MLB: Could Anonymous American League GM Just be Driving Up the Price on Bryce?
By Jason Burke
A couple of days ago over at ESPN, an anonymous American League General Manager was quoted as saying of Bryce Harper, “He’s going to get paid. Like paid, paid.” Could this GM just be trying to up the ante around MLB in order to help out their team?
It’s no secret that Bryce Harper is pretty good at baseball. It’s also no secret that he’s going to make lots and lots of money when he hits free agency. The two things that we don’t know are how much it’s going to take to lure Harper and which team is going to make him the focal point of their payroll for many, many years to come.
With the amount of money that will be on the table, the teams that will be able to afford Harper’s services is fairly limited. In the AL, you have the usual suspects in the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, while in the NL, we could see Washington make an attempt at re-signing their star, but Los Angeles would be a more likely destination. Other teams to consider would be the Cubs, who already have stars and plenty of outfield depth, but this is Bryce Harper so who knows, and perhaps a current rebuilding team like the Phillies makes a big play to get them over the top.
The trend in baseball has been to develop players from within, acquiring talent through the MLB Draft and on the international market, then having years of control at relatively low prices. When a free agent like Harper comes around, however, that could all go out the window.
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Four hundred million. That’s the price tag that has been floated since at least 2015. Now, that figure could be increasing by another hundred million dollars, per the ESPN report, which got me thinking: If I were a GM of a smaller market team, I’d like my competition to sink a large portion of their payroll into one player.
There are a few small market teams in the American League, but for some reason the phrasing “He’s going to get paid. Like paid, paid” just feels very Oakland. Could this be a combo of Billy Beane/David Forst trying to set the bar a little higher for the Yankees or Red Sox? Perhaps.
Say you’re the Red Sox. You have all of this young talent and a GM that isn’t afraid to wheel and deal prospects in order to acquire big name players like he did this past winter in getting Chris Sale. Your biggest rival, the Yankees, are in the middle of a rebuild but still lead you in the division by a game. If Harper hit the market right this very moment, would there be a little extra incentive to add him to your lineup? Hell yeah. If Dave Dombrowski keeps trading away his top talent in the farm system, at some point it would have to dry up a little bit, right? So maybe, just maybe, locking up a large chunk of money while banking on Dombrowski to keep on trading his young, controllable talent, isn’t such a bad idea.
I mean, sure, you’d still have to play and/or beat the Red Sox with Harper, but if you believe in your personnel, or think that adding Harper means less talent around him, then that could be less of a problem than one might think.
It’s hard to imagine an AL GM just offering up how much money he thinks Harper will make without an ulterior motive, and it would make no sense to try to up that price tag if you’re going to be one of the teams bidding on him. This just feels like a mind game being played, and that they want someone to go over the luxury tax and be hit by the stiff penalties under the new CBA.
Or at least that’s how I would play it if I had fewer resources that the big market clubs that will be under large amounts of pressure to make a splash that winter.