I Still Want to Abolish the Draft
On Monday, the Los Angeles Dodgers used their first round selection on Zach Lee, a right-handed high school pitcher. For an organization that has drafted and developed Clayton Kershaw and Chad Billingsley, this wouldn’t appear to be an odd decision, but Lee comes with a pretty big asterisk – the perception of the strong commitment to college of any player in the draft.
Lee, a two-sport star, is signed on to attend Louisiana State University to play quarterback, and he’s one of Les Miles’ top football recruits. After the selection, Miles saw fit to release a statement to dissuade fear among his team’s fans, saying:
“Zach wants to come to LSU, get a degree and play football and baseball for the Tigers. I met with Zach and his parents today and I think that they are looking at LSU as a great opportunity both academically and athletically. Zach is an outstanding student and he’s excited about the college experience.”
Before the draft, rumors were swirling that Lee had put his price tag to sign at over $6 million, a figure generally reserved for the top two or three prospects in a draft. While Lee is seen as a good pitching prospect, no one thought of him as a potential top-three pick, and no one was lining up to pay the kid six million dollars.
The Dodgers can deny it all they want, and they can even prove us wrong if they get him under contract before the mid-August deadline, but everyone strongly suspects that the Dodgers took Lee knowing that they wouldn’t be able to sign him. If Lee goes to LSU, the Dodgers will simply get the 29th pick in the 2011 draft as compensation, one widely seen as much better and deeper than the pool of players they were selecting from on Monday.
In essence, the Dodgers traded their first round pick this year – a year in which they’re under significant financial constraints given their ownership situation – for an equivalent or better selection in a year from now. Because trading picks in baseball is not allowed, they simply used Lee as the pawn to get around the rules, much like the Reds did with Jeremy Sowers back in 2001.
For some, this situation will support a rule change to allow the trading of draft picks, where teams like the Dodgers could trade down or out of drafts if they so chose. For me, though, this simply represents another reason to abolish the draft entirely. Marc suggests that we move to two drafts – I counter that we shouldn’t have any at all.
There are better ways to disperse talent among teams. I laid out my thoughts for such a plan last year, and won’t rehash all the details, but I think the Zach Lee situation gives us yet another reason to doubt the ability of the draft to accomplish the goal of why it was instituted in the first place.
Rather than forcing teams to make sham picks to get around strange rules, or allowing talented players to end up with teams that have the resources to go over slot recommendations in later rounds, let’s just get rid of the whole system and start over. There’s a better way.
3
I want a worldwide draft where each young man can only be picked once and salaries are slotted. Pretty much a copycat of the NBA draft.
I strongly oppose slotting. These players aren’t protected by the CBA – they didn’t agree to this. Robbing them of their leverage is grossly unfair.
Wage controls never solved anything.
Works great for us! Never any problems! No moral or ethical qualms. Nobody finds ways to cheat the system.
Post of the day.
Apprentices in many union shops don’t agree to the terms of their employment. I fail to see why baseball should be any different.
And Dave, to call a throw off comment a “post of the day” is yet another indication of how far into hackery you are descending.
It was funny. Get a sense of humor.
No less unfair than paying someone millions of dollars in advance for something he hasn’t done yet.
That was one of the most ridiculous comments I’ve ever seen.
You really think it’s unfair to pay kids a fraction of what their talent would demand on the open market, were teams allowed to bid for them freely?
You have a very odd definition of unfair.
No, they’re paying them millions of dollars in response to the hundreds of hours of work they’ve put in to make themselves the most talented players in the world.
Now that’s a harsh misinterpretation of what I said: I don’t think it’s unfair. And I don’t necessarily think it’s unfair to try and pay guys a bonus according to where they’re drafted either.
I love free markets but slotting is the only way to get top players to revenue poor teams. Unless there is some kind of mlb player draft where the worst teams are allowed to select players from the best teams every year.
One other suggestion to add to the worldwide draft plus slotting. Players would have to file papers to officialy enter it. So if a guy out of high school really wanted to go to college he would just not put in papers to get drafted until he was ready. Or he could put in papers get drafted and then just wait to sign like some of the euros do in the NBA.
