All interesting things in life are multifactorial!!
What Boras said. “I think we’ve got a lot of excuse-making,’’ Boras said. “We have a lot of reasons for non-competitiveness. And the reason for it is they’re suggesting some reward (high draft picks). Our system is upside-down, because we never, ever want to reward non-competitiveness. It is a cancer. It damages the brand of baseball.’’
Some factors:
-the Cubs / Astros blueprint (Padres are trying).
-post steroid FA hitters losing effectiveness earlier, and other reasons for so many big contract FA busts.
-owner collusion
-team use of stats / analytics
-younger players are outperforming older players more than before
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...are-all-right/