Baseball is full of roster rules and regulations that aren’t always the easiest to understand. Well, these are my favorite parts of baseball, so I’m using this series to try and explain some of those aspects of the game.
Last week the topic of service time was covered in this space—how to count it and what accruing it means for a player’s career. Originally the following section was included in the discussion, but I decided it needed its own spotlight.
Service Time Manipulation
With a baseline understanding of how service time is calculated, an explanation of what is meant when someone says “service time manipulation” is also meaningful.
Since service is calculated by days on the roster, teams can control—in certain situations—how much service time a player does, or doesn’t, receive.
As covered before, a championship season can’t span more than 187 days. In 2023, the calendar covers 186 days, so we’ll use that as the example.
If a full year is 172 days, holding a player who has yet to have their contract selected down for fifteen days and selecting their contract on the sixteenth day means it is impossible for them to gain an entire year of service, finishing with 171 (.171) days of service (assuming no further optional assignments).
If that player is then able to accrue five (5.000) more years of service (again, without subsequent optional assignments), after 6 years in the majors they would finish with 5.171 years of service, or one day short of 6.000. This means they couldn’t qualify for free agency until the following year, when they would have 6.171 years of service.
As you can see, the team, who generally has contractual control of a player for six full years, gains an entire seventh year in exchange for fifteen days on the front end.
The most famous example of this, of course, is Kris Bryant, who the Chicago Cubs held down for twelve days to start the 2015 season. That season was 183 days, meaning Bryant accrued 171 days in 2015. He then was not able to reach free agency until after 2021 with 6.171 years of service, or seven years into his Major League career.
Either I’m reading the rules wrong or the Cubs didn’t think the chances at a one-game playoff were high, because I think it would have been hilarious for a tiebreaker to allow Bryant to accrue a full year of service in 2015. To be clear, it seems to be a one-game playoff for any team, not just the Cubs in this scenario.
Of course, the same idea applies in the middle of the season as well. If a team were to option a player during the season for twenty or more days—the length of time it takes to use an optional assignment and the days don’t count as Major League service—the player would be unable to accrue a full year of service.
Super Two
This is the other commonly talked about form of service time manipulation, but probably even more misunderstood.
There is no “Super Two” date scheduled on the calendar—it’s an estimate that teams try and pinpoint and do their best to plan around, in order to determine which players might be eligible for an additional year of arbitration. In actuality, it’s not generally known if a player will actually qualify for the Super Two status until three offseasons down the road, when said player will have probably eclipsed two (2.000) years of service.
Reportedly, here is where the Super Two cutoff has fell after the last five seasons:
2018: 2.134
2019: 2.115
2020: 2.125* (estimated, never reported)
2021: 2.116
2022: 2.128
This means that any player above this cutoff qualified for Super Two that offseason, while any below did not.
Let’s analyze one of most recent examples for the Pittsburgh Pirates of what could be seen as falling into this bucket—the handling of Oneil Cruz.
Cruz earned a late season callup in 2021, leaving him with two (.002) days of service heading into 2022. The team did not recall Cruz until June 20th, after which he stayed in the majors until the end of the season. Therefore, in 2022, Cruz accrued 108 (.108) days of service (June 20th to October 5th), leaving him with .110 days of service to start 2023.
Assuming all goes as planned and he doesn’t get optioned again, Cruz will accrue full seasons in 2023 and 2024, leaving him at 2.110 years of service after 2024. Based on history, the Super Two cutoff has never been that low, with that figure falling five days short of the cutoff from the 2019-20 offseason. That means that by holding Cruz down until mid-June 2022, the team will most likely avoid having to pay Cruz for a fourth year of arbitration.
However, as illustrated, nothing is set in stone, and no one can predict the future two years out. The Pirates didn’t recall Tyler Glasnow until the middle of July in 2016, but subsequent struggles early in Glasnow’s career led to further minor league time, and he ended up qualifying as a Super Two player after 2019 anyway.
Also, while its probably safe to assume that a service total of 2.110 figure won’t qualify Cruz, there’s no telling where the line will fall several years down the line, so again, it’s a calculated gamble on the team’s part based mostly on precedence.
Manipulation and the Rules
It’s often asserted that these are the rules agreed upon by the players, so there’s nothing for them to complain about; however, that’s not exactly true.
The rules, as stated, say nothing about whether a player’s service time is allowed to be manipulated or not—they simply state how service is calculated and how it applies to a player’s arbitration and free agency clocks. Teams never admit to holding a player down for their benefit in regard to arbitration and free agency, and in the rare cases they do, it doesn’t go well. They realize no matter the actual reason, it must be for performance and readiness because it’s not allowed to be anything else, which can be seen as an admission of guilt in-and-of-itself.
Teams went as far as calling changes to the new Collective Bargaining Agreement an effort to address the “alleged service-time manipulation” concerns of the players, apparently willing to fix a problem that actually didn’t exist.
Also, it can, and has been, argued that while service time manipulation may be “legal” under the Basic Agreement, it’s not a good faith dealing with the union and is against the spirit of the rules.
Offseason Calendar Update
—No updates here as of this week
Pirates Payroll Updates
— No updates here as of this week
—For 2023, the payroll estimate stands at $73,202,372 for the Labor Relations Department, while it’s $89,619,039 for CBT purposes.
