After Kris Bryant’s service time grievance was decided in favor of the Chicago Cubs, he said he holds no ill will toward the organization. True or not, he likely knew the inevitable outcome when he filed. If he remains with the Cubs for the duration of his years of team control or is traded, he will not be a free agent until after 2021. Had the decision been in his favor, his free agency would have been after 2020.

The club’s clear attempt to keep him under team control for an extra year was done intentionally. Had there been a clear and fair performance based analysis, Bryant’s spring training numbers in his rookie year of 2015 warranted nothing less than him being on the major-league roster from day one.

In 14 spring training games, he posted a slash of .425/.477/1.175 with 9 home runs. Nothing more needs to be said as to what the Cubs were doing. The goal was to maintain that year of team control by keeping him in the minors long enough so he would not reach the service time cutoff for a single year.

Bryant was recalled from Triple-A once he could not reach the number of days where he would garner a full year of service time. He won the National League Rookie of the Year; the Cubs made the playoffs – a year earlier than Theo Epstein’s front office expected; and advanced to the National League Championship Series before being eliminated.

From the Cubs’ perspective, there is no denying that it was a successful strategy. Developmentally, it did not hurt Bryant. He won the Most Valuable Player in 2016 and the Cubs won their elusive World Series.

Still, Bryant’s displeasure with how the Cubs manipulated his service time led to the grievance. Experts and analysts knew how the grievance would be decided and they were right as it ended in the Cubs favor. However, Bryant’s move – while not self-sacrificing on the level of Curt Flood as he protested being traded and fought baseball’s reserve clause – will impact future players.

A year before the Cubs and Bryant even became a story, the Houston Astros (remember them?) were accused of using worse tactics with George Springer. At the time, the Astros were in year three of their rebuild and were on their way to losing 92 games. This was a 19-game improvement over 2013. Springer, 23 at the time and a consensus top-20 prospect in baseball, had been approached about a pre-promotion contract extension in 2013, which he rebuffed.

According to him and his agent, the Astros responded by keeping him in the minors to stop him from accruing service time. This would not have been an issue had he signed the contract extension. In the end, he did not file the grievance, but this is something the players were aware was happening and have been clearly seeking methods to prevent.

This illustrates the cold-bloodedness and acceptance of reality that is the hallmark of most MLB front offices in today’s game. Keenly aware of their right to use this sleight of hand and knowing they will not face punishment for it, there’s no reason not to do it. And once there’s no reason not to do it, teams will push further and further to the extreme.

Before contract and finance experts were employed by every front office and whose sole function was to manipulate the rules, if teams even thought about this sort of maneuvering, they kept it to themselves and were opaque in how it was done. Nowadays, success is not defined by winning a championship, but by the number of books written about how that championship was won; whether that front office formulated an innovative strategy; and if the owner spent as little money as possible to win it due to direct action on the part of that front office, ethical or not.

The spirit of the service time rule was not so teams could base their decision to recall a player based on how long they would keep his salary as low as possible. It’s doubtful that the MLBPA negotiators – or even the MLB negotiators – even considered that as an alternative. When the highly educated financial whiz kids entered baseball and sought to maximize profit while minimizing spending. Part of that was exploiting an enormous loophole.

The question is: Can the loophole be closed or would a viable solution simply be another challenge for front offices to decimate?

Bryant’s case was clear-cut since he demolished the ball in spring training. But not all cases are that obvious. Certainly, teams can do what the New York Mets did with Pete Alonso in spring training 2019 when they told him if he earned the right to be on the roster to start the season, he would be on the roster to start the season. He did and he was.

In the long run, the argument could be made that the Mets would have been better served to send him to the minors for two weeks to get that extra year of team control just like the Cubs did with Bryant. To their credit, the Mets did accrue some capital with players throughout baseball when general manager Brodie Van Wagenen told Alonso he’d be judged on merit and, with ownership approval, followed through. Had the Mets demoted him to save a few bucks, would Alonso have hit 53 home runs, posted a .941 OPS and, as a rookie, walked into a clubhouse full of veterans and took over as the team’s unquestioned leader like Derek Jeter did with the Yankees in 1996?

Maybe.

But it would also have caused an unnecessary fissure between the sides. Perhaps the Mets’ treatment of Alonso will end up saving them more money due to the player’s potential agreeableness in signing a reasonable contract extension and not squeezing the team for every dollar to recoup what he would have lost.

