Major League Baseball Considering Ending the Draft?

Yoan Moncada and his expected signing bonus is going to really shake up MLB’s International Free Agent spending limits and caps and may force the hand of MLB into an International Draft, eventually. This got Dave Cameron of Fangraphs.com thinking and he thinks he has come up with an idea to completely eliminate the MLB First Year Player’s Draft while enforcing firm and strict spending limits for each team. The amount the team has to spend would directly correlate with how much the team spends on payroll the year before so the more money you spend on payroll the less you can spend on the IFA market.

That works inside a bubble I guess until you have teams like the Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia Phillies spending big and losing a lot in 2014 not getting the chance to achieve the “competitive balance” the draft is supposed to ensure. Obviously there are two sides to that story and the other side being, as we saw this offseason, that Boston is likely right back into the thick of things after shelling out major cash to free agents and in trades and not because of their farm system or international signings.

Anyway here is an excerpt from Cameron’s idea over at Fox Sports. Tell me what you think in the comments section of the site. Personally I think this is a little too progressive and far too far-fetched but what do I know, I just own a blog.

In his conversation with Ken Rosenthal last week, Commissioner Rob Manfred publicly supported such an idea, stating that his “long haul goal” would be “to get to an international draft.” With the big-money clubs blowing up the league’s system for signing young international free agents, an overhaul of the process is inevitable. But while the draft has become the de facto method for sports leagues to distribute incoming young talent — under the guise of competitive balance, but with the primary goal of holding down acquisition costs — I’d like to suggest that Major League Baseball go the other direction instead.

The logistics of incorporating international players into a draft are problematic, which is why baseball settled on its current recommended bonus system instead. And there is merit to the structure that the league created; if you have various spending allocations in place, you don’t actually need to go through the process of draft positions. The best players want the most money, so by simply creating a system where some teams have more money to spend than others, you can funnel incoming talent to certain types of teams even without handing out specific draft positions….

So what if there was no draft? Instead, what if we just lumped all new players — foreign or domestic — into a single acquisition system where each player was free to sigh with the team of his choice, only with firm spending caps in place to ensure that young talent flows more freely to clubs that can’t compete on major-league payroll alone? In other words, a team’s talent acquisition budget would be inversely tied to its major-league payroll; the more you spend on big leaguers, the less you get to spend on prospects, and vice versa.