From the O's to overseas: How a better CBA for young players could impact the allure of playing in Asia
Seemingly every winter, a slew of former Orioles go to pitch in Korea or Japan. Can a new CBA smooth over the grind that leads them overseas?
The Orioles’ days of bringing Asian players stateside in hopes of finding a gem on the level of Wei-Yin Chen and Hyun Soo Kim appear to be through, at least temporarily. The pipeline the other way, however, seems to still be open.
This offseason, it was reliever Brooks Kriske who left the Orioles for a chance to pitch overseas for the Yokohama DeNA BayStars in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball. This era of Orioles baseball has also seen Rio Ruiz, Aaron Brooks, Gabriel Ynoa, and Tayler Scott sign in Korea or Japan either immediately or shortly after they left Baltimore.
From a different vintage of recent Orioles history, pitchers Tyler Wilson and Mike Wright got to a certain point in their careers and went to pitch overseas for a better opportunity there.
That point in their careers? Well, for everyone, it’s different. Unlike a tenured veteran like Adam Jones, who went to Japan in 2020 at the back-end of his career, all those players had plenty of major league time and lots of familiarity with the good and bad that comes with that.
Taking a chance at pitching in a different country, with the salary certainty and lifestyle stability that comes with it, is often far more appealing than the difficulty carving out a good life for one’s self and family can be as an up-and-down big leaguer. And if anyone needs a reason why the system in baseball that the MLB Players’ Association is trying to improve in collective bargaining needs fixing, this is just another example.
The basics of a professional baseball career for the vast majority of players goes as follows: sign for a bonus that can be anywhere from five figures to eight figures (but low six-figures seems most common) as an amateur, make sub-minimum wage as a minor leaguer in-season with no offseason pay in the minors, then earn the league minimum of around $575,000 until you’ve completed three full seasons in the majors – if you make it there at all.
Whether one does or not, the top players must be on the major league roster after either four or five professional seasons, and they carry three minor league options for the club to use in at least three different seasons to send that player down to the minors and call him back up.
For the top, top players, that part often doesn’t matter. But where the Orioles were concerned, at least for the last decade, is that options are gold. It was presented in the Dan Duquette-Buck Showalter era as a proud badge of roster flexibility, and while it’s less prevalent with this version of the Orioles, one of their main sources of new players are those who are out of minor league options and thus have to go on waivers if a team wants to remove them from the roster.
There’s a certain class of players whose value to a club wains dramatically once he’s out of options. To be clear, these can be players whose performance is either inconsistent or simply not up to the level. But once they can’t be optioned to the minors anymore, the goal is often to move them on and find someone who can be.
Sometimes, this can happen during the season, and it’s fair to say that when someone like Wilson was designated for assignment at the beginning of September 2017 after several years of riding the Norfolk shuttle, the move was made in part because the next year that shuttle wouldn’t be available to him.
What comes next for a player like that, who often bounces between “home” cities for the entire summer in preceding seasons, is more itinerant living. It’s often only a minor league deal that is available to such players, and the new team is thinking more of their roster than anything else when deciding when or if there’s a right time to call the player back up the the majors – where he’ll still be out of options and thus wouldn’t be a good short-term solution to any issue that arises.
They can hang on for as long as they want, or they could be one of the fortunate ones to get scooped up by a club in Korea or Japan, where a guaranteed seven-figure salary and the comfort of not being sent down to the minors at the drop of a hat awaits.
Solutions to the root issue of this are kind of all over the place, and can’t happen without identifying the problems. At the base of it, this predicament rarely occurs for a player who has demonstrated a consistent ability to perform at the major league level. Those players find a way to stay on rosters and stay in the big leagues, and it’s no slight on those who can’t in pointing that out.
From a CBA perspective, the union’s fight to get more money not just the game’s young stars but the vast subset of players in that 0-3 years of service time range who are subject to those minor league options and can have their pay cut by a factor of 10 when they’re sent from the majors to the minors is a worthy one.
Some things are too systemic to be bargained, or at least not a high enough priority to. Options are also so ingrained in the roots of the sport that they won’t go away. (I did a story back in 2015 at the Sun on the roots of them that doesn’t give me the icky feeling I often get reading a story of mine that’s that old).
It wouldn’t be worth it to change that system considering what the owners would want back to give it up, so that’s a non-starter. That basically leaves the minimum pay floor and those avenues for young players to make money early on as the union’s path forward, as if they need another reason to.
It’s not really a big part of this, just one I’ve always found fascinating. I bet there will be someone on the 2022 Orioles, bless their hearts in advance, who will find such an opportunity next fall. He will have taken his lumps at Camden Yards, no doubt, but will have already achieved his major league dream and will make a choice for a better, more stable life for he and his family.
Unless, of course, the San Francisco Giants figure out a way to work their magic on Hunter Harvey and turn him into the pitcher he was meant to be. In that case, they should probably try to latch on there first.