JUPITER, Fla. — It’s time for everyone involved in the current Kris Bryant saga to shut up. For the good of the kid and — more vitally — the good of the game.
Everyone has had their say now, even the new commissioner. Everyone has staked their position. This should be the feel-good story of the spring. Instead, the rarest commodity in the sport — a young position player with the talent and charisma to attract fans — has been soiled.
It would be worthwhile if this were a debate in which the outcome could be swayed. But that just is not the case.
The Cubs say they still have not made a decision whether they are sending Bryant down. Stop. If Bryant is sent to the minors for even just 12 days, Chicago can — by rule — control him for seven years before free agency rather than six. It is a no-brainer and anyone who has been around the Cubs executives would not describe that intelligent lot as brainless.
As long as service time is going to influence salary, teams are going to finagle with it. Cubs officials have said Bryant might need to work on his defense in the minors. However, if the World Series, rather than the regular season, began April 5, Bryant would be on the roster as one of the Cubs’ best players.
This frustrates Bryant’s rep, Scott Boras, who wants his player in the bigs working toward free agency sooner rather than later. Boras has insisted the game should be a meritocracy and once again on the phone Friday he pointed to Bryant’s 43 home runs in the minors last year, his major league-high nine homers this spring in just 36 at-bats plus another in a “B” game. He asked “what is the ticket he has to punch still” to earn a major league job.
Boras is right, too. The best should be playing, and the leaders of the sport must find a way to make this so. But it is not so now, so why keep arguing this? In my conversation with Boras, I actually told him his points are fine, and I am glad he is sharing incendiary quotes with me. However, Bryant’s eventual rise to the majors should not be polluted by back story. His arrival at Wrigley Field should be a huge event for Chicago and the sport.
No one should know that better than Rob Manfred. Yet, the new commissioner re-ignited flames Friday at Cubs camp by saying, “I don’t think the Cubs’ decision with respect to Kris Bryant is really any of Scott Boras’ business.”
Of course, it is. Boras is his representative and he is representing him. But that meant further gas on the fire because Boras is way more pugnacious than diplomatic. He told me Manfred had “a pre-Marvin Miller state of mind,” harkening back to the period before Miller became the first head of the union, when players’ rights were more easily trampled.
Boras also tried to further debase the Cubs’ strategy. He noted that Javier Baez and Jorge Soler were called up last September and his client was not. Baez and Soler were on the 40-man roster and the Cubs clearly did not want to start Bryant’s clock. But they can argue they started Soler toward his six seasons and free agency without regard to potential future salary.
In addition, Boras said the contention by Cubs president of baseball operations Theo Epstein that he never puts a rookie on the Opening Day roster was untrue because Lendy Castillo (2012) and Hector Rondon (2013) were. But both were Rule 5 picks and Epstein was specific he was not including that subset or foreign pros such as Daisuke Matsuzaka.
But all of this is fine-point rhetoric that has lost its value. A fight persists when we already know the outcome. And the fight must stop because it already has cost Bryant and the sport this: What should be the feel-good story of this spring, isn’t.