The only way, huh? That’s why the Nats were unable to draft the consensus (Boras represented) top talents in the previous two drafts, right? That’s why the Rays have been unable to afford to take the best player available the past half decade?
Wait… those things actually happened? Low-revenue teams have no problem nabbing high-end talent? If teams are too stupid to realize that busting slot for premium talent and being engaged in the IFA market still has a higher ROI than major-league free agency, then I have no sympathy for them when they fall behind.
George, apprentices in union shops aren’t barred from working at another company if they don’t like the terms of their employment.
Fascinating concept you proposed last year. I like some variation of it, but I’m not sure exactly what yet. I’m sure I’d limit it to the top xx number of players for the auction, and then have a draft. Of course, that in itself would put downward pressure on some contracts. Interesting read. I’d have to give a ton of thought to how it would be done. I can’t see it happening, they are afraid of any change this drastic….
Problems with the draft in general aside, I don’t really think this situation is like you’re describing. They are not ‘trading’ a draft pick, as there is nobody else they are trading with. They are, possibly, deferring their draft pick until next year, as the rules allow. They aren’t getting around any rule, they are being aware of the rules and taking full advantage of them (if this is even what their aim is, they could also possibly think they can sign him for less, be willing to sign him for that money, or are just plain stupid).
Since the draft started in 1965 — 35 seasons, 7 Yankee championships. From 1903 to 1964 — 61 seasons, 20 Yankee championships (they didn’t win any until 1923 and didn’t make it to the WS until 1921, from then until 1964 that’s 44 seasons and 20 WS Champs).
Isn’t that the major worry about abolishing the draft?
Expansion may be a part of this as well? Increasing the number of teams in the AL by 75% over that time period has led to decreasing Yankee titles by a commensurate amount.
Expansion without a draft would have simply led to more teams fighting over A-, B and C level amateur talent while the Yankees and maybe 1-2 other top teams signed away all the top A level talent.
Right, like when the Yankees signed all the top Dominican players. None of those guys signed with the Twins or Cardinals.
Not all of those players cost millions out of the gate. Many teams beat them to the punch on establishing academies and relationships in the Dominican, among many many other separate factors aside from international bonus baby head counts and money spent.
Plus we don’t know that the chain of events that allowed lesser teams to sign international prospects would have played out the way it did if there was no draft established in 1965 and domestic amateur talent acquisition was still an open process.
Correlation does not mean causation, though. There are probably many factors at play there.
Any system that allows player choice between clubs WILL be manipulated by the rich clubs to ensure they grab all the top flight talent. Just like wealthy althetic boosters sweetening the compensation for college athletes by providing cars, jobs, and women, side payments to the top talent will be filtered through intermediaries to corrupt the system.
That assumes the rich clubs know who all the top flight talent is. I mean, Chase Utley went like 16? Didn’t Heyward go 14? Didn’t Carl Crawford go in the 2nd round? Tim Hudson in the 6th? Grady Sizemore in the 3rd, and people thought it was an overdraft? Mike Trout? Etc . . .
Oh sure, Strasburg would have ended up on the Yankees or Red Sox or Angels, but he’d also have a contract commensurate with the type of of player he is. And there’s still plenty of other players beyond the top 1 or 2 guys in any given year, and if those top guys are pitchers, they happen to fail a lot.
What would happen is that the smartest teams with the best scouts and numbers guys would use the system to their advantage while teams run by fools would not. The same as happens now. Unfortunately or fortunately as it may be, the teams with the most money are generally run by the smartest people. Still, low budget teams with great front offices can succeed and for wide windows ie. Tampa Bay, who has been good for 3 years now, and is in line likely to be good for at least another 3-5, and if they draft well probably longer. That’s a pretty big window.
Tampa Bay also had about a decade where they had very high picks, in many cases the top pick, in several consecutive drafts. What you see from the Rays now is in large part the culmination of that mass of drafted talent self-actualizing. Yeah, some of those picks bounced (Dewon Brazelton, Josh Hamilton) but many of them paid off (Evan Longoria, BJ Upton, David Price, Jeff Niemann… and that’s just the 1st round: Reid Brignac and Carl Crawford came in the 2nd). They probably don’t end up with a collection of young guys that good if not for all those years of high draft picks.
