Major League Baseball work stoppage almost certain on Dec. 2

[chasfh]

18 hours ago, buddha said:

i think the only reason mlb hasnt become like euro soccer is because of the roster requirements that the players (quite rightly, imo) want to get rid of.  not the draft per se, but the eligibility rules and 6 years before you hit free agency.

if they get rid of that or significantly pare it back and allow players to hit free agency at a much younger age, then without a salary cap you'll see all the young players bought up by the big clubs.  and if that happens i think you'll see more stratification because the rays and other such teams wont be able to control players long enough to compete.  that's my thinking.  even with a draft, if you only control a guy for one or two years and then you have to pay him, only the big clubs will be paying.

baseball free agency is fool's gold now because youre buying guys at the end of their primes for the most part.  and dumping 10 year deals on 32 year old players will kill you.

if you have a cap, those deals will dry up.

The draft might be the biggest reason any American professional sport is different from eurosoccer, at least as far as talent is concerned. Pre-draft a team could sign any players anywhere they wanted—they were limited only by the reach of their scouts. But expanding their amateur talent acquisition efforts is what supercharged the Cardinals into becoming the NL Yankees. And, of course, the reserve clause allowed them to keep their best players basically indefinitely.

I saw where MLB suggested a new free agency benchmark as being 29-1/2 years, whichever comes first. That’s a little better for many players of course since you would have as many players going through arb in their 30s. But it’s worse for the best young players since it would tether stars like Vlad Jr and Juan Soto to their teams for close to a decade.

Under such a system an organization like the Rays may be able to identify good 20- and 21-year old players and keep them for a long time and pay them cheap, but most organizations wouldn’t be able to pull that off with much regularity. The thing you suggest would happen is teams bringing guys up at age 26 or 27, then losing them two or three years later. That might happen to most organizations, but I bet they Rays would adapt and figure out a way to go younger. Or, flip side, maybe with a change like that everybody would force their best young prospects into the majors at age 19 or 20 or 21 or 22, just so they could try to get more than six years out of them. More younger players coming up greener would probably hurt the quality of the game overall, though.

MLBPA might counter with either-or: age 29-1/2 or six years, whatever’s first. But the thing they have to be careful not to do is to agree to a system that floods the market with free agents, which could drive down contracts in general since it would become more of a buyer’s market.

As for dumping ten years on a 32 year old: that’s happened only three times out of 14 ten-year-plus contracts, and two of those were uniquely silly contracts by uniquely clueless ownerships. Ten of the fourteen 10-plus-year contracts have gone to players 27 and under. All four nine-year contracts have gone to players 30 and under (including Prince), and 13 of 17 eight-year contracts have gone to under 30s. So this may not be as big a problem as popular media portrayals make it seem.

[chasfh]

2 hours ago, chasfh said:

The draft might be the biggest reason any American professional sport is different from eurosoccer, at least as far as talent is concerned. Pre-draft a team could sign any players anywhere they wanted—they were limited only by the reach of their scouts. But expanding their amateur talent acquisition efforts is what supercharged the Cardinals into becoming the NL Yankees. And, of course, the reserve clause allowed them to keep their best players basically indefinitely.

I saw where MLB suggested a new free agency benchmark as being 29-1/2 years of age, as of July 1. That’s a little better for many players of course since you would not have as many players going through arb in their 30s. But it’s worse for the best young players since it would tether stars like Vlad Jr and Juan Soto to their teams for close to a decade.

Under such a system an organization like the Rays may be able to identify good 20- and 21-year old players and keep them for a long time and pay them cheap, but most organizations wouldn’t be able to pull that off with much regularity. The thing you suggest would happen is teams bringing guys up at age 26 or 27, then losing them two or three years later. That might happen to most organizations, but I bet the Rays would adapt and figure out a way to go younger. Or, flip side, maybe with a change like that everybody would force their best young prospects into the majors at age 19 or 20 or 21 or 22, just so they could try to get more than six years out of them. More younger players coming up greener would probably hurt the quality of the game overall, though.

MLBPA might counter with either-or: age 29-1/2 or six years, whatever comes first. But the thing they have to be careful not to do is to agree to a system that floods the market with free agents, which could drive down contracts in general since it would become more of a buyer’s market.

As for dumping ten years on a 32 year old: that’s happened only three times out of 14 ten-year-plus contracts, and two of those were uniquely silly contracts by uniquely clueless ownerships. Ten of the fourteen 10-plus-year contracts have gone to players 27 and under. All four nine-year contracts have gone to players 30 and under (including Prince), and 13 of 17 eight-year contracts have gone to under 30s. So this may not be as big a problem as popular media portrayals make it seem.

Of course I botched a couple things here and of course it's too late to edit—so I've edited it above in purple.

[Useful Idiot]

These days I don't think that people attend baseball games as much for the game play, as they do for all the snazzy special promotions.   I mean, "bring a relative disguised as a zoo  animal and get a free Victor Reyes  bobblehead".....who can beat that? 

We don't need no steeking trophy!! Trophies are for drunken sailors.