If, on March 1, baseball is still awash in unemployed All-Stars, Major League Baseball should fill a competitive roster (and a taxi-squad) from those ranks. Tender contracts to 25-35 veterans and minor league free agents which will offer those players a modest bump from their last salary. They’d be free to reject these offers, of course, but on March 1, are beggars going to be choosers?

A lot of people have made the observation that you could field a pretty great team with the shockingly large number of elite free agents that are still on the open market. But like — what if baseball actually did that?

The current collective bargaining agreement expires in December 2021. That means there’s a lot of time for that rancor to grow, but there’s also a little bit of time to save baseball from itself. And I’ve got a plan to do it. It’s a plan that involves the seemingly impossible resurrection of a shuttered franchise, and the fleecing of some rich guys to pay some other rich guys a whole lotta money.

We’re currently staring at the end of a glacially-paced offseason that may result in several star players going into Spring Training without jobs due to the inability of teams to spend on free agents in the way that they almost always do.

The World Series was pretty great for the second year in a row, and we’re in the middle of a dinger golden age . Is baseball great? You bet . But it’s very possible that the sport is also broken on some level. Some of the principals seem to think so, especially when it comes to the economics of the game.

Jake Arrieta made more than $15 million last year. Signing him and other big-dollar players like Eric Hosmer, J.D. Martinez, and Greg Holland (assuming they’re still available) could get expensive, but the owners have a lot of money. Especially right now, since they’re each going to get a $50-68 million payout for the sale of BAM Tech to Disney.

Why not tax the hell out of that money to cover those salaries? There’s a case to be made that it’s where those resources should have gone in the first place and, to be honest, paying out $5-6 million per owner will probably sting less than a collusion settlement. Right now, it’s just whispers and anecdotal evidence, but the last time baseball owners got caught colluding to screw over baseball players it wound up collectively costing them $434 million.

Once those players have contracts, where are they going to play? One idea is to sprinkle them throughout the league. But while that might bring a little more balance to the game between the haves and have-nots, it would kick other players out of their existing roles (hampering their own future earning power). And it would also be a little boring, so …



Step 2: Let’s Bring Back The Montreal Expos (Kinda)!

Montreal has a rich baseball history. The city’s first team was established in 1890. The Montreal Royals AAA team featured Jackie Robinson at one point. Many (most?) baseball fans still have fond memories of the Tim Raines/Gary Carter/Andre Dawson Expos, and the 1994 team whose dominance was undermined by the strike. But all of that wasn’t enough to keep a Major League team in Montreal. In 2002, MLB bought the Expos (facilitating the departure of owner Jeffrey Loria who then bought the Marlins from soon-to-be Red Sox owner John Henry) and moved them to Washington D.C. after the 2004 season.

Karma dictates that MLB should be the catalyst for a new era of Expos baseball at some point. Despite the work done by the Montreal Baseball Project and others to keep hope alive for a baseball reboot in Montreal, there are no plans in place. MLB could kickstart things by assigning some of the game’s displaced players to this newly reformed version of the Expos to bolster those efforts, and let Montreal’s political and business community know that baseball is serious about putting down roots in Montreal again. Of course, it’s not as simple as waving a magic wand.

It takes more than a roster full of players to make an organization. These are vast businesses with a lot of moving pieces (event staff, clerical workers, Youppi! the mascot), but it’s not impossible to cobble something together on the fly. In 2002, when MLB took over the Expos, Loria loaded up everything (and everyone) that wasn’t nailed down, including computers and scouting reports. New GM Omar Minaya had six employees (and no scouting reports) when he joined the organization a week prior to Spring Training. And yet, somehow, they made it work on an organizational level, and everyone got paid.

In terms of where these theoretical Expos would play, well, Olympic Stadium is still kinda viable. The retractable roof no longer retracts and repairs are often needed, but the Blue Jays are set to host an exhibition series there for the fifth straight year in late March, so it’s not like it’s on pace to be condemned. MLB could also take the team on the road to other cities while still being primarily based in Montreal. It’s what the Expos did in their later seasons when they played some “home” games in San Juan, Puerto Rico at Hiram Bithorn Stadium. Then, as now, spreading baseball and goodwill across the world has immense PR value.



Step 3: The Catch (And The Pitch)

This idea started as a dumb tweet, but it has kind of spiraled to a point where I’ve almost sold myself on the feasibility of this … at least in some small way.

Precedent shows that it’s not impossible to throw an organization together on the fly. Owners could easily fund a group of baseball mercenaries as a make-nice to keep from being sued, and the Expos would have a place to play, but the main issue is insurmountable: baseball’s complex schedule wouldn’t allow for another team to be inserted at this late stage. Not unless hundreds of games were canceled, inconveniencing fans and causing chaos throughout the league.