It is good to get back into the groove of things.  All my Strat leagues are done and I can focus 100% attention on what is going to happen in the future.

With Spring Training in full swing, there isn’t much going on.  Teams are looking at what they have instead of what other people have with a few exceptions.  Joe Crede is one.  The Giants are interested and the White Sox have promised the job to Josh Fields.  The question that needs answering is whether Crede is healthy.  He’s only hitting .182, but that is with only 11 at-bats.  He did hit a home run.

Another exception is Brian Roberts, but the Cubs / Orioles conversation is hot and cold.  The Orioles always ask too much.  We’ll have to wait and see what happens.

That is pretty much all that is going on so far in a nutshell, so let’s talk about something a bit more interesting, Prince Fielders’ contact.

The Business side of Baseball is a cut throat game.  Let’s say you are lucky enough to be drafted.  They put a contract in front of you and you have two choices; you can sign it or you can walk away.  Other than a signing bonus, there is no negotiation.  If you sign it, you are giving that franchise six years of your life.  If you are lucky enough to make the Major Leagues, you cannot negotiate your salary until you have three or more years of Major League service.  (If you are really lucky you might be lucky enough to be a Super Two and be eligible with less than three years of service is you are in the top 17 percent of those players with at least two years by not three.)

If you don’t like your current employer, you cannot quit and see if your services would be better appreciated elsewhere.  You are stuck.  You go where you are told.  You play where you are told to play.  You get paid what they give you.

On the other hand, you have the owner’s perspective.  How would you like an employee that can, one day be eligible for a 9 million dollar raise?  That is a 2857% increase!

And so it is with Prince Fielder of the Brewers.  He becomes the youngest player ever to hit 50 homeruns.  He gets a good raise, for us regular people.  For him, it is an insult.  The Brewers are small market.  They know that they will eventually have to pay Fielder $10 million a year once he’s eligible for arbitration, so they little choice but to short change him now while they save for when they can’t.

You can only short change someone so much, however, before you anger them.  The Phillies paid Ryan Howard $900,000 his last pre-arbitration year, so Fielder could be sore that he was only paid $670,000.  Is $670,000 enough to anger Fielder to the point that he won’t negotiate?  Brewer fans certainly remember the Gary Sheffield debacle.  There is nothing worse than trying to trade from a position of weakness.

The Brewers also have to deal with Ricky Weeks and Corey Hart.  Both of those players are arbitration eligible next year as well.  Both are major breakout candidates.  Weeks is healthy and Hart is a potential 30/30 guy.  On top of that, Ryan Braun will be eligible the year after that, most likely.

So, this is a critical year for the Brewers.  If they don’t succeed this year, they will end up being priced out of the players necessary to get them there.  Branch Rickey lamented about just this situation so many years ago, before Free Agency, arbitration and all these other rules.  He would sell a player for cash just to pay the players he already had.  The Brewers will not be as fortunate.

Sometimes you have to ignore the future.  Baseball is first about winning today.  Tomorrow will come, but if you focus too long on tomorrow you forget to enjoy the present.

JP Kastner is the winner of the 2007 Strat-O-Matic Baseball Online Expert League World Series.  In five seasons of SOMBOE, JP Kastner has five winning seasons, four playoff appearances, three World Series appearances and now one World Championship.  He is in his second season in the Tout Wars mixed league.