A reader asks Dejan Kovacevic about the lack of blacks from the United States in Major League Baseball. Kovacevic provides a great answer, blaming the draft, an answer I agree with 100%:
For a handful, like Miguel Sano or especially Aroldis Chapman, the international market can bring a huge bonus. For most, though, the bonuses are in the four-figure range. And MLB teams sign many, many players in that range. Hence, the argument made by Hunter and Boras about the cost being lower, because a player who gets drafted, even in the lower rounds, probably is going to do better.
But there is more to it: MLB teams have created a system, especially in the Dominican, that functions like a cheap-player factory. Everyone, including the Pirates, has an academy there, and some of them, again including the Pirates, are just fabulous.
Well, even though that system benefits MLB teams, it also benefits Dominican youngsters in a way that the poorer kids in the United States — regardless of race — do not. MLB has exactly one such academy in the United States, in Compton, Calif., compared to the 30 on the tiny land of the Dominican or the dozen still left in Venezuela and the growing number in baseball outposts such as Korea, Australia and Europe. (Japan falls into its own category, as it handles its own amateurs. Long sidebar there for another day.)
Puerto Rico actually provides the best example: The land that produced Roberto Clemente has seen a marked decline in producing talent since baseball included it in the draft. And that is simply because there is no motivation, unlike in the Dominican, for teams to compete for talent there. The draft eliminates the competition. Thus, no one is building academies there. Thus, fewer poor children get the chance.
Ask any Puerto Rican in the majors about this — Ramon Vazquez is one with the Pirates — and they express profound regret about what has happened to baseball there.
To summarize, the draft makes international players cheaper. This causes MLB teams to invest in these poor areas, helping those communities. The draft hurt both U.S. blacks and Puerto Ricans, since it eliminated the incentive (cheap players) to invest in these communities. I would draw the conclusion from that argument that the draft is bad for poor people who want to play baseball. So what is Kovacevic’s solution?
The solution is simple: Worldwide draft.
The draft is bad for poor people and minorities, so let’s institute it world wide! If the goal is to get more U.S. blacks involved in the game, why not exclude blacks from the draft, and even allow 16 year olds to sign, like they do internationally. You’ll see baseball academies popping up in the inner cities, and I suspect in five to ten years the level of U.S. blacks in MLB will rival the 1970s. That solution, however, just makes too much sense.
How about just get rid of the draft entirely?
@Yeager: I’ve been beating that drum awhile, but I’m willing to take baby steps.
Great analysis, but the idea of eliminating blacks from the draft is just bizarre. Hard to imagine how it could be defended in court, and who counts as black? Barack Obama?
You’ve halfway convinced me that eliminating the draft is a good idea. But how do we avoid exacerbating competitive imbalance? As bad as it is now, pre-draft the Yankees won 29 pennants in 43 years. It might help, if the draft is eliminated, to structure contracts in such a way that all (or almost all) minor leaguers are free agents after each season. That will spread the talent around, and incentivize clubs’ giving their young players an actual future.
@bureaucratist: Yes, I’ve suggested minor league free agents as well (actually, universal free agency).
As for the Yankees, I often wonder how much of that was teams not wanting to compete with the Yankees, as opposed to not being able to compete with the Yankees. They kept coming up with rules to limit the Yankees rather than trying to just out bid them once in a while. The Yankees found their way around every rule. I’ll also note that free agency in the 1970s did more to balance the playing field than the draft did. With the draft, the dynasties shifted to Cincinnati, Oakland and Baltimore. They didn’t really disappear until free agency, where we had a different team win the World Series every year from 1978 to 1992.
Why not just exempt high schoolers from the draft, but allow them to sign as free agents? That way, the draft only mandates the draft for a narrow swath of players: somewhere in the 18-20 range, and only applies to college players generally. If you’re playing college baseball, you’re almost definitely in the US. This levels the playing field for young Americans.
It’d be an incremental way to the gradual abolition of the draft.
@JR: Yep, another good idea. Do you think anyone at MLB or the MLBPA even considers doing away with the draft.
“But how do we avoid exacerbating competitive imbalance? As bad as it is now, pre-draft the Yankees won 29 pennants in 43 years.”
I’ve said this before, but most of those world championships came in an eight team league, where the the team with the best regular season record automatically one the pennant and got to the World Series, and one of those eight teams was the Browns. Every team in that league had effectively a better than 1/8 chance of winning the pennant.
Post expansion, the record is something like 9 world championships/ 14 pennants in 50 years, which is impressive but not the sort of dominance that should be preventing rules changes that otherwise makes sense.
One obvious choice would be a worldwide draft, a tax on each club, and have MLB run the clinics throughout the world, since MLB would continue to have in interest in developing players, and would probably prefer to capture the goodwill such clinics foster, rather than letting individual clubs do so.
So what about American born whites. It would seem that they are being left out if the problem is the draft. If American whites are not being similarly hurt as US African Americans, then something else is going on.
I read an article sometime back about the decline of little league baseball in the inner cities. This would effect African Americans more than whites since a larger percentage of the population lives in the inner city. This should be considered.
Also, one must consider the popularity of basketball and football to inner city African Americans. These sports seem to offer more in the way of scholarships. Much better to get an education playing a sport you love than signing at age 16 to play in the minors.
Also, if you consider going the baseball route out of high school, you are looking at languishing in the minors for 6 years or so, with no guarantees you will make it. In the NBA and NFL, once you get drafted out of college after receiving an education, you are in the major leagues if you make the team, if not, you have your degree and move on.
I say keep the draft, the NBA and NFL have a draft and it does not bother them. What should be considered is giving each team a limit on the number of international players they can have on the 40 man roster (or pay extra for having more international players). It’s one thing to let in the Manny Ramirez’s of the world, there are few of his talent around, but when you start bringing in too many players who are just replacement players or not much better than average, then you are taking jobs away from the local kids.
I don’t disagree with an international draft, but I suspect this won’t be a very good thing for those kids in poor countries. It would help competitive balance since it is usually the richer teams who afford to costs of seeking out and developing international talent, and for the international elite players, they can choose to sign with a better team.
ptodd uses football and basketball as examples to refute David’s position on abolishing the draft when in reality, football and basketball support David’s position. In both those sports, a player’s entry in the profession is through college, which function as minor leagues for the NBA and NFL,and college sports are draft-free — complete free agency. And, as David predicts for a draft-free MLB, they are full of inner-city blacks.
Maybe this is the place to unveil an idea I’ve had for a while (I doubt very much that this is original) for a common-sense form revenue sharing (applicable across the sports, except football) that eliminates most of these problem: Each team in each game shares 50-50 all the revenue associated with that game: When the Royals come to New York, they receive from the Yankees the difference between 1/81 of their television contracts, as well as half the box office, half the parking, half the concessions, half the radio rights, etc. This pushes revenue toward a (just) middle while teams like the Yankees and Red Sox still maintain a decided advantage. In that contest, universal free agency seems like a better idea. In Ball Four, Bouton talks about the scouting and signing process ca. 1959, and most of centered around protecting hidden information. There is no hidden information now, and so universal free agency becomes more doable, I think.
You can take this one step further and base it on the ratings of the TV and radio broadcast. The teams that bring more viewers to the Yankees get a bigger piece of the pie. Competitive revenue sharing should prod teams to put the best players they can find on the field, rather than pocketing revenue sharing money.