Yet, for all this, Lewis Brinson will not earn more than the league minimum MLB salary in 2018, if he reaches the MLB once again. Moreover, despite being a player that many analysts and fans feel is so central to the roster building efforts of Milwaukee’s front office that they opposed nearly any (or every) trade scenario involving Brinson, the Brewers’ top prospect has no recourse to extract additional salary from the Brewers. Milwaukee reserves his contractual rights for at least six more years, during which Brinson’s best chance to earn additional cash is after his third year of service (when the CF will enter salary arbitration).

What is problematic about this is that Brinson does indeed provide the Brewers with their best odds at a 4.6+ WARP player; surveying history through Baseball Prospectus CSV  defines 4.63 WARP as the threshold for an elite season, with 2.28 percent of all MLB seasons resulting in such production. Yet, surveying a sample of one particular prospect class suggests that a Top 300 Organizational prospect has closer to 6.35 percent odds of producing such an elite season. Using these surveys, Brinson’s Bayesian odds of producing one 4.6+ WARP season price out at $2.6 million value for the Brewers (Silver, 2015 [2012], Chapter 8). Unfortunately for Brinson, he will be lucky to earn one fifth of that amount in 2017.

Lewis Brinson is an extremely underpaid player even before he delivers on his five-tool potential.

This is the lifeblood of MLB ownership at the moment: for the Brewers, keeping Brinson in center field is one reason the club does not need to sign an elite free agent like Lorenzo Cain. The slow offseason received fine treatment by Yahoo! Sports’ Jeff Passan, whose feature seeking answers about potential collusion regarding the free agency markets is a must read. Passan does not stop with MLB owners, but also surveys agents, front office trends, and MLB Players Association practices, ultimately drawing conclusions about how many trends within the Collective Bargaining landscape have produced the current market for free agents. Passan’s reporting work supplants Kiley McDaniel’s recent reflection on front office culture from a first person perspective, and both features outline an industry that is reeling due to extremely similar valuation systems across MLB front offices, little pressure to win from ownership groups (or “Tank Hungry” fans!), and a general sea change in attitudes about free agency (from both players and front offices).

For players working two generations into Marvin Miller’s landscape, Passon notes that there is little urgency to fight for every dollar any longer, as players recently saw workplace amenities to be more crucial than bottom line fights. For General Managers working within the era of institutionalized analytics, those free agency contracts for players in their 30s are off limits. And anyway, why spring for a stopgap in their 30s for millions of dollars when you can hunt for the next Jonathan Villar?

Veteran righty Brandon McCarthy provided a fantastic summary of the free agency contract culture, and the significance of the current offseason’s impasse:

because if you’re not overpaying when older after drastically underpaying when younger, then…?

— Brandon McCarthy (@BMcCarthy32) January 18, 2018

Absent from the forefront of this debate are the criminally underpaid MLB minor leaguers. These underpaid professional baseball players are becoming ever more important in the industry, as front offices seek to gamble on returns of quantity via trade, since their rival GMs have such similar valuation systems (cf. McDaniel), and as front offices turn away from players in their 30s in order to gamble on younger production at the MLB level. This practice by MLB front offices has the convenient outcome of inverting the relationship that Brandon McCarthy discusses, basically shredding the social contract that recognizes professional players are underpaid for the first decade (or more) of their careers and therefore seek service-based compensation through the free agency market.

Of course, minor league players are also underpaid because the MLBPA has become a union that is more concerned with protecting a small, elite group of MLB players, rather than a large group of all professional baseball players working within affiliated ball. The MLBPA will happily sell minor leaguers down the river with promises of huge rewards once those players reach the big leagues; yet, what is problematic here is that the sliver of minor leaguers reaching the MLB is slim (most minor league careers end after two seasons), and that the MLBPA really is not delivering on the just compensation aspect (as MLB players must endure six-to-seven seasons of underpaid production in the hopes that clubs will shell out cash once free agency occurs. This current offseason suggests this is no longer part of the bargain).

Many commentators are suggesting that the MLBPA will require a huge battle, potentially involving a work stoppage in 2022, in order to solve this current free agency dilemma. Ironically, the MLBPA is losing leverage with MLB owners because their pool of members represents such a small portion of professional baseball. If the MLBPA is negotiating solely for those players that reach the MLB (or MLB 40-man rosters, at least), MLB owners and front offices are now simply plucking younger talent from the minor leagues and gambling on their production in lieu of paying veterans their Collectively Bargained reward.

The easiest way forward for the MLBPA to win a battle with MLB ownership groups is to begin representing every single professional baseball player working in affiliated baseball from the draft (or International signing) onward. Such a scenario is the only manner in which the MLBPA will be able to realign the compensation system to alleviate the problem that McCarthy discusses: if players are underpaid when they reach the MLB, and for their first decade of overall professional service (in the majors and minors), that is because that talent sits unprotected by the game’s labor agreement until the moment they touch an MLB 40-man roster (or MLB Active roster). If rookies like Lewis Brinson stand a chance to earn anything close to their probable production value, they must be represented while they are playing in places like Colorado Springs, Frisco, Hickory, Myrtle Beach, and the Arizona Rookie league (these are Brinson’s stops en route to the MLB). Even in the advanced minor leagues, a player like Brinson is not only criminally underpaid in the MLB’s current labor climate, he is also underpaid based on his surplus value provided to the organization (60/70 center fielders don’t grow on trees).

What is the additional leverage provided by these players? If an MLB strike includes minor leaguers as well as established veterans, and the full institution of professional baseball is shutdown because of such a stoppage, MLB owners and front offices will no longer simply be able to rely on the promise of advancing supremely underpaid talent to the MLB, sneaking those players beneath labor battles solely involving established MLB players. Moreover, forcing a wholesale improvement of compensation throughout the professional ladder will be one of the most effective ways to reorient MLB reserve, arbitration, and free agency compensation to solve the underpaid-then-overpaid dilemma.

Fortunately for the MLBPA, a new compensation system need not be rocket science once every professional ball player is represented. Simple mechanisms such as annual Salary Arbitration for every player in affiliated baseball, and free agency after two years of minor league play, would quickly cause players and front offices to form multiyear development agreements from the draft or International signing (for example, what should the Brewers pay to keep Keston Hiura in the system after 2018? What is his contract reserve worth to the Brewers in 2018?). In this case, six or seven years of club contractual reserve would not correspond to six or seven years of underpaid production, as players would already have contractual histories reaching back to the minors, and there would be a chance to recalibrate contracts through arbitration on a regular basis. These contractual rituals could be repeated for excellent rookie campaigns, and would mitigate some of the compensation uncertainties that leave impasses between players like Jonathan Villar and GMs like David Stearns (Villar was correct to spit on Stearns’s lowball extension offer after 2016 in the sense of seeking his justified contractual value); had Villar possessed the ability to head to salary arbitration after 2016, it is quite likely that a deal with the Brewers would have looked quite different (perhaps it would have been a two-year, $10 million deal, instead of forcing either side to price out a longer multiyear gamble).

The same type of system would help players such as Lewis Brinson, who are apparently so valuable as to be untouchable in trade negotiations for productive starting pitchers, receive just compensation immediately upon entering the MLB: rephrasing the initial question, if the Brewers did not trade Brinson midseason 2017 or during this current offseason to improve the pitching rotation, what would the center fielder have been worth in arbitration negotiations? History and probability might suggest (at worst) a three-year, $8 million deal due to the starting center fielder. The best route toward that contract will be expanding MLBPA ranks to include every professional ballplayer, in order to leverage all players against MLB front offices and ownership; if this strategy works, hopefully Milwaukee will be paying someone like Tristen Lutz or Caden Lemons $3 million in 2022.

Baseball Prospectus. Individual Stats – Season Totals (Batting and Pitching, All Years). CSV. Retrieved January 13, 2018 from Baseball Prospectus.

Silver, Nate. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t. New York: Penguin Books, 2015 [2012].

According to Cot’s Contracts, the Milwaukee Brewers finished with the cheapest 40-man roster salary for the second straight year in 2017, with a meager $78.8 million spread across the roster. The team has all of $25 million committed beyond 2018, invested in only two contracts: Ryan Braun’s and Eric Thames’s. The Brewers have a team that was a surprise contender in 2017 with all of the major pieces coming back in 2018, aside from the injured Jimmy Nelson, and they could be getting an impact player if Lewis Brinson can take the next step. From 2008 through 2014, the Brewers ranked no worse than 18th in final 40-man year end salary. Mark Attanasio’s pocketbook has been able to take the strain in the past, and it should be able to take another big contract or two this year as well.

Thanks to the anti-competitive behavior (my fancy word for “collusion” that may not be technically against the rules) we’re seeing in the free agent market, there is some talent remaining unsigned, sitting there for the taking without requiring the Brewers to cash in any of their precious minor league assets. Of ESPN’s top 20 free agents this offseason, 13 remain unsigned. Of particular interest to the Brewers are the pitchers; Jake Arrieta or Alex Cobb would be major upgrades over the likes of Junior Guerra or Brent Suter in Milwaukee’s rotation.

The current market suggests there might be bargains, too. Not a single player has received a deal longer than three years or pricier than $60 million. Addison Reed signed this past week with the Twins for just $17 million over two years, well below what many expected for a reliever entering the market as one of the better closer candidates available. Not only is the market looking shockingly cool, but as spring training approaches, players will want to avoid becoming the Kyle Lohse of 2013, who went unsigned deep into March and wound up making about 60 percent of even the lowest estimates of what he could earn.

This is where the Brewers need to pounce. Anti-competitive behavior like this could wind up helping teams with smaller budgets. A reduction of super-long free agent deals worth nine figures has almost no impact on the way the Brewers assemble their squad. The Brewers were never going to make those deals anyway, and their biggest contracts will almost always be handed out to homegrown superstars. Milwaukee’s free agent splashes have generally come on players entering the decline phases of their career. But if free agent prices come down across the board, the Brewers should be able to be active players for more and more players, players who would otherwise receive prohibitively expensive offers from large-market clubs for the Brewers to even consider them as a target.

Consider the New York Yankees of the 1980s. Steinbrenner pulled the Yankees up from years of mediocrity by investing heavily in free agents. His club won four pennants in six years from 1976 through 1981, not coincidentally the first few years of free agency. But in 1982, they dipped to fifth place, and the Yankees wouldn’t reach the postseason again until 1995, the first season after the strike.

In his autobiography A Whole New Ball Game, Marvin Miller discussed how Steinbrenner’s willingness to play into his fellow owners’ collusion scheme was an act of cutting off the nose to spite the face:

“Steinbrenner’s unwillingness or inability to recognize opposition to him first became apparent to me with the beginning of the owners’ collusion in 1985. Although he was the first to utilize free agents, and the most successful in building winning teams, he became a coconspirator by depriving his club of the opportunity to sign free agents. I was astonished at the time because it was so obvious that he was the principle target (along with the players) of the owners’ planned collusion, but apparently this thought had not occurred to him. Ted Turner, Gene Autry, and a few others were also targets, but George was the owner they most wanted to curb. Yet he seemed incapable of understanding that a club like the Yankees — one with no success (or talent) in building a team through effective trading, and without a record of effective player recruitment and development in the minors for some time — would certainly fall out of contention if it could not sign free agents. But he agreed and joined with his ‘brother’ owners in a scheme aimed at himself.”

I don’t know if there is active collusion going on in today’s MLB, but there’s no doubt that large market teams are currently choosing not to leverage their financial muscle, their single greatest team-building asset. If the Brewers can, they need to capitalize on this opening. It’s hard to imagine another time when their money can do more, especially when you consider just how close this Brewers team came to the postseason in 2017.

The Yankees could have been a dynasty throughout the 1980s, but Steinbrenner’s inability to get over the idea that free agents were taking him for a ride cost him a decade’s worth of winning. If teams like the Yankees, Dodgers, and Cubs want to make that same mistake here in 2018, let them. Let them wring their hands about long-term deals and the luxury tax like suckers. If the Brewers want to shock the baseball world and make it back to the postseason,  they need to take advantage of this opening and strike now.

Photo Credit: Jim Young, USA Today Sports Images