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.
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Sorry for the Capatcha... Blame the Russians :)