How one feature of baseball's CBA negotiations could impact Adley Rutschman and the Orioles

Traditionally, the end of January is a time when one following the Orioles might be on high alert that their late-offseason actions might start yielding a signing or two with spring training approaching.

This winter, with the lockout, has been anything but traditional, so save for the left field wall discussion there hasn’t been much to capture the attention when it comes to the Orioles.

Most resulting conversations about the club have to do with whether Adley Rutschman will be on the team on Opening Day, or how long it will be before he arrives if not at the earliest possible moment.

A collective bargaining development this week may add a bit more context to those discussions than we had before–even if the answer isn’t a satisfying one.

Rutschman, baseball’s top prospect, has hardly put a foot wrong as a professional since the Orioles made him the No. 1 overall pick in 2019. Had their collapse to the basement been more of a one-off, or had they been closer to rebounding when he was selected, or perhaps if the COVID-19 pandemic hadn’t happened, he might have already been showing what he could do in the big leagues. 

The Orioles haven’t outwardly said anything about his chances to make the team other than executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias’ season-ending comments about how he’d be at major league camp for spring training and by virtue of that pending invitation, would be in the mix.

Minor league free agents Jacob Nottingham and Anthony Benboom were signed to fill out a catcher position that is unrepresented on their major league roster for that camp, and based on his pedigree and promise, Rutschman would like his chances of making the team in that group.

That’s rarely what conversations like these are about, though.

MLB teams retain a player’s rights until they achieve six years of major league service time, and at least under the current rules, pay players at or around the league minimum until they pass the three-year mark. (There is also an allotment of players with the most service time without reaching three years who can engage in the salary arbitration process and get raises as well.)

Recognizing the financial and baseball value in that structure, teams in recent years have delayed the arrival of top prospects to ensure an extra year of club control or, in some cases, to delay arbitration eligibility. Always, they use baseball reasons to justify these decisions, so as not to run afoul of the union.

Delaying free agency is relatively straightforward. This year, there will be 185 days between Opening Day and the end of the regular season. A player needs to be on the active roster or injured list for 172 days to accrue a full year of service time. Keeping a player in the minors for two weeks at the start of the season can leave them short of 172 days of service time for a given year, and thus give the team the rights to seven seasons of that player’s career instead of six. 

They’d have to pay above the league minimum for four of those years because such a player would inevitably qualify for salary arbitration before hitting three years of service time, and that last year or two could be quite pricey, considering the caliber of players whose service clocks are manipulated this way. The solution there is to keep a player in the minors for around two months instead of two years to ensure they may stay below the cutoff for early arbitration.

Naturally, this is not something players enjoy.

Ownership and the league itself have seen profits and franchise values climb in recent years due to new revenue streams like digital media and gambling, but player pay has decreased, so an early position of the MLBPA was to get players paid earlier and to free agency at younger ages, where clubs might be more likely to pay them than if they hit the open market deeper in or after the player’s prime.

Multiple reports, including The Athletic, indicated that the players dropped their proposal for players to reach free agency before achieving that six-year mark of service time. With it, the chances of Rutschman catching John Means on Opening Day at Camden Yards dropped with it.

Whenever anyone in public or private has asked how I thought the situation would play out, the most logical answer was that the Orioles would only have Rutschman up if they didn’t have a single reason to keep him in the minors.

This was the main one. 

For an organization that’s trying to give itself the best chance of making the playoffs and competing regularly for years to come, a seventh essentially full season of a prime Adley Rutschman will be worth a lot more than two weeks of him in April 2022.

It will be trickier to make the sale on the baseball front, considering how well-rounded Rutschman’s game is. He’s a switch-hitter with power from both sides, doesn’t chase or swing-and-miss, and more than holds his own at catcher. Plate discipline and defense are most frequently cited as reasons to keep a player in the minors for a few weeks, with Kris Bryant and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. high-profile examples.

The Orioles’ best weapon for such a decision might be precedent. In 2019, the Elias front office came in to inherit a group of young players who had either accelerated or incomplete development tracks and stuck them all back in Triple-A to at least begin the season and finish off their development.

Chance Sisco and DJ Stewart basically had full seasons of Triple-A experience, but were made to start at Norfolk and eventually hit so well in May that they were up after that. Anthony Santander had just 44 Triple-A plate appearances entering 2019, even though he’d been in the majors for parts of two seasons as a Rule 5 draft pick already. He spent 48 games (193 plate appearances) in Norfolk to start the year, got hot, and came up for good in June.

Austin Hays, too, skipped Triple-A after debuting from Double-A in his first professional season of 2017. He ended up back in Bowie in 2018 and dealt with ankle injuries, meaning even as he hit well in spring training 2019, he was Norfolk-bound. 

Elias cited the lack of Triple-A experience for Hays at the time, and painting with a broad brush, said they didn’t want players going up and down to finish off their development. Instead, the preference was to wait until players were truly ready.

All of those were well-regarded prospects, but not at the level of Rutschman, so it’s a bit moot. Still, his experience is in that category. Rutschman had 157 plate appearances in Triple-A last season after he got there in August.

That’s not a lot of Triple-A action to forecast out on, but a full season of high-minors success is enough for the public models to forecast Rutschman could hit the ground running based off what he did in 2021. FanGraphs’ ZIPS projections, which don’t account for playing time, have Rutschman worth 3.3 wins above replacement (fWAR) with a 115 OPS+, with 100 being league-average. Only Cedric Mullins is better among Orioles’ hitters in the former, and Trey Mancini the latter.

It stands to reason the Orioles’ own internal models have a similarly rosy outlook on what Rutschman’s first major league season could look like. There’s justifiably a lot of excitement, inside and outside the Orioles’ organization, for when that moment will arrive.

There are other aspects of a possible new CBA that could swing the equation, too. Perhaps there’s a salary floor instituted, and in lieu of spreading millions of dollars around on free agents, the Orioles take care of their own early and make Rutschman a part of that group.

Reading about the players removing their bargaining point of earlier free agency from the table and ensuring that at least there the current system will be in place made me believe that barring anything spectacular in Sarasota in the coming months, that moment won’t involve an orange carpet.