On the edge of February and with pitchers and catchers reporting now in weeks rather than months, some of the biggest names in baseball remain unsigned.
Manny Machado and Bryce Harper highlight a market packed with talent, with names like Dallas Keuchel, A.J. Pollock, and Craig Kimbrel, also still waiting to sign with their new teams.
These are players that teams looking to compete for a World Series should be clamoring for All-Star talents that are available to the highest bidder in a league that has no limit to what teams can pay their biggest stars.
But rather than bidding wars between perennial big spenders, it seems the top talents on the market right now have struggled to find even two teams interested in bringing them in for the 2019 season.
On Wednesday, ESPN's Buster Olney reported that Machado's offer from the White Sox stood at $175 million over seven years.
While Machados agent, Dan Lozano, has released a statement calling the White Sox offer inaccurate, the fact that we've made it this far into January without a deal being made is proof enough that the market is not as hot as expected.
Simply put, it's a price that any team in the majors could afford to pay again, there's no cap on how much a team can spend and Machado is a player that would make any team better.
Machado's case provides a solid explanation of baseball's free agency problem in general.
In recent years, free agency has bled longer and longer into winter, as teams seem more hesitant to offer big contracts to marquee players, even though franchises are making more money than ever.
Some teams are deciding to Moneyball their way to a title as the Houston Astros did in 2017. Others, such as the Marlins, are openly recognizing that between revenue sharing and television deals, selling tickets and winning games aren't as necessary to turn a profit as once thought.
In both cases, the end result is a lack of interest from teams when it comes to paying to acquire players that would directly result in putting a better team on the field, which is how you wind up with one of the best third basemen in baseball fielding just one solid offer into the January of his free agency.
Machado is the possible face of a franchise and could be the difference for teams on the cusp of competing for their division, making the playoffs, or even winning a championship.
With a 26-year-old All-Star fielding offers for $100 million less than expected, it's clear that the MLB needs to figure out a way to fix its free agency system, and fast.
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