“It has created an incentive to lose, and we now have a process where teams are not seeking competitiveness and therefore they’re not seeking players to be competitive."

When "super-agent" Scott Boras speaks, the air grows so thick with self-interest that you might as well be vaping a Chris Christie beer fart. What Boras does to subtlety, elephants do to watermelons. In the public battle between millionaire baseball players and billionaire team owners, Boras is always working the refs - (everybody knows this: bird gotta fly, fish gotta swim) - though one problem has emerged for this voice of labor: There are no refs anymore.

That war I mentioned? The owners won. Long ago. Everything. Every front. After years of manning the barricades, they managed to install a de facto salary cap - called the "luxury tax threshold" - and they now limit team spending at every level of a player's career, from hoof to bun. In today's Times, Tyler Kepner addresses the current "sluggish free-agent market," including a few hot-button zingers from Boras, the King of Craven.

Some highlights:

"To make baseball what it should be — a league of 30 that are incentivized to compete — we need to address these rules to say: You get more money in the draft if you win x number of games, and if you finish below a certain standard, you don’t get a top-five or top-10 pick. That will make the league more entertaining and make baseball better, because we want to wake up every day and know that every team has an incentive to win, not an incentive to lose.”

Kepner notes that team tear-downs work: The world champion Astros, Cubs and Royals have proved this. What's wrong with losing now to win later? Boras' take:

"When you’re a professional player and you sign that contract, on your first day, you’re taught that you’re here to win, you’re here to compete, you’re here to be your best. And if they teach that to their young players and they tell the fans they’re here to win, then the entirety of this process in pro sports needs to be about winning — and the structure needs to have immediate change to address this.”

Wow. No wonder the players union lost: Naivety. They actually thought winning is the objective. 

To describe today's slow free-agent market, Kepner invokes the C-word: Collusion. And why not collude? By sitting on their hands, the owners win. The longer a free agent has no team, the more stress upon his family. Take JD Martinez for example. He wants a seven-year deal, but Boston is holding at five. The Redsock suits know where their kids will be attending school next year. Martinez waits in limbo. Sure, he'll end up wealthy beyond our imagination, but until the guy knows where he'll be next summer, he's waking up five times a night to pee. Just watch: He'll sign for five.

OK, so... you were wondering: Who gives a shit about this, what about the Yankees?

Last night, River Ave did some quickie math. Between now and Oct. 30, to stay below the tax threshold, the Evil Emp has about $19 million to spend on extra players. But the question looms, how close does Brian Cashman want to cut it?

Come July 31 the Orioles could be Aleppo. Dead team, dead city. If so, they will almost assuredly put Manny Machado on the market. The Yankees would have prospects to trade. But it would still cost them about $7 million for the second half. In simple terms, that $19 million can get swallowed up in a gulp.

Unless the Yankees find someone willing to take at least half of Jacoby Ellsbury's $21 million salary, Cashman has only nickels and dimes to spend: a lefty reliever, a backup catcher, some veterans launching a comeback (who are not named Rafael Palmeiro.) Yu Darvish? Uh-uh. Makes absolutely no sense. 

Baseball won't be changing its rules to mollify the King of Craven. Come July 30, there will be some serious tear-downs underway - possibly three within our own division - and the Yankees better save their cash. In this market, $19 million is a beer fart.