Most teams will not do what the Mets did while they have the option to save some money.

Change can only be achieved by adjusting the rules. While there are parameters that MLB and the MLBPA must adhere to, there will be attempts to circumnavigate them. The current CBA expires after the 2021 season. The negotiations are bound to be contentious not only because of service time manipulation, but accusations of collusion to keep the salaries of mid-level free agents in line.

Due to clear displeasure among the rank and file player, the MLBPA will take a hard line against this behavior in the next labor deal. Currently, the options are as follows:

• Change the template for service time by, for example, cutting the number of days in the first year in half so the player’s absence from the big league roster will damage the club.
• Let players receive salary arbitration after two years instead of three.
• Let the players be free agents after their fourth or fifth year instead of after the sixth.
• Give the players a legitimate process to complain with a panel to hear the case and decide when the reason for the demotion is so blatant that the club doesn’t even deny what it is doing.

The adversarial relationship between club and player is the worst it’s been since the days of collusion in the late-1980s. The difference is that back then, the teams were clumsy about what they were doing, unabashedly flouted the free market and the CBA to smother free agency, and left the courts with no choice but to decide in favor of the players. It ended up costing them exponentially more than it saved.

The problem is that front offices are no longer that clumsy and outright stupid.

Blaming Epstein for sending Bryant to the minors is too simple. The benefit to do it was there, the Cubs did it, and it worked. It’s a technicality that the MLBPA negotiators never considered. Now, they not only need to consider it, they need to fix it too.

At the height of Houston Astros-mania when they had just won the 2017 World Series and owner Jim Crane and general manager Jeff Luhnow’s tanking deployment was an undeniable success, the talk was not about how the apparent bubble could burst, but whether it was the first year in a pending dynasty. The narrative was dutifully promoted by the club, the players and the media.

The story’s feel-good attributes were suitable for family-friendly fare on the Hallmark Channel with the filmmakers likely to find a role for Lori Loughlin. The story of worst-to-first; baseball outsiders who had never played remaking the game; Justin Verlander and Kate Upton’s move from Detroit to Houston and fairy tale romance; Jose Altuve’s “size doesn’t matter” and “never give up on your dreams” rise to Most Valuable Player and super-stardom; all the way down to Carlos Correa’s over-the-top marriage proposal amid the postseason celebration – it was sweet, wonderful and objectively ludicrous to those who were cynical enough to understand both the fickle nature of crafted storylines and the reality that things are not always as they seem.

Still, had anyone said that the organization would be mired in scandal, vitriol and embarrassment just over two years after that November night, it would have been too much of a heel turn to be believable. Add that the replacement for Hinch would be the veteran manager who epitomizes what the stat-centric, supposedly forward thinking outsiders who have infiltrated and infested baseball have tried to eliminate – Dusty Baker – and the book proposal, movie treatment or teleplay would have been rejected as preposterous.

Yet, here we are.

Luhnow fired; manager A.J. Hinch, fired; the organization in disarray and doing everything it can to stanch the bleeding; and Dusty Baker is the new Astros manager.

Truth is stranger than fiction is an easy statement, but this goes well beyond a dystopian alternate universe where the blatant irony is too much to warrant the necessary suspension of disbelief.

Astroball, as we knew it, is officially dead. Rightly or wrongly, the Astros will forever be known as sign-stealing, garbage can-banging cheaters whose acts resulted punishments that are among the harshest in the sport’s history.

With Crane going so far to the opposite end of the spectrum in his managerial hire, Baker, the question why has some obvious and not-so-obvious answers.

In the end, the choice is a good one despite the Baker naysayers. Here’s why.

Dusty Baker is in charge, without question.

There won’t be any insinuation and threats coming from Dusty Baker. He protects the players and will calm the poisoned atmosphere. A player who cannot play for Baker cannot play for anyone. The rules are simple: be on time and play hard. There is the unsaid understanding that Baker is not a 40-something who will tolerate certain things just to keep the job, making it all-but impossible that the same sign-stealing and other untoward acts will happen while he’s running the team on the field.

Whereas Hinch openly stated that he meekly tried to put a stop to the signaling by twice breaking the replay equipment only to see it replaced, Baker will not need to break anything if the Astros dared to try to pull something similar. He’ll make them stop because, at his age, he has nothing to lose and walks in with the street cred for the players to listen to and respect him.

