MESA, Ariz. – The query to Kyle Schwarber about how cash modifications folks wasn’t even completed when a primary baseman with rabbit ears piped in from 4 lockers away Wednesday morning.
“Money talks,” Anthony Rizzo mentioned.
If that wasn’t a tone-setter for the beginning of Cubs spring coaching, think about it not less than one other voice in a rising refrain of gamers important of the sport’s financial squeeze on salaries — and extra centered on upcoming collective bargaining negotiations than gamers have been in a technology.
“I think the luxury tax wasn’t meant to be a salary cap, and teams are treating it like that,” Rizzo advised the Sun-Times. “Are you sacrificing winning a championship to be under the tax threshold? Who knows? We don’t know that.”
Nobody disputes the truth that payroll price range limitations the final two winters prevented the Cubs’ entrance workplace from making the sorts of roster enhancements it desired.
So it’s actually not a leap to recommend, in flip, that these threshold-minded price range contributed to simply sufficient weak hyperlinks and smooth spots to stop the Cubs from profitable the division in 2018 and lacking the playoffs altogether in 2019.
“You’ve seen it the last two years with us: We haven’t gone out [and signed big free agents],” Rizzo mentioned. “But the few years before that we’ve gone out and signed megadeals.”
The Cubs averaged 97 wins and reached three consecutive National League Championship Series from 2015-2017, profitable the 2016 World Series alongside the best way.
Now the Cubs and 2018 champion Red Sox symbolize a two-team Ground Zero for a number of the sport’s financial dysfunction – not less than so far as gamers and lots of followers are involved.
They had the 2 highest payrolls within the sport, each paid luxurious taxes final season, each missed the playoffs and each have their eyes set on getting below the brink with their last 2020 numbers to reset the penalty ranges (which rise with every successive 12 months over the brink).
To that finish, the Red Sox traded among the best younger gamers within the sport – and up to date franchise historical past — in a wage dump of former MVP Mookie Betts.
“It’s crazy,” Rizzo mentioned. “There’s how many teams in baseball that are the teams you expect to spend money every year?”
Until the arbitrarily low luxurious tax thresholds (relative to revenues) started having extra extreme impacts on the top-revenue, top-spending groups, they yearly included the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers and, traditionally, the Cubs.
“So you see one end of the spectrum, [the Yankees’] signing of the richest deal ever with Gerrit Cole; that’s what the Yankees do as long as I’ve been alive,” Rizzo mentioned. “And on the other end, trading away [Betts] to shed payroll when you have a team that just won a World Series. It’s weird.”
The Cubs have engaged in commerce talks all winter involving their very own former MVP, Kris Bryant – talks selecting up since Bryant misplaced his grievance final month over service-time manipulation (although nonetheless with out important traction).
“Whether you win a championship or you have a great product on the field, you’re still making a lot of money, and if you can do it with the least amount of [high-paid] assets, that’s good business, I think,” Rizzo mentioned.
“Listen, right now more than ever in baseball, players are being treated like commodities. We want to win because that’s what we’re bred to do – be baseball players and win. On the other side of it, we want to make as much money as we can in the short amount of time that we can.”
If it feels like a spoiled millionaire speaking, think about that Rizzo rapidly acknowledges how “lucky” gamers are to receives a commission what they do to play a sport, took a team-friendly extension early in his profession and – like Bryant and different labor-aware gamers – makes a distinction between his private success and the bigger enterprise of the sport.
Even staff president Theo Epstein doesn’t push again on Rizzo’s perspective,…