Aaron Moreno is the only one that said it so far. There is already a large difference between the so-called ‘large-market’ / ‘small-market’ teams in signing free agents.

I don’t know if it’s true or not, except as it effects the Royals. Then it’s true.

But if some teams can’t afford to sign premium “proven” players, how can they afford to sign “amateur” players at free agent type contracts?

No franchise should have to mortgage it’s future for an unproven high school/college player. And there’s plenty of evidence that it’s all a crap shoot regardless.

And as far as the argument that ‘no other profession does it’, sports don’t fit into that. No one has to play sports. People have to have jobs. Being an athlete is a talent, like singing, dancing, painting, woodworking. It’s not a taught skill.

Ballarinas and musicians don’t compete in a normal job market, and neither do athlets. If they don’t like the rules, they can dig ditches or shovel pig s$*t on a farm for minimum wage.

there’s no real justification to have a draft, and there’s certainly no way of justifying the fact that foreign born players can begin professional careers at 16, and native american players are forbidden from doing so.

it’s unlikely that all the best players will sign with the yankees or dodgers or other high dollar teams.  after all, the farm systems are a lot smaller than they used to be.  at this point in time, there are only so many slots in a farm system.  no one’s got multiple, power house AAA teams like the yanks used to, or the cards used to, or the dodgers used to.

at one point in time teams like the old senators or the old browns or the old phillies were just so damn dysfunctional that there really truly wasn’t much hope for them to ever be able to turn themselves around…they didn’t have the cash flow, they didn’t have the scouts, they didn’t have much if anything in the way of a farm system…

there’s not a single team, now, who is as bereft in any of those areas as the old time downtrodden teams.  and of course, there’s revenue sharing now that wasn’t available then.

Rob’ says that the idea that the owners are the only benificiaries of the draft is a lie.  okay…where’s your thinking on that?

i mean…rob’...the draft was set up by the owners to benefit themselves, not the players.  right?

why would you think that’s not true any longer?

Rob, I wasn’t implying that you called me an idiot. I just know there are a lot of people out there smarter than I am.

If we eliminate the draft we should also eliminate the salary structure (3 years at the club’s mercy, 3 years of arbitration). 

As Charlie Finley said in 1976, make ‘em all free agents.  No contracts guaranteed beyond one year.  With no artificial market shortages, the player compensation would find its own level in a free market.

Economics (not to mention MLB draft rules) are so very not my strong suit, so I am prepared to be told that I have this totally wrong…

1. Does it really matter if a handful of rich teams dominate the top-ranked picks? I was under the impression that few of the “top” guys actually end up panning out, at least in comparison to the amount they’d be getting paid to fall short of expectations. What round did Pujols go? 

2. If rich teams go nuts on potentially worthless picks, doesn’t that (at least partially) dent what they can afford spend on veterans? Yankees aside, there is only so much money, right? 

3. Wouldn’t it be better to let teams trade picks?  Wouldn’t that give the have-nots a chance to get some talent in exchange for their unsignables? 

More questions than opinions, I know…

@Rob^2 - “the idea that the draft does nothing but limit the income of amateur players at the benefit of the owners is a lie.”  This comment was in a response to me, but I never said it, so I’ll assume it was a general statement.  And I never said owner are the only benficiaries of the draft.

Regarding the statement that other fields are restrictive in their employment, sure, but not to a single company, and not where they can control the conditions of your employment for a decade.

@Ron - “If they don’t like the rules, they can dig ditches or shovel pig s$*t on a farm for minimum wage.”  So those should be their two choices, take what you’re giving or perform the worst job there is?

“Too many of these guys are doing it as a paycheck, and not because they want to play the game.”  So many people gave Jeff Kent grief because he didn’t really like baseball, and at first I was one of them.  Then I realized I don’t *love* what I do.  I do my job partially for the paycheck.  Being good at something and making a living at it doesn’t mean you have to love your job, even if it’s one most people would give anything to have.

It’s that last bit that I think really gets to the heart of all this.  We all played baseball as kids, and maybe longer, and we all love the game.  We say we’d play it for free, so why do the players complain so much when they get big bucks to play a kids’ game?

I think this all boils down to jealously, to a large extent, and I’m just as guilty of that as anyone.  They’re doing what we can’t, some of them don’t love doing it, some “leave us” as free agents to find other hometowns, so hold out as amateurs to squeeze a couple hundred grand from the team that drafted them.  We’re offended by this behavior in regard to our beloved game, though we’d be quite likely to act in the same way if we were in their shoes - even though we’ll swear here and now that we wouldn’t.

Baseball is a glorious, beautiful game filled with many happy memories from throughout our lives, and we want to romanticize everything about it.  Therefore, anything that takes away from those wonderful emotions elicits a strong negative reaction.  We can’t separate our emotional attachment from the fact that at the MLB level it’s very big business, whether we like it or not.

Here is one interesting way to get rid of the draft.  Poll the teams such that the top 100 hundred players are ranked.  Have all of the teams submit closed bids for every player in the top 100, who ever submits the highest offer wins.  If one team would like to drop their entire budget on the top prospect so be it, but then they won’t have any other draft picks.  It would bring in some interesting game theory.

Continue with the draft as normal with the “lesser” picks.

er…‘and that’s never enought, apparently’ *for the owners*...the same folks who cried poor for thirty years, threatened contraction…and by god want to lower their overhead and rake in more money.

eh?

I don’t think it’s fair to take “the Yankees will buy all the good players” off the table as a “con.”  If the list of “all the good players” that the Yankees can “buy” expands to included North American players between the ages of 18 and 22, the analysis changes.  I understand it’s not the sexiest argument that can appear in a comment thread, but I’d hate to avoid the simple answer.  That’s a fundamental change in facts.

Two darn-near-facts: 

(1) The argument about parity being good in and of itself isn’t necessarily foreclosed for all times just because it’s settled in the eyes of the lords of the realm, but it’s settled, in all four major sports, and has even been, at least as reflected by how the draft is set up.

(2) Baseball’s current economic system at least skews toward favoring franchises that live in more populous metropolitan areas.  All other things being equal, the Milwaukees of the world are not in as good a bargaining position as, to pick an example completely at random, the Yankees—simply by virtue of Milwaukee being smaller.

If Law and Pinto can live with there being a perpetual underclass of baseball teams, so that their economic ideological bias can be satisfied in all realms of the world including entertainment, I guess that’s their business.  I think baseball is more interesting when the Rays can draft well and see that come to fruition, knowing that without a salary cap, they’ll never be able to get there by having a winter where they go out and purchase Mark Teixeira, CC Sabathia and AJ Burnett.

I’m not sure the international signings are the same situation as American signings. Latin America has the disadvantage of unknown ages and fewer organized leagues with comparable talent levels (though that one is lessening). East Asia is even bleaker on being able to compare talent. You can’t get young players from Japan, the one place that it’s easier to compare to. The Yankees, and other teams, don’t necessarily sign foreign players possibly because it’s much harder to judge them. Sure, they can go ahead and sign a bunch of them anyway, but they may think it’s wiser to stick to the States. They know how to compare them. The scouting is a bit more formalized. Ages are always correct. They don’t always pan out, but at least, they know what they’re getting.

And though not all top prospects work out, most first round picks end up doing something at the major-league level. If the Yankees sign the top 5 players, it puts them in a pretty good position.

And just for trivia, but I’m not sure it means anything:

6 of Yankees’ 26 World Series have come after the draft was instituted 44 years ago. They thoroughly dominated from 1930 to early 60’s.

3 of 10 Cardinals’ World Series titles came after the draft started.

Again, it could just be that there are more teams, but something seems odd about that.