The contract Baker agreed to – one-year with a club option – has the tone of Crane taking advantage of Baker’s desperation to manage and the need to bring in a manager who he, the club and the rest of MLB can trust not to let the same issues crop up. But it also leaves Baker with a nothing-to-lose freedom. This is his best shot to win that elusive World Series as a manager and punch his ticket to the Hall of Fame. He need not worry about having a job in 2021.

An understated expectation is that Chris Speier will be on Baker’s staff. Speier has been Baker’s enforcer in every managerial stop and that will not change in Houston. Baker can play the good cop and the dad players don’t want to disappoint; Speier can give the withering glare and “take no crap” attitude he had as a player and maintained as a coach.

Baker’s strategic decisions are in line with the way the game is played in 2020.

Managerial strategies are notoriously subjective. If, for example, a manager has a reliever in the bullpen who is an obvious choice to face a certain hitter or two and he doesn’t use that reliever in that situation, it’s the foundation for criticism and assertions that he made a mistake. However, that reliever might have a tender elbow that day and the manager does not want to inform the media and, by extension, the rest of MLB about an issue that is not expected to warrant a stint on the injured list.

So, he takes the hit and says something like, “manager’s decision” or comes up with a ridiculous excuse. It might look bad to the media and fans, but it certainly doesn’t look bad to the players.

One of the biggest criticisms of Baker in the past was his attachment to certain players like Corey Patterson and Shawon Dunston – players who probably should not have been granted as many at-bats as Baker gave them at that point in their careers.

It’s a fair point.

These critiques might have been valid 10 to 20 years ago when managers had greater freedom to write the lineup. That is no longer the case. While the Astros might be reaching into the past for a veteran manager to clean up the mess Luhnow and Hinch left behind, that does not mean Baker’s strategies will deviate from the current norm. He’s not going to have Verlander or Zack Greinke throwing 155 pitches in a game. He’s not giving everyday at-bats to players whose role is pinch-hitter, pinch-runner and defensive replacement.

Regarding strategy, it’s laughable that fans of the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers are mocking Baker when their managers – Aaron Boone and Dave Roberts – made egregious postseason gaffes that stemmed from a lack of experience and adhering to the flowcharts and orders sent down from the front office. The deer in the headlights, “I dunno what to do!” look on their faces is part of the reason their teams lost.

Even Hinch got demolished during and after the World Series Game 7 loss after pulling Greinke and using Will Smith instead of one of his available starters who were in the bullpen. No manager is immune to it. It’s just a convenient excuse to attack Baker when he’s not managing any differently than other MLB managers.

Regarding the “playoffs are a crap-shoot” alibi presented by front offices who are running the team from top to bottom from the executive suite, it’s either the playoffs are a crap-shoot or you can blame the manager for making moves that don’t work. You can have one or the other, but not both.

The machine is in place.

The Astros are not in need of structural changes to the roster. The team is still more than talented enough to contend for a World Series. In today’s game, the manager is secondary to the talent level. The days of a Billy Martin-type whose mere presence meant at least 12 more wins than that roster should reasonably have accumulated are over. This is largely because Martin had a scorched earth strategy where he would push his pitchers beyond normal limits to do one thing: win. Every game was Game 7 of the World Series with Martin. In fact, his entire lifestyle was one in which he lived every day like it was his last.

No prospective manager with that attitude is getting a major-league job today – Wally Backman is a prime example. He’d win, but he’d also end up getting fired for reasons that had nothing to do with the won-loss record.

Baker has maximized the talent on his rosters wherever he’s managed. No, that has not translated into a World Series win. His teams have frequently been bounced from the playoffs when they were, on paper, better than their opponents. The key, though, is getting the team beyond this controversy, calming things down and allowing the players to play without relentless questions as to whether the 2020 wins are on the up and up. He is not, nor will he ever be a tool of the front office. He’s agreeable to listen to reasoned advice, but he’s not a yes-man. There is no need to worry that a Brandon Taubman-type will be interfering with the on-field product and, more importantly, clubhouse hierarchy.

Baker will not need to be asked those questions because he would put a stop to any appearance of impropriety. After this disastrous series of events, that’s what Crane and the Astros needed. With Baker, that’s what they’ve got.