Normally, players must have accrued at least three years of MLB service time before they can be eligible for salary arbitration — or in other words, until they can negotiate their salary and not have it automatically set by their club. But certain players with less than three years of service time can also become eligible for arbitration, if they meet the following criteria:

● If they have less than three years of service time, but more than two.

● If they rank within the top 22% of all 2-year players in terms of service time.

So if a player finishes a season and is just shy of three years of service time (say, 2 years and 171 days) then MLB will award them Super Two status and they’ll be eligible for arbitration. Since these players are still under team control for another three seasons, that means Super Two players get four year of salary arbitration instead of the typical three.

The Super Two cutoff used to stand at 17%, but got changed to 22% in the new CBA negotiations. This means that if a team wants to keep a player in the minors until after the Super Two cutoff, they will have to keep that player in the minors for even longer than before. Considering that the cutoff used to fall sometime in June — it varied from year to year, as the 17% cutoff isn’t tied to a specific date — it will likely end up being in July going forward.

Links for Further Reading

Super Two – Biz of Baseball