Why major league-ready Kris Bryant should start the season in the minors

MESA, Ariz. – At this juncture of spring training, when everybody in uniform wants the interminable days to end and the real games to begin, when the beat writers have exhausted their trove of story ideas, when the fans latch on to anything new or novel as a beacon shining toward opening day, a debate like the one over Kris Bryant’s immediate future gets pumped full of bluster and narrative that simply doesn’t match reality.

In a world of gray issues, this is the rare black-and-white dispute, one with a truth as evident as it is disheartening. Of course the Chicago Cubs should start Bryant at Triple-A Iowa to start the season, even if he is their best option at third base right now. Do not blame Theo Epstein for it. Do not blame Cubs ownership for it. Blame the system to which players and owners agreed that incentivizes this sort of behavior.

The rhetoric has been ratcheted up in recent days, fueled by Bryant’s spring training-leading six home runs in 23 at-bats – one more than the entire Toronto Blue Jays roster has hit in 498 at-bats. He is the best power-hitting prospect in baseball, the purest since Giancarlo Stanton was called Mike, and at 23 years old possesses every skill to anchor the Cubs into the 2020s. And his agent happens to be Scott Boras, whose ability to inflame through oratory prominence often prompts teams to swallow NSAIDs by the fistful.

Boras lobbed his standard Molotov Cocktail on Tuesday, trying to make the case that Cubs owner Tom Ricketts has a responsibility to override whatever president of baseball operations Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer see fit to do with Bryant. Never mind that Ricketts hired Epstein and Hoyer to make this exact sort of decision. This is a simple equation that exists at the baseball-operations level, not for owners.

Is nine games in 2015 greater than 162 games in 2021?

That is it. That’s the nutshell. Do the Chicago Cubs, who have playoff aspirations for this season but only because baseball is a wasteland of parity, really believe the impact superstar-in-the-making Kris Bryant can have over nine games in 2015 supersedes what he can do in his full age-29 season? If the answer is yes, you keep him. If the answer is no, you don’t.

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Baseball’s service-time rules dictate this conversation. They are stupid, worthy of the finest minds in the sport getting together before the next collective-bargaining agreement and figuring out how to allow teams to break camp with their finest 25 players and without being penalized for it. They are the rules, though, and they are rather simple: While there are 183 days in a baseball season, a player accumulates one year of service time with 172 days on the major league roster. A player with six full seasons in the big leagues earns free agency. Thus, by waiting just 12 days to promote Bryant, the Cubs will delay his free agency by an entire season.

Over the first 12 days of the season, the Cubs play nine games. Surely over those nine games Bryant could hit a half-dozen home runs; the prospect of him swinging for the middle three at Coors Field is indeed tantalizing. He also could hit none. That is the problem with parsing an issue like this. Only a soothsayer knows, and those in the baseball industry are just guessing.

They’re educated guesses, though, and those educated guesses demand data points. Projection systems exist all across baseball, and most of them peg Bryant for around three wins above replacement this season. WAR may be a flawed metric, but it’s reasonable enough to use here. The highest project comes from Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS, which calls Bryant a 4.2-win player. Nine games over a 162-game season equals 0.2 wins. While no player distributes his production evenly, it’s the fairest way to look at it without knowing whether Bryant would go off or struggle over those three series.

In 2021, on the other hand, ZiPS projects Bryant for 4.9 wins. If his ascendance comes even close to mirroring ZiPS’ projections, he’ll be in line for a fourth year of arbitration that season, which likely would exceed $30 million. So it’s not like Bryant will come cheap to the Cubs. Every year of arbitration salary, however, amounts to a one-year deal, and every team dreams of getting a superstar on such a risk-friendly term.

