Expect free agent salaries to continue to rise.

In conclusion with the most one-sided World Series of all time in terms of runs scored vs runs allowed, players and fans alike began looking toward the upcoming 2008 season. A most favorable tradition fans partake in during baseball's offseason is debating where which players would fit in best, and predicting the decline and rise of these players and their respective teams. For the fans along with small-market teams, the underpaid teachers, nurses, mechanics, and general do-gooders, the moaning and groaning begins... gasping: "they gave him how much money for how many years?!??"


Most players however, are underpaid. Let me explain:


The year was 1992 and Bud Selig had just taken over as MLB's commissioner, the sport's gross revenue standing at $1.5 billion, not exactly chump change. Combined payrolls from the 92' season added up to almost exactly $784 million, meaning 52.3 percent of baseball's money went back to the players. Fast forward to 2001, the year following the bull-market offseason in which Alex Rodriguez signed his now void 10 year, $252 million contract. The money being distributed toward the players had increased marginally to 56.1 percent with revenue holding strong at $3.5 billion.

Within the next four years, revenue continued to climb, jumping another billion dollars. Player's salaries however, stayed remarkably stagnant, resulting in a decline with owners only willing to give 48.7 percent back to the players by 2005. The numbers are bit more shocking than you would originally think. Major League Baseball grossed just over $6 billion for the 2007 season, a number that rivals that of the mighty mighty NFL, yet on opening day the combined payroll of all 30 teams stood at $2,487,970,000.. or about 41.3 percent of gross revenues. By comparison, the National Football League paid the players $3.2 billion last season, over 50 percent of their revenue. So it's not that major leaguers are individually underpaid, but compared to their rival sport and predecessors, they're getting short-changed in an enormous way.


There are causes for this though.


With the greatest collection of young talent exploding on the scene in recent years, in this windfall, teams can keep a player's salary close to or at the minimum mark of $400,000 for the first three years of his career. Talk about incentives. This allows flexibility to teams while also keeping their highly-touted prospects in an avaricious manner, and because of this, it allows low-market teams to at least have a small and fighting chance of landing an expensive and prized free agent. Revenue juggernauts such as the Yankees and Red Sox understand that for every Joba Chamberlain, and for every Dustin Pedroia, they themselves can have fun and cause havoc on the market. Once these young talents are eligible for arbitration, teams make a greater effort in locking up their young players with reasonable long-term deals rather than allowing their value to peak as a dozen or so teams bat eyelashes and lick lips during free agency. Of the 143 free agents this offseason, only a dismal 12 are in their 20's, with the youngest being Corey Patterson at 28. The best free agents in their 20's would appear to be mediocre pitchers Kyle Lohse and Carlos Silva, who could most definitely end up with deals in the range of $10 million a year with all the cash-flow going around these days. Kyle Lohse being a sub-.500 pitcher could and probably will join the ranks of Gil Meche, A.J. Burnett, and many others to squeeze out big-buck contracts that've inspired many expletives to be thrown around.

This year's free agent class is so atrocious that Scott Boras was requesting $20 million a year for center fielder Andruw Jones last season. He can probably get $16 million in a year that found Jones hitting .199 a week before the All-Star break, and ended up with an average of .222, an OBP of .311, and a SLG percentage of .413. Torii Hunter is coming off of a career year, and will probably get somewhere in the range of 5 years for $75-90 million even though he'll be 33 in July, and not once has he reached base 34 percent of the time. Jorge Posada for example, a 36 year old catcher, was lavished into a 4 year deal worth $52 million.

With revenues going toward dwindling players, there's an air of collusion penetrating too. As Major League Baseball states revenues will continue to grow -and Selig expects it to- the more agents and the union will demand. Relatively soon, the split should be somewhere of AT LEAST 45 percent going back to the players, and because there is no such thing as spending in free agency, only over spending, this will in turn necessitate an even bigger dose of offseason novocaine.