Brewer Twitter to Mark Attanasio:
So the Brewers decided to take one of their generational pitching talents, Corbin Burnes, to an arbitration hearing in his penultimate arbitration season. You might ask, ‘okay, what was the discrepancy?’ Surely it had to be a pretty wide gap to want to take a player to trial that you may want to eventually sign to a long term deal, right? Was it 2 million? 3 million? 5 million???
Nope. Nope. Nope. It was, *drumroll*, $740,000! As I’ve always said, any time you can publicly drag the best pitcher in baseball over about $750k, you should always take that opportunity. Especially if it’s a player your fanbase desperately wants to see stay with the franchise long term, and especially when ownership has increasingly been under fire for penny pinching.
And the craziest part of the whole story is that the Brewers actually WON the hearing. HOW. How did Corbin Burnes not just plop down his 2021 Cy Young Award and his top 10 (#7) finish in the 2022 Cy Young voting and not come away with the $10.75 million he was asking for? I guess I’m not privy to how these types of hearings work, but I can’t imagine an arbitrator seeing his body of work and ruling in favor of the Brewers. Was Burnes represented by Lionel Hutz?
So now, not only did you take him to a hearing over $750k, but you won the hearing. That should build a bridge when it comes to long term negotiations. Can’t imagine there will be any bad blood as a result of this. Nope.
I suppose in the interest of being fair to the Brewers, there’s not a very realistic chance that Burnes is staying anyway. He’s going to get $30+ million a season over the course of a 7-8 year deal on the open market. It’s hard to fathom how they would come up with that kind of change when they already have Yelich’s anchor of a contract and Mark’s new soccer club to worry about. Unless the newly installed X-Golf simulator starts generating 10 figures a season, I just can’t see it. So I suppose if they’ve already resigned themselves to having to trade him after this season (or at the deadline next season), then money saved is money saved.
Matt Arnold talked with the media yesterday about winning the hearing and basically said a lot of expected nonsense about how this is the ‘business of baseball’ and there’s no ‘bad blood’ yada yada yada. Burnes will talk today when he reports to camp, his demeanor should be interesting to examine. Maybe a Darkness Retreat before he makes his first spring training start.
PS: I’ve said this before about Mark Attanasio, but whatever grace period he had during this era of Brewer baseball feels over. Because they’ve been winning at a pretty decent clip, making the playoffs, etc. he’s been fairly liked/loved by the fan base for almost his entire tenure. He was a breath of fresh air when he took over for the Selig family in 2005, and his era of Brewer baseball has been the winningest in franchise history. But you could feel sentiment shifting a bit with a failed playoff run in 2021, and the way last season ended with the Hader trade, it was only amplified. Now this is making the rounds all over Brewer Twitter:
I’m not saying he needs to start to sit in a box when he comes to games, but if they underachieve this season, and there’s no progress made on a long term extension with Burnes or Woodruff or Adames, he may want to consider it.
