I don’t know where to begin with this Michael Rosenberg draft article, which is just a big complaint about Scott Boras. How about the most glaring mistake?
(As a side note: Boras, and other agents, are officially just “advisers” to players, so those players can possibly go back to college if they don’t sign. This gives the players leverage. But it is also a blatant circumvention of the NCAA’s amateurism rules.)
Doesn’t Rosenberg know about the lawsuit that overturned this rule? Shouldn’t an editor at FoxSports know the about the rule?
As for Rosenberg’s solution to agents like Boras demanding lots of money for players like Stephen Strasburg:
Major League Baseball needs a true slotting system — not just a ridiculous, unenforceable commissioner’s recommendation. It needs a system like the NBA, where the top pick is locked into a certain figure and the contract values diminish with each subsequent pick. The only way to get one is to negotiate it into the next collective bargaining agreement.
That would give the owners cost certainty. It would keep signing bonuses reasonable. And it would allow teams to draft the best available talent, instead of the most signable player.
What Rosenberg doesn’t understand is that the teams created this system to screw the Yankees. Since agents figured out how to game the system to screw the non-Yankees, people like Rosenberg figure, “Let’s just create more rules that can be gamed!”
International players are free agents, and that seems to work just fine. Let teams sign whomever they like in a fixed period of time. The Yankees can’t sign everybody. Teams like Washington might be able to sign two or three very good players for the price a better team pays for Straburg. That’s what teams like Pittsburgh and Washington need, a way to get many good players onto their roster.
Abolish the draft, and let these amateurs sign for what the market will bear. Then we can stop having these idiotic discussions about what’s wrong with the draft. The draft is just wrong, period.
What I like is that every (well, most) time someone doesn’t like something that’s happening in the major league baseball laboor market, the first, immediate response is to change something so that the players get less money.
Is there a problem? Institute an amateur player draft (1965) instead of allowing amateur players to negotiate with anyone and everyone.
Is there a problem? Salay caps.
Is there a problem? “Luxury” taxes.
Is there a problem? Limits on signing bonuses.
Is there a problem? Screw the players.
At least these people are consistent.
No, the Yankees can’t sign everyone, but they can sign a lot of people. CC? check. Tex? check. AJ? check. It wouldn’t be much different with the amateur draft, though if 50 players are demanding millions apiece, of course the Yanks couldn’t sign all of them, but they could sign more than their fair share.
Yes, screw the Yankees is a proxy for screw the players, since the Yankees are one of the few franchises that is willing to pay players what they’re worth.
@sabernar: “…the Yanks couldn’t sign all of them, but they could sign more than their fair share.”
So what? Then they’re on the hook for more guys who don’t make it. Plus if they do sign a bunch of amateurs every year, where will they put them all? They won’t all fit on the 25-man roster year after year.
“Abolish the draft, and let these amateurs sign for what the market will bear. ”
What market?
MLB’s “market” is hopelessly skewed in favor of a handful of teams in big cities, at the expense of the majority of teams that reside in less than big cities. If *every* dollar of income was split evenly between *every* team then maybe a free market for all talent might work. But since some teams with geographic advantages (often confused by local fans and media with imaginary advantages in intelligence and/or strategy) make ten times as much money as other teams there can’t be a fair and free market for talent, amateur or otherwise.
Look at the top 50 prospects that’ll get drafted tomorrow. How many of them would NOT get scarfed up by NY, LA, and Boston? 10? 5? 1?
Sorry, your solution is delusional.
@ShoelesJoe: Yes, all the money those teams are paid in revenue sharing couldn’t possibly be used to sign draft choices.
the major league teams don’t have the enormous farm systems of the old bad pre draft days…the yanks don’t have two AAA power houses…neither do the dodgers…neither do the cardinals…nobody does.
so, the big market teams will be hindered by just how many minor league slots they’ll have available in their systems.
so they’re not likely to take enormous chunks of the very best players available…
the things that justified organizing a draft in the first place have changed. there’s really no justification to continue to have a draft, except to lower labor costs for the major league owners.
“Look at the top 50 prospects that’ll get drafted tomorrow. How many of them would NOT get scarfed up by NY, LA, and Boston? 10? 5? 1?”
You do realize that players would get to choose who they sign with, right? I’m willing to bet that a fair amount of players would be more interested in somewhere they would actually have a chance of playing, rather than going with the kind of overloaded farm systems you’re imagining…
The real question is do you agree or disagree with the use of the draft to distribute talent?
If you don’t then argue to abolish the draft – for anyone that says players won’t just choose the money, they will go where they get a chance to play – just naive nonsense. While not a true comparison, players who are already financially secure choose the money (but are reasonably certain of playing time), why on earth would a competitive young player, who isn’t financially secure, choose anything other than the highest bid? Every player will believe they are good enough to win a place, so why not take the money?
If you do think the draft is a tool for redistributing talent, then put forward a system to improve the sharing of economic benefits, which clearly isn’t a slotting system. Why not have a system where a draft order exists, but where every team blind bids on a player – the highest bid wins, but the team with draft priority can match that highest bid, or lose the rights to the player – that way no team can “deny” a player what is rightfully theirs, but which would allow economically disadvantaged teams to maximize the utility of the dollars they want to put in the market?
To me, abolishing the draft is arguing for a ‘perfect competition’ market solution, in a market that is not perfectly competitive.
Without dragging the post off topic, several commentators here and elsewhere are arguing that the draft denies players their rightful economic reward – I understand the argument, but wonder why I never read discussions on how owners can claw back economic reward from players who clearly aren’t earning it – or is risk one way in baseball?
Hmm. I’m generally on the free-market side of things, but I’m not really sure the draft abridges a player’s economic freedoms. I guess it depends on how you view MLB—is it a collection of competing teams, or is it a single entity? As a business, I think it’s more of a single entity—none of the teams would exist without the others. As such, your options as an amateur are to enter MLB or not, not to sign with a specific team. Abolishing the draft could hurt prospects financially in the long term, as well. If doing so results in increasing competitive imbalance, and MLB loses market share in the entertainment industry as a result, the overall pool of dollars available for player salaries would shrink. Top prospects might get a larger percentage of that pool, but a smaller gross amount. The players need MLB as much as MLB needs the players.
I think Neil makes a strong point. If you abolish the draft, you’d have to spread the income MLB generates evenly (or at least much more evenly) between the teams. Otherwise you’re creating a permanent underclass of teams and endangering the competitiveness of MLB as a business in the entertainment industry. Of course, revenue-sharing is a whole different argument.