The deadline approaches for MLB and the MLBPA to make or break a deal on an international draft. One of the main concerns voiced as a reason for the need of a draft is corruption, as youngsters, barely teenagers, make deals to sign with clubs years before that transaction is allowed.
Let me state up front that the draft is not about that. The draft is about saving MLB money, and making it a bit easier for the lower revenue teams to compete for players. Francisco Lindor of the Mets says it well:
“This is not a system problem — this is a people problem, and the people work for the major league teams,” said New York Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor, a member of the MLBPA’s executive subcommittee. “It should start by penalizing those people that do pre-deals. It should start by penalizing the people that are putting these (players) to work as hard as they can at such a young age to try to get a deal at 13, 14 years old. That’s who they should be penalizing.
“At the end of the day, the system is a byproduct of the rules that people made. … I think the system is probably not the greatest, but the people who created the system have taken advantage. That’s the problem.”
ESPN.com
Long time readers of Baseball Musings know that I believe the more rules in a system, the easier it is to game those rules. This is why I constantly push for universal free agency. The limits put on international signings appear to have made the system worse, not better. If a draft is implemented, in ten years people will be complaining about the lack of Latin American players in the big leagues, just like the current amateur draft reduced the number of African American and Puerto Rican players in MLB. These players were no longer cheap to develop, so that mechanism moved to other countries outside the draft.
I also want to take exception to a statement in the article:
When the Dominican-born Minaya served as the New York Mets’ general manager from 2004 to 2010, teams were just beginning to commit resources in Latin America.
ESPN.com
This really started in the 1970s:
That aspiration became more formalized in 1977. In that year, “super-scout” Epy Guerrero, himself Dominican, took ten Dominican players he had signed and housed them together so they could hone their skills. The Dodgers and Pirates, already involved in scouting in the Caribbean, quicky copied this model.
The idea of a closed baseball academy was born, and they were also established to cut down on the culture shock faced by players moving to the United States without knowledge of English or American culture. Today all thirty MLB clubs have a presence on the island in the form of these academies.
Origins.OSU.edu
What happened 20 years ago is that most of the big market clubs realized they could save money with this model. Suddenly, teams like the Pirates, who had been fairly free to develop foreign talent, now had to compete with the Yankees for that talent. Remember, every restriction on signing free agents, whether amateur or professional, is designed to stop the Yankees from dominating the league.
The draft is a bad idea. Slot bonuses are a worse idea. Let all the players be free to sign where they want for the money they want. Everyone will be better off.