I think he didn’t do himself any favors this time around. He could’ve had Soto making bank here, incentivizing a timely retooling including his clients and have the other teams bidding up other clients. Now, a previously big spending team in a market that can sustain that might not return that way for who knows how long.
And if there is a return to free agency, it might just be one of the big spending teams using up the big money on him rather than another client. Given the limited number of teams for his clients and the cyclical nature of that, incentivizing his client to make a deal there seems to be more towards his interest rather than risking one sizable market potentially tapping out for quite a while.
The MLB CBA seems pretty broken to me. To get these guys, you basically have to pay tens or hundreds of millions in years they are not likely to be very productive, and yeah, that takes money from the guys who are performing now. It's a problem with having a CBT but no limit on lengths of contract. These star players just end up with the teams who don't care about a bunch of dead weight on their books in the later years, which sets them up to be on crappy teams.
