Rays reliever Ryan Thompson details messy arbitration hearing after losing battle over $200K

While players have benefited greatly from arbitration, it's an uncomfortable and flawed process

Salary arbitration remains a broadly unpopular process among Major League Baseball teams and players. Players dislike the structural awkwardness of it -- in which a team is in essence tasked with denigrating a player's accomplishments while he's in the room -- and teams dislike it because arbitration has led to significant salary growth for young players. 

For the uninitiated, in salary arbitration, a player with between three and six years of service time (in rare instances, between two and six years) and his team exchange binding salary figures, and the three-person arbitration panel picks one or the other. The panel is not permitted to average the two figures or pick a salary out of the ether. As such, the system is designed to foment negotiation leading up to the arbitration hearing, and the "pick one or the other" nature of it prevents either side from submitting some kind of absurd salary figure. The process has been around since 1973, and it presents the young player with his first opportunity for something close to fair compensation. 

As you can imagine, though, the process can lead to some hard feelings, like with Corbin Burnes. After all -- and as noted -- the team must in essence insult the player's accomplishments during the prior season in order to make the case for the salary figure it submitted. Speaking of which, Tampa Bay Rays reliever Ryan Thompson recently wrote a lengthy Twitter thread on what he sees as the biggest problem with salary arbitration. Some of these bear highlighting: 

• In arguing against the quality of Thompson's 2022 season, the club leaned on flawed metrics that it would never use in its day-to-day operations. For instance, Thompson says blown saves were brought up, a metric beyond useless when applied to middle relievers like Thompson. 
• The Rays also cited Thompson's lack of use against left-handed batters. The team, of course, wholly determines how often a relief pitcher is used against the opposite side, and in limited exposure Thompson over his career has actually been better against left-handed batters than right-handed batters. 
• None of these perhaps cynical ploys work if the arbitration panel has a basic understanding of baseball statistics and on-field value. In Thompson's estimation -- and this has become a familiar observation over the years -- the three-person panel very much lacked that basic understanding.

"The biggest issue with this process to me is that the arbitrators get to make whatever decision they come to, but with no explanation or defense of the decision. In any other legal case, the decision is public, this for some reason is very hidden and secretive," Thompson tweeted late Wednesday.

"If the process is created in order for fairness, then why don't we learn the laws of the land. In some sense, we were shooting in the dark not knowing what the arbitrators leaned into and what they disregarded. These understandings matter."

In this round of arbitration, the team side has fared quite well, as they've gone 13-6 in cases that reached the trial phase this offseason. Perhaps that's playing into some of the player-side frustrations we're hearing, but, again, the strange dynamics in play aren't new. 

The larger reality, though, is that arbitration has led to major salary growth for players who haven't yet reached free agency, so the mechanism itself probably isn't going anywhere (in spite of MLB's desires for it to go away). That said, from afar it certainly seems like the process could be improved by limiting what's admissible during hearings and requiring a fundamental understanding of player evaluation on the the part of the panel. For now, the process remains an exercise in discomfort and frustration.