One agent wants MLB’s worst teams to exploit a roster loophole — it would be a bad look for all involved

Being a successful agent means, among other burdens, getting people to talk about your client when they otherwise wouldn’t. Tip your cap to CAA’s Ryan Hamill, then, for a job well done with respect to free-agent right-hander Michael Lorenzen. 

The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal has the details on a creative sales pitch conceived by Hamill and Lorenzen that has them marketing Lorenzen as a two-way player. The goal isn’t to convince a team that Lorenzen can do his best Shohei Ohtani approximation; rather, it’s to sell a non-contender on using Lorenzen in an offensive capacity long enough (20 games with at least three plate appearances apiece) for him to earn the two-way player designation. At that point, Lorenzen would no longer count toward Major League Baseball’s 13-pitcher limit, allowing his next team (ostensibly a contender who acquires him at the trade deadline) to effectively carry 14 pitchers down the stretch, a sweetener that might enhance Lorenzen’s trade value to any and all teams wanting the extra arm.

Here’s how Rosenthal reported the pitch:

Hamill, according to sources briefed on his conversations, is talking with such clubs about signing Lorenzen, getting him the necessary plate appearances to qualify for two-way status and then flipping him to a contender that would benefit from carrying him as a 14th pitcher.

While I appreciate the creativity on display, and I mean no disrespect to the parties involved (indeed, if the goal was to create buzz then consider it a success), I can only hope that no team buys into Hamill and Lorenzen’s idea — ditto for other teams, players, and agents who may feel inspired by this line of thinking.

Make no mistake: Lorenzen is a capable starting pitcher. He shouldn’t need gimmickry to land a contract, potentially with a good team. He’s amassed a 106 ERA+ over the last three seasons, along the way earning his first (and to date only) All-Star Game designation. I ranked Lorenzen as the 38th-best free agent available this winter, noting that his wide-ranging arsenal makes me believe “there’s an effect not being captured by traditional measures or modes of thinking.” He was a skilled two-way player in college, too, and his apparent athleticism has transferred to results at the big-league level: he’s hit .233/.282/.429 with seven home runs for his career in 147 plate appearances.

There’s an alternate timeline where Lorenzen makes the two-way player thing work. Unfortunately, I don’t believe this is it. Lorenzen’s career marks likely overstate his current capabilities with the lumber, as he’s nearing his 33rd birthday and he’s taken one at-bat since the start of the 2020 season. One team, the 2019 Cincinnati Reds, tried to make Lorenzen into a two-way player; it didn’t work and that was that. At least the Reds’ experimentation was conducted in good faith. Here, the purported goal is more about skirting MLB’s roster rules by taking advantage of a team acting in bad faith.

An unrelenting nihilism has germinated across professional sports that states nothing matters if a team is already identifiably bad. This philosophy is how tanking, intentionally losing as many games as possible to improve draft positioning, became a socially acceptable practice — that despite it being bad business for the league as a whole. That same spirit possesses people to look at bad teams, like the Chicago White Sox and Miami Marlins, and think: what difference does it make if Lorenzen gets 20 starts at DH instead of some other below-average player? 

A ton, in my opinion. Using a bad hitter is a suboptimal but acceptable part of the game. Someone has to take the at-bats, over the course of a long season and sometimes a bad hitter is the best a team can do. Using an unqualified hitter is a different beast altogether — especially when the aim is, largely, to create a marginal advantage for another team. 

There’s also the risk of this snowballing. Baseball is a copycat league. If a team signed Lorenzen, enacted this plan, and received any (perceived or tangible) benefit, then it would be a matter of time before another team tried and another after that. You can reach a point where enough teams are willingly punting lineup slots that the cumulative effect could dictate close playoff races if one team happened to luck into playing those particular clubs more often than their closest competitors. 

Beyond that, it’s time to push back against these acts of executive ingenuity that violate the social contract between teams and their fans. There are already too many clubs who lack the motivation to field a good product. The last thing needed is to normalize more noncompetitive behavior, even at a small scale. Baseball is an entertainment business at its core. People pay real, hard-earned money to watch and attend games. Teams treating fans as consumers, and nothing more, could find themselves being treated as a mere product that can be ignored if the quality isn’t up to snuff.

The game’s keepers would be wise to keep that in mind, and to honor the loyalty fans show even the worst teams. That means, among other things, not embracing ploys that require a team to reveal how little it cares about the games at hand.