Before long, they'll accept stock certificates in the organization in lieu of $$$.
@DCPatriot You laugh, but that actually might
not be a half cracked idea at that! Depending, of course, on whether a team is a publicly-traded organisation by itself or part of a publicly-traded company. Imagine the Cubs, for example, working, say, a contract extension for someone like Anthony Rizzo or Kris Bryant, and between the team and the players' agents they come up with a package in which the players get X million dollars a year in base salary plus enough Tribune Company stock options. The Cubs wouldn't have to lay out as much money immediately in salary, they'd have enough remaining in the till to work elsewhere on building/rebuilding/fortifying the team, and the players still stand to be very wealthy men for long years to follow.
Ballplayers aren't exactly ignorant of such things---in fact, in the final years of the reserve era, Joe Torre worked as a stock broker in the offseason, and Jim Bunning worked in both the insurance and the stock businesses in the offseasons (long before Bunning thought of entering politics). Dave Kingman worked for United Airlines in the pre-free agency offseasons (his father was a United lifer) and who's to say he didn't collect a few stock options there himself? George Altman, a Cubs/Mets/Cardinals outfielder of the 1960s, was a stock and commodities trader in the offseason and stayed there after his baseball career ended. And when Yogi Berra was first approached to endorse Yoo-Hoo chocolate drink in his Yankee playing days, Berra was canny enough to turn his genuine liking for the stuff into introducing other investors to the company and gaining himself both a company vice presidency and a small boatload of stock options enough to help make
him a millionaire in due course. (Berra was also fabled for sharing the wealth---he brought many a Yankee teammate over to the Yoo-Hoo company to get them endorsement deals and maybe a little stock in the bargain.)
I think of something else that might have gone huge in alleviating the future pressures of free agency if only baseball's owners of the time had actually heeded the idea:
In 1928, Hall of Famer Earl Averill was in the thick of a Pacific Coast League pennant stretch drive with the San Francisco Seals when the Indians decided they had to have him and bought him from the Seals for $50,000. Averill learned of the sale when he picked up a newspaper that included a story about the deal. When he asked the Seals how much of that price he was going to get, the Seals practically told him to seek psychiatric attention. Averill said he was going home, then.
Enter Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball's then and autocratic commissioner, to whose attention the Averill flap had come. Now, get this:
Landis actually took Averill's side in the scrap. He not only told the Seals that Averill's demand wasn't unreasonable, he actually suggested baseball should decide that whenever a player was sold, rather than traded, the player should get a cut of the sale price.
You may remember that, decades later, Bowie Kuhn unilaterally ruled that players couldn't just be sold. He did it just to stick it to Charlie Finley, who was trying to sell his stars off as free agency was about to hit after the Messersmith ruling (you remember Finley trying to fire-sale Joe Rudi, Rollie Fingers, and Vida Blue, no?), and who'd gotten under Kuhn's skin a few too many times as it was. Kuhn's only reason for the ruling
was to stuff Finley and try to drive him out of baseball. The problem was, Kuhn wounded the whole game just to spank one owner. If Kuhn really wanted to help the
whole game, he might have harked back to the Landis suggestion. Let teams continue selling players, but let about 20 to 30 percent of the money go to the sold players. If he'd done that, two things could have been possible: 1) The richer teams could still strengthen themselves without overweight salary structure inflation; and, 2) the not-so-rich teams could still remain competitive financially by way of profiting from the players they developed until they could be competitive teams again.
By the way, the Averill controversy got settled when the Indians agreed to give him a $5,000 bonus and a salary well above whatever the major league rookie salary was at the time, and Averill went on with his Hall of Fame career; when his back went out in a 1937 game, his swing was ruined. After he retired, the Earl of Snohomish turned one of his off-field passions into his livelihood: Averill liked to visit botanical gardens and zoos when the Indians were on the road, and after he retired from baseball he opened a greenhouse business with his brother.