If there’s one moment that makes it clear to players that Major League Baseball is a business, it’s an arbitration hearing. Corbyn Barnes and the Milwaukee Brewers showed why.
During the early stages of a player’s professional career, the player and team are typically aligned toward their respective goals. The team will help the player from the draft through his MLB debut, making it to the majors and winning ball games.
This relationship will take a couple of years into a player’s career thanks to an arbitration process in which the player and team each submit what they think the player deserves based on past performance. A team that has done everything it can to support its players up to that point suddenly becomes obsessed with arguing that analysts shouldn’t really be paid that much.
Baseball is supposed to be a business, but it can feel personal. Sides often settle before going to public hearings. So Brewers fans may have been a little concerned when the team took Barnes, his 2021 NL Cy Young winner, to a hearing instead of a settlement.
The good news is that the Brewers won, and although the arbitrator agreed to a proposed 2023 salary of $10.01 million instead of Barnes’ $10.75 million, the team did so in the most brutal way possible. It seems that the lawsuit was discussed.
As Barnes explained in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel video above, the team claimed he was the main reason he missed the postseason last year.
“They’re trying to do what they can to win the hearing, but I think there were other ways they could have done it. Maybe they had a little more respect for the way they did it. At the end of the day, here they clearly won it.
“There’s no denying that what happened over the past few weeks has hurt our relationship. There’s really no way around it. Obviously, we’re professionals and we’re going to go out and do our jobs. But for example, Given some of the things that have been said, such as putting me at the forefront of why we didn’t make it to the postseason last year, it probably won’t go without saying that we don’t have to go to public hearings even if we don’t do it. You can go to the meeting.”
The Brewers finished second in the NL Central with an 86-76 record last season and won the NL Wild Card, one game behind the Philadelphia Phillies.
In 2022, Barnes had another strong campaign following Cy Young’s season, posting a 2.94 ERA in 202.0 innings in 33 starts, an NL-best 243 strikeouts, a 3.14 FIP, and a 0.965 WHIP. . As the Baseball Reference calculated, he never hit the injured reserve and finished second on the team behind shortstop Willie Adams.
For many pitchers, it would qualify as a career season, but for Milwaukee it was clearly not enough. It’s a common argument, but it’s rarely said that the team went so far as to weaponize it in a formal setting.
If this permanently damages Barnes’ relationship with the team, it’s hard to imagine it showing up on the field, but it could be a factor in future attempts to keep Barnes in Milwaukee for an extended period of time. Again, given how much money the 28-year-old is likely to make when he becomes free agency in 2025, the Brewers have already realized that good relationships don’t do much. There is a possibility that
