Service Time Manipulations

Throughout this most recent offseason, there has been numerous discussion about player rights. Most of this discussion has centered on minor league pay with some dialogue on service time manipulation and, to a lesser extent, owners working to suppress player salaries at the big league level. All three of these topics are important and should be looked at in depth (especially the minor league pay), however, I was drawn to the second topic of service time manipulation because of the way people respond. In the case of minor league pay the responses are almost unanimously in favor of giving these players a reasonable wage. Yet, when it comes to teams manipulating service time and keeping players from getting a full return on their value, the response was surprisingly quite the opposite with most responses portraying some version of the team focused “it’s worth it to have them the extra year.”

My gut told me this was a case of shortsightedness. Something prevalent in most fields and as Bastiat described in his story of the broken window, a focus on things that are seen and forgetting things that are unseen. What if, by taking advantage of players by manipulating service time, teams were only getting the extra year instead of three, five, or even ten extra years? What if these players that had been toyed with were significantly less likely to sign extensions? What if a little good will early in their career were reciprocated by the player through staying with the team instead of seeking free agency? What if this attempt to squeeze out one year of cheap labor cost the team more in lost revenue through disengaged fans due to losing favorite players and even more so in long term value from some of the games top players?

This is where it gets tricky. How do we know if teams are taking advantage of a players service time versus the player actually needing more seasoning in the minors? How is the best way to track and gauge player sentiment anyway? Truthfully, without players flat out telling us how they felt and what drove their decisions, I don’t think there is an answer, but I hope to at least find a trend. Something that points to a significant factor on the decision tree. So I went back through all of the players who debuted from 2007 on and tracked their call up date and whether they signed an extension or explored free agency. I also tracked super two status and if they signed back with their original team during free agency. Any player traded or released by the original team are recorded, but not counted in the final results so that I could more accurately try to track influence from team call-up decisions.

I wasn’t expecting to find a blatant trend where every snubbed player explored free agency and every early call up signed an extension, but something more like a slight, barely noticeable, but noticeable, trend where players called up earlier signed more extensions relative to their peers who got the call up snub.

As I started pouring into the data, another difficulty emerged. How do we define snub? Just because a player was called up late enough to get an extra year of service doesn’t mean the wait wasn’t genuinely called for. Maybe the player had some genuine things to work on, maybe the team schedule had a rough stretch on the road to start the season and they needed an extra pitcher early and waited to call up the player for reasons not related to the player at all. To combat this, I focused on just top prospects even though I ran the data for every player that made their debut in this span. A few notable names, potential manipulations, and exceptions sprang to mind (Bryant, Longoria, Alex Gordon, Acuna, Kingery), and I expected this to be more obvious amongst the top prospects.

The final major limitation was that some of the more notable examples (e.g., Bryant & Acuna) have yet to hit free agency, so we won’t know how this affected his decision to sign an extension or explore free agency until a later date, which limited the data pool a little, as well.

That said, after combing through and sorting data from the last decade on player debuts, service time, and free agency; and even with a few notable examples that seem to support the hypothesis, the data showed absolutely no trend whatsoever.

Players don’t seem to be holding onto service time when it comes time to make extension or free agency decisions. Maybe as it has become a bigger conversation we’ll see more of this, but for now, the players aren’t giving teams any reason to consider not manipulating their service time in the teams favor (except Bryant’s still pending grievance).

So, even though the players have made it clear they don’t like this system and they are trying to find a way to negotiate it out of the next labor agreement, they aren’t speaking with individual actions. That doesn’t mean we as fans can’t still put pressure on the owners to treat their players right.