February 7, 2019

Incentives

Tyler Kepner talks about the rules negotiations with players:


In their proposal to the owners, the players have advocated a system that would incentivize winning: lower draft position for perennial losers, better draft position for low-revenue teams that win, and so on.


“One thing that’s going come up in the next few years is: ‘Oh, this is all about dollars and cents; this is all about players being greedy and wanting more,’ and that’s not the case,” Iannetta said. “We play a game our whole lives and we work our butts off, and we want to compete against the best — and when the best isn’t out there on the field, it doesn’t feel right.

I have long advocated for incentives for winning in baseball. It’s good to see the union finally thinking this way. Good behavior is expected. Bad behavior is punished. That’s the way many rules are written. Sometimes, however, the good and bad is not always apparent. Teams that are accused of tanking believe they are doing a good thing by building a winner for the future at a low cost. Prices are signals, and the signals now are saying it’s okay to lose for a while.

The players have it right that if you don’t want teams to take, the incentives have to be there not to tank. The same goes for speeding up the game. If this is really important, pay for it. Instead of punishing players for slowing down the game, give them incentives to speed thing along.

Baseball used penalties for way to long. It’s time to start using incentives to make the game better.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *