The Major League Baseball hot stove hasn’t even been warm since the New York Yankees acquired Giancarlo Stanton, and it doesn’t sound like it’s going to heat up anytime.
While the trades of Stanton, Evan Longoria and Andrew McCutchen have highlighted the offseason, there has been little movement on the free-agent market as most of the key names remain unsigned.
With spring training less than two months away, Yahoo! Sports’ Jeff Passan did an investigation into what’s slowing the entire process down, focusing on possible collusion, Scott Boras (shocker), the 2018-19 free agent class, and Tony Clark and the union’s concessions.
But one of the most intriguing aspects of Passan’s in-depth piece is that one anonymous big-name free agent apparently is willing to sit out for half of the 2018 season if he doesn’t get the deal he wants.
“Recently, one of the best free agents available this offseason met with a friend, and he admitted something shocking: He was preparing to sit out until the middle of the season,” Passan writes. “The market for his services this winter was so thin, the offers so incompatible with his production, that he worried he was going to need an external force to compel teams to pay him what his numbers say he’s worth. Maybe it would take a playoff race.”
Wow. Now that would be something.
While there is no way of telling which marquee free agent this is or how credible the threat is, it appears that this stalemate between teams and free agents might not end anytime soon.
