Kris Bryant (USA TODAY Sports Images)

The Cubs sent top prospect Kris Bryant to minor league camp on Monday, a controversial decision that may allow the team to maintain an extra year of controlling Bryant through arbitration due to Major League Baseball’s service-time rules.

The Major League Baseball Players Association released a strongly worded statement in response to the move. Via the union’s Twitter:

Today is a bad day for baseball. We all know that if Kris Bryant were a combination of the greatest players to play our great game, and perhaps he will be before it’s all said and done, the Cubs still would have made the decision they made today. This decision, and other similar decisions made by clubs will be addressed in litigation, bargaining or both.

Bryant’s agent, Scott Boras, echoed the union’s sentiments with fancier words. Via the Associated Press::

MLB is not the MLB without the best players. Kris excelled at every level and earned the right of entry. The CBA is at the apogee of wrongs incentivizing clubs to create a product less than best. Bryant’s situation is the badge for change to the CBA player service structure.

And Major League Baseball defended the Cubs in a statement of its own:

In accordance with long established practice under the Basic Agreement, a club has an unfettered right to determine which players are part of its opening-day roster. This issue was discussed extensively in bargaining in 2011, and the principle was not changed. We do not believe that it is appropriate for the players’ association to make the determination that Kris Bryant should be on the Cubs’ 25-man roster while another player, who, unlike Bryant, is a member of its bargaining unit, should be cut or sent to the minor leagues.

Got all that? Let’s try to sort this all out.

First off, Boras is absolutely right to defend his client. Nothing terribly surprising there. People sometimes seem like they will twist everything Boras says into evidence he is evil, but he’s doing his job here. And like he points out, the service-time rules that helped push Bryant to the minors were those collectively bargained by the league and its union.

(USA TODAY Sports Images)

That’s why part of why the MLBPA’s angle here seems murkier. The union appears to be threatening litigation over a team abiding by the very rules the union agreed to and helped establish in the CBA. Plus, as MLB’s statement points out, the MLBPA is acting on behalf of a player who, like all minor leaguers, is not represented by the union.

If anything, if the Bryant decision is unpopular in the union it’s likely because so many of its members have lost service time to the exact same type of roster machinations. The Cubs are just not anywhere close to the first team to keep a prized young player in the minors when it looks like he’s ready to start a season, so it’s hard to figure why anyone would single them out for it.

And no matter what service-time rules are set in the next CBA, some team — probably every team, even — is going to figure out a way to maintain control over its young players for as long as possible, for as long as young players represent the most cost-effective way to compete.