The fact that they always go up is no surprise. Until an arb player reaches something close to the market value at his position, it should go up regardless of how the player performs. Service time is the driving factor. Don’t forget, the process starts with players making the major league minimum of 450K.

But WHAT the free market price is for player X is something that should change from year to year. Typically, it goes up. But I would imagine next year it will be adjusted downward. Players will still get increases in arb, but we likely won’t see the new levels set like what happened with Howard last year.

Well, yeah, it raises the AAV compared to the old process of “You’ll take what we offer you or you aren’t eligible to play.”

Otherwise, it shouldn’t be raising the bar unless you’re talking about the top players. But those players would usually be getting into free agent bidding wars, which is by far the biggest contributor to high salaries.