The Toronto Blue Jays and their newish management have been coolly dispassionate about the free agency of two of the more popular players in franchise history, which is not that surprising.

But so has the rest of baseball, which is.

With baseball’s winter meetings wrapping up, neither Edwin Encarnacion nor Jose Bautista have signed a contract and, though the market for both could bounce back as teams who missed on other targets come around to the long-time Blue Jays, the presumed narrative around the sluggers was way off. It’s not that the Blue Jays had to bow out of a high-priced bidding war for them, it’s that the bidding war never happened. So, how did two players who for years have expected the winter of 2016 to be a huge windfall end up finding themselves fishing for deals, and still talking to Toronto about a possible return?

AGE

Encarnacion is 33 and Bautista just turned 36. Although there are David Ortiz-type exceptions, the years past 35 are when power bats tend to drop off precipitously. Projection systems expect neither player to perform next year like their recent peak seasons, and then continue downward after that. This is hardly a new development, and there are usually teams willing to hand free agents huge multi-year contracts on the basis of past performance, but that hasn’t happened this off-season.

The five-year deal for Ian Desmond from Colorado is the only one so far of 50-odd contracts to exceed four seasons. It also doesn’t help Encarnacion and Bautista that both will likely DH a lot in their sunset years, which takes the National League as a whole out of the potential bidding.

ATTITUDE

Bautista is the first player in recent memory to have villainy cited as a reason for lack of interest, as Baltimore’s Dan Duquette suggested on Wednesday. Even though Bautista can be a world-class, um, prickly person, this is hard to fathom.

Fans learn to love you pretty quick when you are hitting the home runs for them instead of against them. Encarnacion is the opposite: quiet and understated, better known for his imaginary parrot than anything he has actually said.

Expecting him to go to, for example, Boston to replace a face of the franchise guy like Ortiz would have been an awkward fit.

THE INVISIBLE HAND

Clearly the players’ agents expected the workings of the free market to come up with more attractive packages than what they have been offered so far. Usually the market does break in a player’s favour, needing only a couple of teams to be interested in order to drive up a price. But with teams such as Houston (Carlos Beltran) and Boston (Mitch Moreland) signing other players to fill holes, suddenly the list of suitors gets short in a hurry.

The Jays also put themselves in that category of hole-fillers with their quick-strike signing of Kendrys Morales late last month and Steve Pearce this week.

COLLUSION

Or, it could be that the owners are deploying some skullduggery. Any time you see all this time go by without at least one big overpayment, it’s hard not to wonder if the teams haven’t collectively agreed to cool their jets. But someone will almost certainly sign a dumb contract before the winter is out, and this conspiracy theory will be officially shelved.

THE CBA

This explanation could also be called E) All of the above. The new collective bargaining agreement that was hammered out just before the winter meetings began was a relatively low-key affair, but there was enough new stuff in it to give team executives pause. The penalties for exceeding the luxury tax threshold have been significantly increased, there is a cap on the amount teams can spend to sign international prospects, and the draft-pick compensation for free-agent signings has been altered (and is also now linked to whether a team is paying luxury tax). That is a lot of moving parts, and it means a lot of teams are making on-the-fly adjustments to their spending plans, not just next year, but in 2018 and beyond.

It will be more costly to pay luxury tax, harder to throw a bunch of money at long-term Latin American prospects, but less punitive to sign someone else’s free agents. It is probably not a coincidence that the biggest moves this off-season, the trades by Boston for Chris Sale and Washington for Adam Eaton, were swaps that didn’t require giant cash investments, at least by the normal standards of the teams that acquired the key players. Whenever a new labour deal is signed, it takes time for teams (and, especially, agents) to figure out how to best game the new system. (See: The National Hockey League and front-loaded contracts, circa 2010.)

This also means the immediate aftermath of a new deal is probably the worst time to make a major long-term commitment to a free agent. Bad timing, then, for a couple of guys who, as yet, are still not former Blue Jays.

sstinson@postmedia.com