A Modest Proposal to End Service Time Manipulation
Major league baseball is at its best when the game’s most talented players are able to showcase their skills at the sport’s highest level. Anything that serves to limit these displays is to baseball’s detriment. Of course, sometimes, fate intervenes. The game’s best players are susceptible to injury, and though major league organizations and the players themselves take great care to try to stay on the field, seasons are lost to tweaked knees and torn elbow ligaments. Some obstacles are impossible to avoid fully. But other absences are the result of careful, intentional planning. Take the example of service time manipulation.
Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. is generally considered to be the best prospect in baseball. He probably earned a callup last season when he was destroying minor league pitching. Right now, Steamer projects the younger Guerrero to put up 4.6 WAR in 545 plate appearances. That’s the 13th-best projection among position players, right behind Nolan Arenado and just ahead of Jose Altuve. He’s not a player who needs to spend more time in the minors, and yet yesterday, Blue Jays General Manager Ross Atkins said that, “I just don’t see him as a major league player. He’s 19.” To start with, Guerrero is older than Juan Soto was when the latter debuted last year, and will turn 20 before Opening Day. Atkins assertion that Guerrero isn’t ready is belied by his minor league performance and industry consensus, and it is hard to interpret the GM’s comments as anything other than an attempt to provide some public, baseball-related justification for keeping Guerrero in the minors so that he can stay under team control through 2025 instead of hitting free agency after the 2024 campaign. That’s service time manipulation.
The practice isn’t unique to Toronto. Kris Bryant was famously held down at the beginning of 2015; he won’t be a free agent until after the 2021 season instead of in 2020. Last season, Ronald Acuña didn’t start the season with the Braves. The White Sox’s Eloy Jimenez is likely to spend time cooling his heels in Charlotte despite being much better than the players ahead of him on the depth chart. Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. is ready now, and the Blue Jays will be worse for every game that Guerrero spends in Buffalo, but that is exactly where he figures to begin this season.
The incentives for teams are obvious, but they are deliberately choosing not to field their best roster, depriving the sport of its best possible product, and delaying deserving players from fulfilling life-long dreams and obtaining market contracts. The easiest solution would be for teams to simply call up players when they are capable of meaningfully contributing, but given that teams could easily do that right now and don’t, another solution is likely necessary. Others have offered solutions to this issue in the past. In 2015 in response to the Cubs’ treatment of Bryant, FanGraphs alum Mike Petriello proposed changing the a full year of service to time to 100 days on the major league roster. Erstwhile Baseball Prospectus scribe Russell Carleton proposed an age-based free agency model as a means of curtailing the practice. Sheryl Ring proposed that a player accrue a year of service if he spends the majority of the league year on the major league roster. And while a solution might not even be possible until the players and owners negotiate a new Collective Bargaining Agreement in 2021, I’d like to put forth my own proposal to eliminate service time manipulation. The problem is fairly straightforward, but as most potential solutions have unintended consequences, this one is a multi-parter.
First, a player’s first year of service time will be reached with 90 days of MLB service. This is a fairly direct solution, but unfortunately, it could also incentivize teams to keep players down even longer than they do now. While it might make clubs’ decisions more difficult if they are potential contenders, organizations might still opt to keep players in the minors, and non-contending teams might be more likely to do so than those with playoff aspirations; in a year where the Blue Jays are only projected for 77 wins, they might decide that Vlad Jr.’s defense at third needs yet more time, bad PR and a potential grievance be damned.
As a result, it will be necessary to give players half-service time for their days on the 40-man roster. If a player spends the entire season on the 40-man roster in the minors, he will reach 90 days of service time at the end of the season. To prevent shenanigans for those with MLB experience, players can earn one year of MLB service time in the minors at any point in their careers, but can only accrue one year this way. This will get some players closer to free agency without actually playing in the big leagues, and incentivizes putting a team’s best players on the active roster. After all, if a player’s free agency clock is going to start anyway, why not have him lend his talents to the big league club if he’s ready? Unfortunately, teams don’t put players on the 40-man roster until they have to, and many top prospects won’t be on the 40-man roster as a result.
