As some agents and club executives picked through the fine print of baseball’s newly completed Collective Bargaining Agreement last fall, a lot of them reached the same conclusion: The new rules would dramatically alter how clubs spend money.
Just one year later, those predictions seem to coming true, and as some agents feared, perhaps to the great detriment of the middle class of players -- the veteran free agents who aren’t superstars. As of Thursday morning, there are about 150 unsigned free agents, in what has been a very slow-moving market. Among them are six unsigned free agents who hit 30 or more homers last season and another five who hit 20 or more homers.