Baseball and E-Bay

Have you ever lost an auction on e-Bay?  For something you wanted, too, right?  You bid right when the item came up for auction, perhaps impatiently so, even if you knew that the auction would expire in one week.  You had a price set in your head, as you're practical, you don't want to overpay.  You follow the auction loosely, and in the last 12 hours or so perhaps you even watch it more closely.  Perhaps you're the only bidder, and perhaps if there was another bidder she dropped out after your last bid.  And with four hours to go, you feel pretty good.  With two hours to go, even better.  You might be getting the product at a reasonable price, perhaps well below it.  You might even go to bed.

Only to wake up that you lost the auction.  To someone who had not been in the bidding all along.  And perhaps there was not one bidder at the end, but even two, because their theory was to use you as a stalking horse and then wait until the last minute to save energy and bid the bare minimum.  You weren't even a factor, really, they knew they would beat you because you were in cruise control at the finish line.  They were worried about clones of themselves, the free-rider bidders who don't do any of the work to further the auction, and then come in late to try to steal it from those who started bidding at the jump. 

It is not illegal.  It is not immoral.  It is not unethical.  It is not unfair.  It is not wrong.  It's good game theory.  Why spend a lot of time at the beginning helping set the price if you have a sense that there will be a reasonable price at the end and once others have spent their energy come in late to take the auction and the product?  It happens all the time. 

Now let's consider what's happening in the Bryce Harper sweepstakes.  First, the Nats, his former club (and perhaps his future club) made a 10-year, $300 million offer to him during last season, the Albert Pujols contract fiasco be good gosh darned.  And Harper passed, demurred, what have you, because he is the great Bryce Harper and there were sure to be better offers out there. 

The expected suspects showed interest.  The Yankees, with all their might, salivated over a 2-3-4 order of Harper, Stanton and Judge, and the Phillies, vowing to go crazy with spending despite not having anyone credible to bat before or after Harper, expending a lot of energy.  The Dodgers, what with their newly found love of spending and a trade that created a position for Harper in a previously crowded outfield, baled.  So it looked like a two-horse race, and Harper's agent, Scott Boras, would try to pit those two clubs -- and the Nats -- against one another to drive the price up. 

Except it seemed that those teams had placed their close-to-final bids on the table, and it seemed that Boras is in no hurry to get his player in camp when position players report at month's end.  Boras and his team probably worked the phones to probe teams that Harper would be interested in playing for, particularly those on the west coast.  There's a saying that if you're good, pursue where you want to work and not just the open jobs.  Well, the Dodgers baled, the A's would never do something like that and the Angels will pay Pujols until Bobby Bonilla is an octagenarian.  So that leaves the Padres, who have been rebuilding for the past couple of decades, and the Giants, a shadow of the team that won three World Series in six-year time frame not that long ago. 

Those teams just sat and waited.  Sure, the left coast teams don't grab the attention that those in the Northeast do -- they play after everyone else goes to bed.  Yet they garner enough attention for the average fan to discern that already Mike Trout is one of the top-ten position players of all time.  So it stands to reason that proximity (to his hometown of Las Vegas) trumps vanity (in terms of basking in the east coast-driven media spotlight) for Harper.  Translated -- he is interested in San Diego and San Francisco.

And perhaps they always were interested in him, it's just that akin to an eBay auction, they had no reason to get into the sweepstakes early.  Harper, so goes the reasoning, wants the west coast, so the Padres, with the nation's best weather, and the Giants, with a recent tradition, have an advantage over the Phillies, who had a dreadful offense last year and while there are many who love the City of Brotherly Love, it's hard to argue that it compares favorably with those two cities in California save for real estate values and lower taxes.  Let the Phillies, Yankees and Nats exhaust themselves until the hammer falls, so reason the Padres and Giants, we'll come in at the end of the process and take the auction.

Right now, one Vegas bookmaker makes the Giants the favorite to land Harper.  They weren't even in the conversation say two months ago.  The Phillies are third in the running, at least in the eyes of this betting house. 

It's just like an eBay auction.  Let others set the pace, spend their energy, and come in with the best big and for the kill right before the hammer falls.  If the Giants prevails, their front office people will be laughing their heads off.  If the Phillies lose out, their front office people will utter a profane version of Seinfeld's "Newman" and scratch their heads as to how others blindsided them and beat them at an auction they believed they were fated to win.

And then Bryce will learn that it gets very cold in San Francisco, the taxes are high, he won't draw that much attention out there compared to other places (read:  he's also not a Warrior) and perhaps the team is not on the upswing.  But he'll have gotten his big payday, some way and some how.

And then once Manny Machado signs, the free-agent season will come to a merciful end.  And the Lords of Baseball and their protectors in the media once more will be in denial that the onetime national pastime is still sliding down a hill toward a cliff with rocks beneath it.  The Lords have enough problems with their product,, and then they stink at something that should be easy -- creating an exciting off-season.  Hard to believe that they could create something worse to watch than a 3:45 minute game with 9 pitching changes, 28 strikeouts and very few hard hit balls, but in this free agency season, they have done just that.