This is part one of a three-part series on fixing the MLB draft. It isn’t a perfect fix, but it is a start…..and it is slightly more realistic than my proposal that every team make the playoffs! Part two will cover the details. Part three will be an analysis of the likely spend by each team (though that might be delayed while I do the math). We can quibble over numbers, but the idea is that players have more say on where they go, and bad teams have the opportunity to get better faster.
Four or Five of the Problems With the Current Draft (not in any order)
- It encourages tanking. Bad teams have incentives to be even more bad, so that they get earlier picks and more money to sign players. This leads to bad baseball, and certainly can create imbalance among the teams. Look at the AL Central in 2019.
- The draft suppresses compensation for draftees. Draft picks are underpaid compared to what international free agents used to get, before those dollars were capped. I know that some people think that all players are millionaires or are “just playing a game” or other nonsense. But, no. These people are doing a job.
- Players have no say where they end up going at the beginning of their careers. I’m not sure about you, but I think workers should have at least some choice in where they work. This is the problem that most other suggestions for changing the draft do not attempt to fix.
- You can’t trade draft picks. This might have made sense when picks did not have a cap tied to their draft position. Players could hold out and ask for more money. The thought was that elite players would hold out, and only the rich clubs could afford them. So, less wealthy teams would have to trade those picks. Banning trades was a way to keep that from happening. This is a problem because picks are like any asset, and they should be available for trading as one way for a bad team to get better faster (for example, trading for more advance minor league players that can come up sooner).
Finally, there are issues with how non-US born players are treated compared to US born players. Largely, they are currently free agents (of a sort), but there is a lot of talk about having an international draft. I’m going to mostly skip over this topic for now. I may write a separate article about a proposal for an international draft later but know that it would look a lot like this one, except for age differences and how I would suggest MLB work with teenagers in other countries.
Some assumptions about what MLB and the MLBPA would or would not agree to.
First assumption, we can’t just eliminate the draft. No sport has no draft. No chance teams agree to this.
Second, there will always be some sort of cap on what teams can spend. The less wealthy teams will not go back to a time with no cap, and the wealthy teams aren’t going to argue with them. They all like making more money.
Third, the draft needs to give the worse teams an advantage in acquiring players. Drafts are set up this way, to almost reward the bad teams for how bad they are. It seems obvious on its face that this gives the bad teams a chance to catch up to the good teams, over time at least.
The goals of this system
- Somewhat decrease the incentive to be bad at the MLB level.
- Speed up the ability for bad teams to get better.
- Decrease barriers to MLB players making money, tied to the draft at least.
- Give (at least a subset of) players some say in where they start their careers.
- Increase the opportunity for the best players to make more money.
Some things this system doesn’t fix as much as I’d like:
- Players don’t have full freedom to decide where they go, but it’s darn close for most of them.
- We can’t fix the fact that most players are under paid at the draft and in the minors (those two are tied together…..we can’t use this system to fix the overall pay issue.)
- We still won’t have even footing for international and US born players.
So, what’s the summary of this plan?
The one sentence summary: the MLB entry system should be a hybrid of free agency and a draft. Well, really, it is limited free agency. The draft part is largely abolished in this proposal.
The draft has 5 distinct rounds which will be explained in part two of the series:
1. The ten worst teams get to sign players subject to an $8 million pool per team.
2. The next ten worst teams, plus the first group get to sign players. The ten best teams can trade into this round. The pool per team is $5 million.
3. All thirty teams get to sign players subject to a variable pool that ranges from $4 to $5.5 million.
4. All thirty teams get to sign players subject to a pool that is the same for everyone.
5. The remaining players can sign with any team for a lot less money than the first 300 got.
By the end of round 4, teams must have signed 10 players……which is the equivalent of ten rounds. Note, there are no sandwich picks for free agency losses or anything like that. That system goes away…..
So, that’s it. Next: The gory details of each round……