Service Time Fuckery is Smart, and it Sucks
It’s that time of year again; the point that comes in every season, when two or three top prospects — who certainly weren’t ready for the big leagues on opening day — are suddenly deemed worthy of a call-up, despite no meaningful changes in performance or roster situation. This year’s lucky winner was Blake Snell; the Rays decided that nearly a month with a four-man rotation was enough, and that the phenom prospect, who received the fourth-best DRA projection among Rays starters from PECOTA, had finally demonstrated an ability to beat major league hitters and contribute to the big league team.
Except, they didn’t really, as Rian Watt (Contributor to Vice, Editor-in-Chief (and my boss) at BP Wrigleyville) wrote earlier this week. Snell was just this year’s Kris Bryant, a player clearly ready for his major league debut who was instead kept down due to the peculiar approach of the Collective Bargaining Agreement to service time. This probably isn’t new information to you, since, like I said, this happens every year, and we’ve had variations on this conversation for at least the last several years. (The earliest I remember personally was around Bryce Harper’s April 2012 promotion, though it’s assuredly been happening longer than that.) The Rays waited until the exact date that calling up Snell would keep him from accumulating a full year of service time, and not a day longer, which lets them employ him for a fraction of what he’s really worth for seven years rather than six. For Snell, this delays his first big payday, but it also increases the chance that he never sees it at all. Plenty of promising young players will get injured or fall out of the league before they ever see a big contract, and adding an extra year of waiting only makes that more likely.
Rian’s piece was titled “We Can’t Watch Blake Snell Pitch Because of Greed and a Loophole,” which struck me as an accurate description of reality. Rian (who noted that he didn’t write the headline), stopped short of indicting the Rays; he described the delay as “nonsense begotten by a devil’s compromise between the players’ union and ownership,” which is also entirely accurate. That didn’t stop Rian from catching some flack; a representative individual in his mentions said that “you can’t blame any team for using the CBA to their advantage,” which is a statement I think a lot of people would agree with. Rian was quick to clarify that he was taking aim at the system that encouraged this behavior, not the behavior itself, but it is complete and total horseshit to say you can’t blame teams for this kind of behavior. I can and I do, and you should too.
Most of the baseball people I know, who are generally very smart, seem to get that they are under no obligation to like everything the team likes. They don’t like it when a team scams taxpayers out of public funding for a new stadium, or when it names a street after a racist and anti-integrationist past owner, or when it does any number of things that are Bad. The team sees some benefit to doing them; that does not mean that a fan of the team’s on-field aspect needs to think those actions are good.
That conception seems to go out the window when it comes to, as Rian put it so well, “service time fuckery.” For a lot of people, such fuckery is entirely explainable because it’s rational and logical for the team to act in this way. Sure, the system is bad, this line of thought goes, but it’s the reality the team happens to find itself in, so there’s nothing wrong with them making the most of it.
That’s it! That’s the whole argument! This is a bad system, therefore fans should want whatever the team wants, as long as it is acting rationally within that system. It’s a terrible line of thought. There is a lot wrong with what the Rays (and the Cubs, and every other team in baseball) do to make the most of this system, and I don’t like it.
First of all, these teams created the system they’re taking advantage of, in conjunction with the players union. (The union, I might add, that Snell was not a part of, and that has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to sell out young players to benefit veterans.) It’s as if I installed a shitty lock on your house, and then ~made the most of the situation I found myself in~ by stealing your TV. The teams either knew or should’ve known that the consequences of this system would be the aforementioned fuckery; indeed, it was probably one reason why they set up the system this way.
But even if this system was mandated by Baseball God, and the teams had nothing to do with it, it’s still bullshit to just shrug and say they’re acting in their best interest. I know they are, but just like with the public financing of stadiums, I don’t have to like service time fuckery because of that, and there are lots and lots of reasons for me to dislike it. My incentives are different than the team’s, and I want to see the best players as soon as they’re ready. I might be dead in 2022, or not care about baseball in 2022. Blake Snell might not care about baseball in 2022!
The other, more important point, which I first heard from Jason Wojciechowski during the Kris Bryant saga, is that we shouldn’t automatically celebrate every time a team makes a profit. I think this mode of thinking is partly a byproduct of the sabermetric revolution, which often a) views players as assets with a corresponding dollar value and b) labels moves made by teams as either Smart or Not Smart. This isn’t that. Everyone knows this was a Smart move by the Rays, in that it trades current value for future value at an above-market rate. I can think that, and also think it was a Bad move, because it meant baseball fans didn’t get to enjoy the best game possible, and a deserving player had to start the year in the minor leagues, and he now has to labor for far less than he’s worth for yet another year. Not every Smart move has to be celebrated.
We can absolutely hold the Rays to a standard other than profit-maximization. That’s the standard they’ve chosen to operate under, but that doesn’t mean we need to agree with them. Everyone seems to have no problem disagreeing with teams on so many different things; it shouldn’t be hard to make this another one of them.
