In defense of player "greed"

Okay, I'm about to do something that violates the standard code of conduct for fans. I'm going to side with a couple of "greedy" players in their gripes with ownership. The players in question here are Cole Hamels of the Philadelphia Phillies, and Prince Fielder of the Milwaukee Brewers. Both players have publicly expressed displeasure at their team's decision to renew their contracts for the 2008 season at an amount significantly lower than they had hoped for.

Now, an important piece of background here is that, as players with less than 3 years of major league service time, neither Hamels nor Fielder have any actual leverage negotiating their contract. There is a negotiating process that typically goes on with such players, but the bottom line is that if an agreement can't be reached, the team can renew their contract at any amount (as long as it is at least the league minimum, and not more than 20% less than the player made the previous season), and there's nothing a player can do about it. So, by the rules, neither player is even close to being "entitled" to any particular amount of money. At this stage of their careers, ownership holds all the cards, and that's not going to change. These rules are why most players with under 3 years of service time wind up making a figure that isn't too much more than the league minimum.

Hamels and Fielder, however, are not "most" players. Fielder finished 3rd in the NL MVP voting last year, after a season in which he became the youngest player ever to hit at least 50 HRs. Hamels established himself as the clear ace of the Phillies pitching staff, going 15-5 and earning an All-Star bid. He also finished 6th in the NL Cy Young voting, despite an injury that cost him about 4 starts. Clearly, Hamels and Fielder are special talents, and not your "run of the mill" young players.

Hamels was renewed at 500,000, having requested 750,000. Fielder's request is unclear, at least as far as I can tell, but he's expressed dissatisfaction with his renewal amount of 670,000, which leads me to believe he was looking for something in the neighborhood of, or higher than, the contract that 2006 NL MVP Ryan Howard was given for last season, of 900,000. While neither player has suggested that these moves would be a reason for them to not return when they hit free agency, both have made it clear that they felt disrespected by the renewals, and will remember such things going forward.

While again keeping in mind that, as I said, neither player is entitled to anything by baseball's contract rules, it's also important to understand that the two players are undoubtedly among the best players on their respective teams, and presumably both teams would like to keep them around for a number of years. From that perspective, it seems to me like an exceedingly poor play to risk alienate your best talent over the matter of a couple hundred thousand dollars, especially when you consider that even at their full asking price, both players would be a ridiculous bargain relative to what more veteran players of similar talent would command.

Ownership would try to sell you some line about "If we give them X amount of dollars, that impacts what we have to give the next guy". But from my perspective, that just doesn't fly. You aren't going to have a legitimate MVP or Cy Young candidate in this position all that often, so it's hardly a damaging precedent to set. And again, all the leverage is in the hands of the owners, so it's not a case where lesser players will be able to force their hand if they were to reward their young stars better. This sort of line rings especially hollow coming from the Phillies, who just last year gave Ryan Howard the biggest contract every for a player with less than 2 full years of service time. That contract, by the way, is almost double what Hamels was given for this year.

The reality is that both of these teams are going to likely be sitting down with the players in question in the near future to negotiate highly lucrative long term contracts. Lingering resentment over these sorts of things could easily lead either player to take a much tougher line when that time comes, so scrimping on a matter of a few hundred thousand now could contribute to the loss of millions later, or even losing the talented player altogether. I think both teams would have done much better to have acted in better faith in these negotiations, in hopes of seeing something like that reciprocated down the road.

I will say this much for Milwaukee, however: Fielder's agent is Scott Boras, and I'm not sure "good faith" is in his vocabulary. Regardless, I say give them what they want in this instance. At some point down the road, I'll elaborate on why I'm much closer to being "pro-player" on contract matters than average fan, but in this case, I think it's clearly in the best interests of both sides that ownership not play hardball with contracts.