“I’ll leave if he’s not fired.” Due to their major miscommunication, a key player for the Milwaukee Brewers has stated he will leave the team if his colleague is not dismissed.
An arbitration hearing is one instance when a player may be made aware that Major League Baseball is a business. The Milwaukee Brewers and Corbin Burnes just proved why that is.
In the early stages of a player’s professional career, the team and the individual will typically have similar objectives.
In order for the player to reach the majors and win baseball games, the team helps him from the time of his draft until his MLB debut.
Two or three years into a player’s career, the relationship takes a hard turn because of the arbitration procedure, when the player and team each submit an amount of money that they believe the player deserves based on his prior performance.
The team, which up until then had done everything in its power to support the player, will all of a sudden have analysts dedicated to claiming that his salary isn’t really justified.
Although baseball is meant to be a business, it sometimes feels intimate. Due in part to the uncomfortable nature of hearings, the parties frequently reach a settlement before they begin.
For this reason, when the Brewers chose to proceed with a hearing instead of a settlement with Burnes, the 2021 NL Cy Young winner, supporters may have been a bit concerned.
The good news is that the Brewers prevailed, as the arbitrator accepted their requested $10.01 million salary for 2023 as opposed to Burnes’ $10.75 million contract.
However, it appears that the team used the most abrasive approach to present its case.
The team asserted that Burnes was a key factor in their failure to qualify for the postseason the previous season, as he clarified in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel video above:
“They’re making every effort to win the hearing, but I believe there were more polite and perhaps more effective ways for them to approach the situation. Here we are, at the conclusion of the day. Clearly, they prevailed.
“There’s no doubting that the events of the past several weeks have damaged the relationship. Really, there’s no way around that.
Naturally, as professionals, we will go out there and perform our duties. I will continue to do my best every fifth day that I go out there.
However, some of the remarks made, such as placing me in the center of the reasons we weren’t able to It’s probably not necessary to mention the postseason from the previous year.
We don’t need to do that in order to conduct a hearing.”
