Milwaukee Brewers ace Corbin Burnes had a worrisome quote about his relationship with the organization in light of his recent arbitration hearing.
Burnes and the Brewers failed to settle on a contract for 2023, forcing the two sides to go to salary arbitration. The Brewers won the hearing having sought to pay Burnes $10.01 million, while Burnes asked for $10.75 million.
On Thursday, Burnes admitted that the process had negatively impacted his relationship with the organization.
“You kind of find out your true value,” Burnes said. “You think you work hard for seven years in an organization and five years with the big league team and you get in there and basically they value you much different than what you thought you contributed to the organization. It’s tough to hear, tough to take, but they’re trying to do what they can to win a hearing, but I think there was obviously others ways that they could have gone about it and probably been a little more respectful with the way they went about it, and at the end of the day, here we are.
“There’s no denying that the relationship is definitely hurt from what [transpired] over the last couple of weeks. When some of the things that are said, basically put me in the forefront of the reason why we didn’t make the postseason last year. That’s something that probably doesn’t need to be said. You can go about a hearing without having to do that.”
This is the danger of arbitration hearings. Teams essentially have to argue that players are not as valuable as they feel they are in order to win a hearing. This case seems particularly silly, as the gap between Burnes and the Brewers was not that significant.
Burnes made 33 starts in 2022, posting a 2.94 ERA while leading the NL with 243 strikeouts.
