With spring training scheduled to open in a little more than two weeks, the tension in baseball's free agent market must be intense. More than 100 players remain available, including almost all of the most accomplished members of the group, and any optimism that Lorenzo Cain's surprise five-year agreement with the Brewers on Thursday might jar things loose appears unfounded.
Teams continue to underwhelm free agents with offers. Players continue to hold out for higher bids. But at some point, the market will heat up, right?
"It's inevitable," Derek Falvey, the Twins' chief baseball officer, said during TwinsFest last week. "Patience has been the defining characteristic of this market, but eventually deals will get done."
The timeline has become so condensed now, though, that teams have to beware of getting caught up in the emotion of an overheated market. Making a bad deal is far worse, the Twins feel, than making no deal.
"Sometimes what can lead us down a path towards decisions we regret is momentum," Falvey said. "We have to make sure that we're addressing each situation as it fits and find the best decision for us."
But if the free agent market becomes frantic in early February, one industry-wide game of musical chairs, it's still unlikely to equal the great feeding frenzy of 1995. That year, more than 100 free agents signed within one week, including 22 high-profile deals struck on one insane Saturday. Think the Twins need to be ready to strike quickly when the logjam breaks? Imagine a day when six former 20-game winners, including two Cy Young winners, changed teams, not to mention a couple of outfielders who are now enshrined in the Hall of Fame.
"It's a little hard to imagine," laughed Falvey, who was in grade school in Massachusetts at the time.
The busiest week in baseball history was triggered by Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was a federal judge in Manhattan at the time. She issued an injunction the day before Opening Day preventing MLB owners from starting the season with replacement players. The players union had been on strike since the previous August, forcing cancellation of the World Series, but when Sotomayor blocked the owners' plans to replace them, the players agreed to end the strike and play under the previous year's financial rules.