Such low salaries used to be more palatable for players, given the promise of a big payday once they reached free agency. But that promise is drying up: Fewer teams are competing (eight teams had at least 95 losses last season, the most in history); clubs are more wary of aging players’ production dropping off since drug testing began; the luxury tax has deterred some spending; and analytics-driven front offices are evaluating players in similar ways, driving down bidding wars for players.
The free-agent market has shifted drastically the past two off-seasons as teams have become more leery about handing out lengthy contracts to older players, leaving younger ones like Judge feeling squeezed on each end.
“You can’t play both sides,” said the Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton, 29, who signed a 13-year, $325 million contract extension with the Miami Marlins in 2014 after one season of arbitration. “You can’t say, ‘Oh, break in and we’ll see how they can do,’ and once they’re proven, ‘Oh well, they’re old now.’”
Stanton said Judge could not expect to be rewarded in free agency the way similar players had been in the past. “He has to be more aware and knowledgeable to the situation than I had to be, because it has changed,” Stanton said.
The Yankees could have given Judge a heftier raise than the $62,000 bump he got for the 2019 season — much as the Tampa Bay Rays could have given the 2018 A.L. Cy Young Award winner, Blake Snell, more than a $15,500 raise, to $573,700, for 2019. (Snell has since agreed to a five-year, $50 million extension.) Neither team was obligated to, based on the collective bargaining agreement.
Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman said the team’s pre-arbitration salary formula is based on players’ service time and performance. “Its strength is built on its consistency,” he said. “We’ve stayed disciplined to it.”
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