To combat the phenomena described in the previous paragraph, it will be necessary to put more teeth behind the Rule 5 draft by making players draft-eligible a year earlier than they are under the current system. Players who signed their first pro contract at age 18 or younger would now be eligible after four years of minor league service instead of five, while those who did so at age 19 or older would be eligible after three years instead of the current four. This would make many more good prospects eligible for the Rule 5 draft and in order to protect them, teams would then put them on the 40-man roster.
Unfortunately, making so many more players eligible for the Rule 5 draft would create a massive roster crunch, and could result in teams being unable to get the prospects they develop to the majors. To prevent this situation, and to keep the Rule 5 draft roughly as it is, the 40-man roster would become a 50-man roster. Teams would then have no difficulty protecting eligible players, but would still be encouraged to promote their prospects as those prospects would end up with a year of service time. While teams would move more players to the majors earlier, those players accruing service time in the minors are a limited set of players: those who are close to the majors or have star potential after multiple years in the minors, hence creating the need to protect them from the Rule 5 draft. For players, it would also have the added benefit of welcoming hundreds more players into the union with better minor league wages as players who have been named to the 40-man, now 50-man, roster are paid at a higher rate thanks to union protections. As a benefit to teams, an additional option year could be added.
So to review:
- Players receive their first, and only first, year of service time after 90 days
- Players receive half-service time for days spent on 50-man roster, but not in the majors
- Rule 5 Eligibility moved up one year
- 40-man roster increased to 50 players
- Teams receive an extra option year
This proposal is admittedly complicated. The irony of this idea is that Kris Bryant, the poster-boy for service time manipulation, actually wouldn’t have been spared due to his rapid ascent to the majors, though the Cubs would have had to hold Bryant out until the All-Star Break in 2015 to get an extra year of his services. While this deal favors the interests of the players at the expense of teams and team owners, it is a much more reasonable proposal from ownerships’ perspective than cutting the service time necessary for free agency to less than six years. A union proposal that cuts free agency down to five years and deals with service time manipulation in some other way would mean less team control for those young, ready stars that this proposal is designed to protect, and might make it a non-starter come 2021. Negotiating this solution is likely to be difficult and part of a much larger deal. Teams are going to be highly resistant to any change that deprives them of cost controlled years of their best players. But the union focusing some of their attention on getting players like Vlad Jr. to the majors, as well as getting better benefits to the minor leaguers left behind, can only be to the game’s benefit. Many of baseball’s stars of tomorrow are ready today. Let’s watch them play, shall we?
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
I don’t think you need to develop such a complicated rule. Something more simple might do the trick, such as: If a player spends 90 consecutive days on the active roster, he earns his first year of service time, but no further service time accrues until either the start of the next season, or his actual service time reaches 172 days.
For example, Vlad Jr. comes up on May 15 after more seasoning. On August 13, he logs his 90th consecutive day and earns a full year of service time. On Opening Day 2020, his second year clock begins and proceeds as normal.
Another example: A player comes up for 40 days at the end of 2019, but begins 2020 in the minors. He is recalled on May 1. On July 30, he reaches 90 consecutive days and earns his first year. On September 10, however, his total service time hits 172, so his second year clock begins with the next game.
I think teams would find a way to manipulate the 90 consecutive day aspect and you’d end up with the same problem we have now.
Teams already do this due to Super 2 anyways. Not to mention that forcing teams to sacrifice half of a season to get the extra year of control makes it less of an obvious tradeoff. I really doubt that the 2015 Cubs would have kept an obviously MLB-ready Kris Bryant in Des Moines until the All Star Break.
While it’s possible that non-competitive teams like the Sox or Blue Jays could do this, it seems less likely to me that these teams would stall their top prospect’s development for what would be an entire year, just to get an extra half season out of him.
Any system built around service time days will be manipulated. In this case I say better the beast you know that the beast you don’t know.
Increase the minimum salary to $2 million and you probably won’t see as much manipulation, and if you did the young players would still make substantially more than they do now.
