Tony Clark says MLBPA will protect the right for deferred contracts like Shohei Ohtani’s

Tony Clark, executive director of the MLB Players Assn., talks with reporters before Game 1 of the World Series in October. “All of those things we should assume to be correct.” Clark’s comments came Monday, minutes after he and other MLBPA officials met with Dodgers players at the team’s Camelback Ranch facility, and more than two months after Ohtani inked a record-setting deal that stunned many agents, executives and evaluators around MLB. The trend hasn’t gone unnoticed by agents around the industry, especially for deals such as Ohtani’s in which the “net present value” of a contract — essentially, how much a deal with deferrals would be worth if it were paid out in the present day, since money in the future isn’t as valuable because of inflation — is significantly lower than the actual guaranteed total. A more consequential recent development to Clark — and agents around baseball — was MLB commissioner Rob Manfred saying last week that the league would prefer to institute a “free agency signing period” in the offseason, preferably in December around the time of the winter meetings. “We’ve had two player meetings as of this spring,” Clark said, “and being able to remind them of what the actual proposal was, they all understand.