Suppose Bryant isn’t a star or a good player or even a serviceable major leaguer – that he’s a complete bust. This isn’t out of the question. Happened with Brandon Wood, a power-hitting, can’t-miss third baseman. Happened with Andy Marte, a power-hitting, can’t-miss third baseman. It’s not likely, of course, but the possibility certainly exists. And if that does happen – if the worst-case scenario plays itself out and planning for 2021 was moot – the only way in which this could bite the Cubs is if they miss the postseason in 2015 by one or two games. Possible? Certainly. Probable? Despite what the sucker-baiting oddsmakers in Las Vegas may have you believe, not particularly.

The Cubs don’t want to rush their transition to contention because they don’t have to. In interviews with FoxSports.com and USA Today, Boras argued Bryant should’ve been up last September after he dominated the minor leagues. Absent service-time considerations, that’s probably true. But Bryant exists in a baseball world that encourages teams to hold back their best prospects because it’s the proper business decision, and to summon Bryant during the September of a losing season would epitomize improper decision-making.

Boras is right about a lot of things. He was dead-on when he questioned why Jose Abreu got paid $68 million as a free agent from Cuba while Bryant, a similar talent, signed out of the draft for about one-tenth of that. Bryant is his cause célèbre, one that any good agent takes up, because that’s how this charade works.

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And that’s all this is. The Cubs, similarly, have to act like this is strictly a baseball decision, that Bryant needs some seasoning defensively at third base (which he does) and that a dozen days at Triple-A could help him find a rhythm in the field he hasn’t found yet this spring (which it may). Ultimately, any excuse on the baseball side is simply cosmetic; Bryant belongs in the major leagues.

“I really stay away from it,” Bryant said Tuesday. “I tune it out. It’s kind of getting old for me now. I’m just trying to go out there and play baseball. If they see me as one of the top 25 guys at the end of spring, I’ll be up there.”

That’s not exactly true. Of course Bryant is one of the Cubs’ 25 best. So is Addison Russell, and nobody is clamoring for him to start the season in the major leagues. Roster construction does not exist in a vacuum. Not only is service time a consideration, but so are options, salary, age and any other number of factors beyond the obviousness of talent.

“I understand there are certain rules you abide by, and this isn’t any different,” Bryant said. “I’m really trying to make it hard on them and have fun and do it with a smile on my face.”

The Cubs’ elation over Bryant goes well beyond the majestic home runs he hits. They love his attitude, his curiosity, his knowledge, his dedication. He figured out how to leverage his 6-foot-5 body into a compact, powerful swing that turns ordinary fly balls into home runs via extraordinary backspin. If he isn’t a star, everyone will have missed.

Which makes this such a non-choice. Even if Bryant patrolling third base during the first game of the major league season April 5, Cubs vs. Cardinals, would add an element of excitement on top of the (semi-)renovated Wrigley Field and Jon Lester’s first start for his new team, it can wait. Evan Longoria and Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper waited. Last season, George Springer and Gregory Polanco waited.

Jason Heyward didn’t wait, and the Braves won the wild card by one game in his rookie season, and it seemed like the proper decision at the time. And yet half a decade later, Atlanta traded him this season, as free agency beckoned. Maybe they wouldn’t have dealt him with two years left until free agency. Or perhaps they could have gotten more via trade under those circumstances. And no one can say whether they wouldn’t have made the playoffs in 2010 without him for a couple weeks.

These are nothing more than gambles, and the best gamblers stick to the games with the greatest odds. The odds are stacked decidedly in favor of sending Kris Bryant to Iowa and summoning him April 17, the 13th day of the season. Certainly the players’ association will cry foul. Boras will seethe. But they’re the rules, ones agreed to by both parties, and the Cubs are simply doing what the odds tell them to.

So get ready for more bluster and more narrative and more of the debate that isn’t really a debate. With every home run, it becomes more clear what the Cubs have to do, no matter how counterintuitive it may be. Kris Bryant, an obvious major leaguer, should start the season in the minor leagues. And if that sentence is not an impetus to overhaul the rules and prevent this from happening, nothing will.

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