Murray Chass writes on manipulating service time. Union chief Michael Weiner wants it stopped:
Weiner doesn’t question the clubs’ right to make personnel decisions, but he is concerned with the way he feels they “manipulate” service time for players before they reach the two-to-three-year level of major league service.
The players in the top 17 percent of that two-to-three class are called “Super Twos.” The category was created as a compromise in the 1990 negotiations that produced a lockout.
“Going to Super Twos was supposed to be a floating threshold that wouldn’t be easy to manipulate,” Weiner said, “but it has become so obvious that this is happening so it will be a part of collective bargaining.” He referred to the bargaining that will take place to replace the agreement that expires in December 2011.
I will be very eager to see what they come up with that won’t be easy to manipulate. I suppose if they base it on ability rather than playing time, it might work. Instead of the 17% with the most service time, the 17% with the highest WAR are eligible. So if team call up scrubs early in the season and stars later in the season, the stars should still be super twos.
Remember, that’s what this is all about. Seventeen percent of the players are still super twos, but it’s not the best players in the class, players like Ryan Howard who would set arbitration records and push salaries higher. Oh wait. Ryan Howard was a super two who set an arbitration record. So was Tim Lincecum. To paraphrase Dennis Moore, this manipulation of super twos is trickier than I thought.
In other words, Weiner’s whines about super twos are just that. Any rule the union comes up with is going to be manipulated, because that’s what lawyers are paid to do. The union lawyers should know that.
Update: Here’s something else that might work. Select the percentage of super twos randomly every year, and make range wide enough that teams can’t manipulate the number. So every year, between 10 and 50% of players called up with less than a full year service time can be super twos, but teams won’t know until the end of the season. At the end of the season, a random number is draw indicating the percentage. So if a team calls up a player in May, and the percentage is 10%, they might not go to arbitration so soon. Another year, a player called up in July might be a super two. The problem now is that teams pretty much know when super twos end.
I suppose if one team wanted to force another into paying a super two, they could call up a plethora of players after a big star came up in June. That would force the star into the top 17%.
I have an idea. Let the player be brought up to the the MLB team on a 1 or 2 year deal at a time of that teams chosing (excluding September call ups). Give the team an option to renew that deal for 1 year (or smart teams can offer longer term deals). At the end of the option year (or end of the multi-year contract), let the player be a FA or accept arbitration (if offered by the team). End the slavery and service time discrimination, and the manipulation of the system that goes with it. Keep it simple.
Of course, the unintended consequence would be significant wage deflation for older players who have been emancipated, and more of an unbalanced league as the richer teams acquire the younger talent. This could be addressed with a salary cap that is tied into league revenues that would be verified by an independent Big 4 auditor assigned jointly by the MLBPA and MLB who would simply come back with a report after their annual audit giving a single number each year (so teams financial privacy would be protected).