It’s Time For an International Draft

The MLB currently has a disorganized, chaotic, confusing, and silly method of dealing with amateur ballplayers. It’s time for that to change, especially in light of  how valuable foreign players have become to teams, sometimes an entire organization’s future can rely on winning a posting process or signing the right 16 year old Dominican or Cuban.

Currently, American high school and college players (and Canadians for some reason) participate in the June Draft. Teams each have a selection in each round, just like the NBA and NFL drafts. Unlike those leagues, you can’t trade draft picks but the picks exchange hands in free agency as compensation to a player’s old team. There is also a ridiculous system of supplemental picks and rounds between rounds. It’s all very complicated and convoluted but it somehow works. However, next to the system for international players, the domestic system looks like the line to meet the Queen of England (which I imagine would be quite orderly).

There really aren’t any rules for signing Latin kids. Teams find a player they like, makes sure he’s of age, which he usually isn’t but he says he is, and offers him a few thousand dollars to sign. That’s about it. There’s no draft. Sometimes teams compete for the same guy, but a lot of the time, only one team has found a guy, a diamond in the Latin American rough if you will. How’s that fair? The teams that do the best are the teams with the most resources invested in isolating and signing these kids. The teams that have the most invested are the teams with the most to invest. Those are the teams with the most money, the Yankees, Cubs, Red Sox etc., not the Pirates, Rays, Royals etc.. So the teams with the biggest markets make the most money and then get the best players by virtue of having the most money to spend.

Sound fair? Not to me either.

I know what your thinking, that creative teams who allocate resources smartly can outdo the big guys and get some good players for themselves: it’s not all about money. Well, what about high profile amateurs like Aroldis Chapman or Yoenis Cespedes? The Reds got Chapman because they offered him more than anyone else and you can bet Yoenis will take the biggest offer for his services. Still not convinced? Let me tell you about the process of signing a professional Japanese player and we’ll see if you still think that way.

If a player from the Nippon Professional Baseball league (NPB) would like to come over to the States, he can request that his team post him. The team then “posts” the player, at which point the 30 MLB teams have the right to bid to get the right to negotiate with the player. The MLB Commissioner’s office reviews the bids and submits the highest to the Japanese team, the bid can be quite high as we’ll see in a minute. The winning MLB team gets exclusive negotiating rights. Exclusive. It’s almost like the process was designed to screw as many people as possible at once.

For Daisuke Matsuzaka, the Boston Red Sox gave the Seibu Lions $50 million for the right to negotiate and then gave Daisuke $51 million to play for them. $101 million. Think the Rays could afford that? The pool of teams that seem to be in the running for Yu Darvish appears to be the Rangers, Blue Jays, Yankees, and Cubs and maybe some others. Any small market teams there? Think the Blue Jays have a shot?

Here’s the thing. The posting process is terrible because it does a few things. First, the best teams get the best players. The Rangers just won the AL twice in a row. Why should they have any shot to get Darvish? Or the Yankees for that matter? Shouldn’t the weakest teams get the first crack at the best players, you know, kind of like a draft. That way, we get more parity!

A second reason why the posting process is ridiculous as presently constructed is because the players get the least amount of leverage possible. Once a team has won exclusive negotiating rights, the player can either take their offer after minimal negotiation (because they have no leverage) or go back to Japan. Imagine a situation where a player’s NPB team didn’t want to post him but he demanded it. It would seem in that situation, going back to Japan isn’t a great option. Or what if a player just doesn’t want to go back. Maybe he’s always dreamed of playing here. In those cases, what real choice does he have? Accept the MLB team’s offer or….what exactly?

The bottom line is, the MLB currently has a hodgepodge of rules and procedures for dealing with international players. They read like they were assembled on the fly, which in many cases they were. (I’d think that the guys who started the draft didn’t really have Aroldis Chapman or Yu Darvsh in mind) We need another draft, but the details of that are for another post. This one just told you why we need a draft. Now you know.

-Max Frankel