The big contracts from the 90s and 2000s are becoming a thing of the past. The myth is that these players make huge money and don’t need any more. The reality is that it’s tough to get that big money today and very few do. Take Aaron Judge for example. In his first 2 years he has made $1.1 million - total. Nice money for us but way less than he deserves. He won’t be a free agent until 2023 when he is 31 years old and then good luck. It seems that teams have finally learned that they shouldn’t pay a 30+ year old player a monster contract because their best years are behind them - see Pujols, Cabrera, Ellsbury, Zito, A-Rod, etc, etc. The market took a big swing last year when the contracts stopped all at once and a lot of players were left taking a fraction of what they would have received a couple years earlier or got nothing at all. The 2 players that got big money - Hosmer and Darvish are already looking like a disaster. Harper and Machado are still waiting because no team is looking to burden themselves with a player for 10 years - those deals almost never work out for the team. And those guys are rare because they got into baseball so young.
The league is going to have to do something. Players need to be able to make money in their 20s because a lot of players in their 30s are getting smaller deals or just find themselves unemployed and disappear because there are plenty of guys in the farm system who can take their place. At the same time attendance is declining. So baseball has a lot of problems and they are heading for an inevitable clash. I hope they learned from 1994 and never strike again but they have to start working on a new deal sooner rather than later to avoid a huge problem. You are right to be worried because if baseball goes on strike again it may not recover.
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