impossible that Harper could earn north of $400 million on his next deal.
While free agents of Fowler’s caliber will never be worth that much, the rising prices for the cream of the crop also allows lesser players to ask for more money. Building a team through the draft rather than free agency has been the calling card of organizations like the Oakland Athletics for years, but now, thanks to the higher costs of free agents, more and more organizations would rather look for reinforcements through other avenues. The bottom line is most rookies are just so much cheaper than most quality veterans, and can potentially provide similar production
Thus, all things considered, it’s hard to blame Baltimore for its extreme reluctance to lose a draft pick. That is, after all, exactly what the qualifying offer system was intended to cause. And with wealthier teams like the New York Yankees already gearing up to spend big in 2018, teams with fewer resources will need all the help they can get. Baltimore will almost certainly miss out on the best players that free agent class has to offer, and may have to pass on much of the middle of the class as well, since their asking prices will be driven up in proportion to those of the Bryce Harpers of the class. More draft picks between now and then means more opportunities to keep pace for a lower cost.
Its clear that the qualifying offer system should be changed. It simply isn’t fair to the players. While it did make it through the collective bargaining process, its possible that the players’ representatives simply did not fully understand the effect it would have on the players themselves, or that they had to agree to its inclusion in order to get the owners to agree on some other point. Whatever happened, the system is now harming players, and needs to be changed or removed.
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