No one has gotten good enough at talent evaluation to know how to hoard all the future stars. 17 year-old boys are too unpredictable.
Strasburg wasn’t that hot a commodity when he was17 or 18.
But King Felix was.
And yet somehow Felix didn’t sign with the Yankees.
I was thinking the same thing about the NYY pre-draft years.
They don’t have to. Players always follow money. So, the lesser teams can find and develop the talent, and the Big Boys can sign them. With the way finances are, KC and the like are back to their Golden Age roles of being a 3A/4A team.
The best players are often obvious at 22. At 17, it’s still basically “Who hit puberty first”. Nut if a team can sign 20 of the best 50, and have the other 30 dispersed among the other teams, they’re already way ahead.
It forces small market teams to put all their chips on one guy, or sign a bunch of affordable prospects, neither situation is enviable.
Signing 20 of the top 50 players (assuming bonuses would rise in a free market and that you’re signing a fairly even distribution from 1 to 50) would proably cost about $50 million. The Yankees have an awful lot of money, but I’m not sure even they can support $50 million in amateur bonuses every single year.
Can you please post the link to your plan of abolishing the draft?
i personally like the auction idea.
Why not just add a rule allowing any team to defer their pick to the following year? You give up the number 1 pick this year, you get a pick immediately after the number 1 pick next year. That means the Dodgers don’t have to play games to defer their pick, and I don’t see how it hurts anyone.
Because the rule wasn’t intended to allow teams to defer their pick, it was intended to take some leverage away from the draftee.
Sort of off topic, but another thing that needs to be abolished immediately is the Staples WOW….THAT’S A LOW PRICE commercial.
Can anyone think of another fangraphs post that had ‘I’ in the title?
If you’re not big on the whole ‘tenses’ thing, there was an “I’m” on April 29th:
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/im-just-another-fool/
I and I’m = same tense, just a contraction. Ugh. Something about this site makes me stupid(er).
The reason you don’t abolish the draft is because you’ll run into many of the same problems international football does: The big market teams will outspend the lesser teams via inflated bidding wars and build monopolies of talent that would price most everyone else out of championship contention into perpetuity. Abolish the draft and the Red Sox, Yankees and other big-market teams will likely snatch up most of the top amateurs with big bonuses and further polarize baseball’s pecking order.
There’s a reason other top U.S. leagues have drafts as well. You want to ensure the talent is dispersed equally across the board so this doesn’t happen.
The MLB Draft has a lot of problems that can be addressed. But the fact that it exists isn’t one of them.
No, the leagues have drafts because the owners know it saves them millions of dollars per year. The players union views every dollar spent on player development as a dollar not spent on MLB salaries, so they’re happy to depress amateur bonuses for the perception of higher veteran salaries.
“No, the leagues have drafts because the owners know it saves them millions of dollars per year.”
Yeah, sure. Teams would rather pay a rookie $10M a year than an established pro bowler.
1st round rookies in the NFL come in being some of the top paid players in the league. Its not suppressing costs at all.
No, top-ten picks do. The NFL’s rookie salary scale is ridiculously steep (and illogically so).
Wait, so who’s promoting the draft again? The players union or the owners?
And I’m sure the owners are thrilled with only having to pay a top pick several million dollars, and if not for the draft there wouldn’t be a such thing as six years of team control and minimum salaries for rookies… oh wait
Also, Mitch, since you’re well aware of the true motive of the league with the draft, feel free to go to Wikipedia and edit this entry. Since it’s mostly open source, you should be able to gain editing access. Let me know how that goes for you.
The owners are promoting the draft, and the players union goes along with it because the veteran players perceive it to be in their best interests. Whether it actually is in the veterans’ best interests is debatable; it’s almost assuredly not in the best interest of baseball players (non-union included) as a whole.
