CARLSBAD, Calif. – During the great panic of 2017-18, when jobless players were jumping on conference calls and asking one another what the hell happened to free agency, the Major League Baseball Players Association tried to allay fears by pointing toward the future. It wasn’t particularly satisfactory for those lacking employment, but the 2018-19 offseason, players were told, shouldn’t be like this.

The New York Yankees, the game’s financial behemoth, would dip below the $197 million competitive-balance-tax threshold – lawyer-speak for the luxury tax – to reset the penalty for their years of profligacy. Surely they would spend. And the Los Angeles Dodgers, who used 2017 to escape CBT jail, too, would leap back into the market ready to reinvest their hoard of local television money.

However reasonable those assumptions may have been, the early indications given by the Yankees, Dodgers and the team with baseball’s third-highest revenues, the Chicago Cubs, do not portend an offseason of free-flowing cash from the game’s financial titans. Perhaps it is simply early-winter posturing, and by the time Bryce Harper and Manny Machado and the rest of the free-agent class of 2018-19 is locked up all will be well again. Subterfuge, after all, is one of baseball’s time-honored traditions.

View photos The early indications given by the Yankees, Dodgers and the team with baseball’s third-highest revenues, the Chicago Cubs, do not portend an offseason of free-flowing cash from the game’s financial titans. (AP) More

A cocktail of concern and curiosity joined the Coors Lights and neat bourbons in the lobby at this week’s General Managers Meetings, where agents stung by the spending freeze that wreaked havoc on players’ contracts last winter worried signs of another barren offseason were ahead. Others maintain hope this class would receive far more than last year’s free-agent sum of less than $1.5 billion – especially with Harper and Machado likely to exceed $600 million together. The philosophical chasm came down to a matter of trust about MLB’s intentions, long- and short-term. As one agent said: “Everyone is trying to use last year to get everyone in panic mode.” Leveraging the fear of February unemployment into below-market November contracts is a power move that reflects the drastic shift in clout from the union to MLB, particularly after the December 2016 signing of a new collective-bargaining agreement, which the league relishes, agents despise and the union tries to weather through gritted teeth.

Economic strife was clearly on the agenda for some, as free-agent season kicks off. Bill James — an adviser to the team with the fourth-highest revenues, the champion Boston Red Sox — opined on Twitter that major league players were as replaceable as beer vendors. Agent Scott Boras started his annual GM Meetings soliloquy by calling non-competitive teams a “cancer” on the game and trying to show that their relationship with sinking attendance the last five years is causative and not simply correlated. Boras, according to sources, has forged an increasingly strong relationship with MLBPA executive director Tony Clark, who fired back at James and ended his statement: “If these sentiments resonate beyond this one individual, then any challenges that lie ahead will be more difficult to overcome than initially anticipated.”

James may be little more than a proxy for a ratcheting-up of rhetoric. Clark knows it’s an imperative offseason not just for the union but for him. Historically, players have judged the union’s success on the fecundity of a free-agent market. Here is how the top end of the market, at least, looks to be shaping up: A pair of 26-year-old stars and none of the three highest-revenue teams clearly chasing them despite all three finishing the 2018 season below the CBT threshold.

The Yankees intend to approach the CBT with a mantra that, two sources told Yahoo Sports, goes something like: We didn’t get under it just to blow back past it. The Dodgers’ intentions are laid out even more clearly in a document for potential investors that outlines plans to stay beneath the threshold not just this season but for the next four, according to a Los Angeles Times report. Already the Cubs are projected to carry a $220 million-plus payroll, well past the $206 million threshold for 2019, and entering the Harper sweepstakes — or even signing a good relief pitcher — would push them into the second tier of luxury-tax penalties unless they can dump salary.