Theo Speaks on Bryant Grievance, Not Likely Ground-Breaking

The Chicago Cubs seem hellbent on trading their best player this offseason, but there’s one major hurdle – his grievance. Back in 2015, Kris Bryant and Scott Boras filed a grievance with Major League Baseball due to apparent service time manipulation. While manipulating the service clock is basically standard operating procedure, a couple players have filed against their teams for keeping them in the minors just long enough to squeak out another year of control.

For some reason, it has taken up until this offseason for MLB and an arbitrator to hear the case.

Now, there is a lot of false narrative out there suggesting that Bryant is mad at the Cubs, which is why he’s held onto the grievance, but Bryant has been incredibly adamant that his grievance was more about future players not being taken advantage of than it was about himself. After all, this is just the business of baseball.

Monday evening, at the Winter Meetings in San Diego, Theo Epstein talked a bit about the grievance and his belief that nothing groundbreaking will come of it.

Theo Epstein said he was preceding ahead and “fairly confident “that the grievance presented by the union on Kris Bryant’s service time will not be ground breaking result of free agent status being granted one year early.

— Bruce Levine (@MLBBruceLevine) December 10, 2019

Theo on waiting for decision on Bryant grievance: "I think we’re fairly confident in what the outcome is going to be. But the timing, I guess, is a bit frustrating. It would be nice to know. We’re at this point in the winter meetings there hasn’t been a ruling. … (more)

— Mark Gonzales (@MDGonzales) December 10, 2019

And I understand these things take time."

— Mark Gonzales (@MDGonzales) December 10, 2019

There is really no way an arbiter could allow Bryant to become a free agent after this season. Not only would that put the Cubs in a bad place, but several other teams as well. Like previously mentioned, Bryant isn’t the first or last player to have been taken advantage of like this. And while yes, athletes get paid a ton of money to play a sport, a lot of these kids are coming out of a minor league system that is essentially slave labor and into another system where they’re immediately taken advantage of again.

Once there is more official news on the grievance, which should last a couple more weeks, that will increase the pace in which they can move Bryant. According to sources, the Cubs are ok waiting until the grievance is completed as both Josh Donaldson and Anthony Rendon should have found new homes. This will increase Bryant’s value to the teams that lost out on either of those two third baseman.