The owners are thrilled with paying first round talent only a few million dollars; how much would Strasburg have received on the open market? I bet the answer is a whole lot more than $15 million. That surplus is a transfer directly from the players to the owners.
I’m not exactly sure why I’m supposed to go and edit a Wikipedia entry that lists “prevents expensive bidding wars for young talent” and “a way to restrain teams’ payrolls” as key reasons for a draft, since that’s exactly what I’m arguing.
Yes, and you’re arguing that there is nothing wrong with open bidding wars on domestic amateurs, whereas history and other nations’ top football leagues provide a wealth of examples of the drawbacks.
Picking Lee was basically a courtesy on the part of the Dodgers, and that may have been a fluke because no NL West team was anywhere close beneath them. It’s only a matter of time before a team drafts someone who would have signed even though they have no intention to do so, and then what?
Very interesting. I think if that happened and the player could prove he would of signed a contract then the grievance process would provide some recourse. Also the commisioner would probably fine them the unsigned pick plus another if it happened that way.
The problem is that the draft is as much about keeping salaries down by making it so that the player can only negotiate with one team as it is about dispersing talent. That’s the reason MLB will never eliminate the draft.
The fact that the Dodgers picked a player they don’t want to sign does not reveal any flaws in the draft. It reveals that the dodgers are poorly run right now.
Changing the way teams acquire talent isn’t going to fix the dodgers.
That isn’t true. If you had read the article, Dave is arguing that the Dodgers made the smart decision. Why waste a pick in this draft when you can get a better one in the next draft? It should never be in a teams best interest to draft someone with no intention of signing him.
Dave,
The draft is the funnest part of my season!
The Dodgers lose their leverage for next year, though, since if they don’t sign their pick next year they don’t get another pick the year after. Therefore the player they choose next year will either have to be a “signable” player a la Drew Storen, or they’ll have to overpay. IF the Dodgers fail to sign this player on purpose, it would be stupid since they will have little to no leverage with the player they draft next year.
The Dodgers aren’t interested in leverage. They’re interested in shorting the draft budget so they can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their kids’ allowances or a faith healer.
God, Mark Cuban can’t rescue that team soon enough. I don’t even like the Dodgers, but the McCourts are a black eye on baseball.
The problem with the MLB draft doesn’t seem to be as much of a draft probl (compared to NBA or NFL) as it seems to be differences in the sports.
Hitting a baseball or pitching are primarily skills that incorporate athleticism. Others sports are primarily athleticism that incorporates skill. There are some interesting studies on this, but it’s also a reason why 1st round picks in NBA and NFL not only make the roster, but are often starters or soon will be. MLB seems to be moving in this direction, where the top prospects are not spending 3-5 years in the minors, and teams may be looking to maximize their years of control, while keeping them in the minors long enough to push back arbitration.
What I am getting at is there is much greater risk in the MLB draft as compared to others in regards to the contributions top picks may make in MLB.
I like how the NBA does things with the slotting and giving the drafting team some advantages to retain the players they draft, but I also realize there are differences between the 2 sports.
For example, when the Bulls draft Derrick Rose they knew he’d likely be the ROY that next season. When an MLB team drafts a top 6 pick, the hope is that he becomes an ML regular, but many times that’s not realized until a couple years later.
There are 6+ levels of minor league baseball and 1500+ players drafted each year. I think it’s excessive, but MiLB is part of Americana so it’s not going anywhere. If MLB only had 1 level of MiLB or just had 40-man rosters and that’s it, prospects would play a much larger role and perhaps slotting might not be as important.
Ah well, it’s all interesting discussion. Owners will continually try to get talent for cheap, and MLBPA will always look to protect the vet$, so we’re likely stuck with what we have.
The draft was instituted so Teams like my Yankees could NOT just go and sign anyone they want. Now people complain about the draft? This writer wants something different? You either HAVE a draft or DO NOT have a draft. It has to be either or, there is no other way to sign players. Slotting players, a payroll cap, none of that is relevant to the basic question is the draft the way to get players into major league teams. The only other way would be that the teams cannot contact ANY player, the player goes to whatever team he wants and signs. That is stupid, but I guess that must be what people want.