If you increase the minimum salary, you might see more manipulation because that will simply set the bar higher for arbitration rewards and free agent contracts. As a result, teams will have a greater incentive to stave off those events, not to mention a financial reason to avoid promoting players in September and structuring a player’s first year of service time over two seasons.
I suspect that a lot of “defensive issues” would appear right around the 80-game mark that are mysertiously fixable in a 15-day option out to the minors.[
After 80 games, players would have half a season established in the majors. Any attempt by teams to manipulate service time would be that much more transparent and difficult to impose without facing both public/team backlash, not to mention a credibly argued grievance.
The logic of something like the above is it forces a team to decide how much of the first service does it want to benefit from…a full 172 or as little as only 90 days.
This is no modest proposal. A modest proposal would involve letting Vlad Jr. eat the org depth guys.
“Roemon Fields Casserole! Yum!”
(or something similarly absurd)
Kids have it so good now. The Angels only offered me David Eckstein,
I was on the same page as you. Except I thought the Union as a whole could eat the executives.
Gotta “flesh” this out some more. We need a good rule about who gets to eat whom. I think it’s pretty easy who gets eaten–the guys who aren’t Rule 5 protected. Figuring out who is getting manipulated, and therefore gets to eat, is more complicated.
Just to confirm, we’re talking about eating players, right? Like, for dinner?
Gives the concept of a “sandwich man” a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?
Yes, indeed! But if we can be serious for a minute, I think your Rule 5 idea has some legs. It could be re-branded to the Sandwich Man Draft. All players drafted would become the sandwich men. For instance, in last year’s draft, the Tigers selected Victor Reyes first (he sounds delicious). The Tigers 40-man roster would then be able to eat Reyes, and so forth. As far as who gets to eat.. I’d propose giving priority to whoever has accumulated the most team service time at the time of the draft. The highest tenured player gets to eat first, then second highest tenured. I presume the size of the given sandwich man would correlate to how many players on the 40 man roster get to eat. Team chemistry would also play a part, obviously. As well as team nutritional needs, but that’s a whole ‘nother enchilada. This seems like a pretty solid plan, overall.
Enchiladas AND sandwiches!! Everyone eats this year!
This is awfully complicated to be called “modest”. Why not simply make it that any time on a MLB roster outside of September counts as year 1 of service time. End of rule change.
This. You make 31 days on the Major League roster=1 year of service time. Done.
The problem is that the players would need to give up something fairly significant to get this.
That doesn’t end manipulation, though. I bet a Twinkie that vlad and Eloy are “working on their defense” until September under this rule.
Then that’s ok. We can’t stop teams from deciding when to call up players. What we can do is stop GOOD teams from waiting to call up players.
That would be worse for the teams, though.
Because then teams would never call up a player in July or August, and they’d never call up a guy for, say, a sport start in May if they thought he’d only be up for a cup of coffee and spend the rest of the year in the minors.
In other words, it would make teams only call up prospects if they were absolutely sure they’d be on the team for the whole (or majority of the) season. Thus it’s possible that players could be kept down even *longer* than they are now.
It’s probably stating the obvious, but the goal is to make teams indifferent to when a player is called up, and I don’t think this addresses that.
I don’t think so. I think Vlad would be called up now (or last September 1). The Blue Jays don’t want to wait until September this year.
That’s true – but that’s my point, that teams would want to call them up to play the full season. But if the Jays were contending last season and needed a bat in August, they would have been less likely to call him up than under the current system. Hard to say which is better, but at least I don’t think it’s a big improvement as it would help some players and hurt others.
If they are trying to win they will and even if they aren’t there is a big difference between punting 2 weeks and 5 months. I doubt they would go that far.
Also, this is how it used to work for decades. Player gets first taste in Sept then starts next season in the bigs. That model worked well until service manipulation took over.
Those decades are long past What you are talking about was fine in the days of the reserve clause but ever since free agency the teams have sought to maximize their control over the players, which is as it should be. The teams are doing nothing wrong in valuing a full season of play, at the expense of two weeks at the start of the season, as very beneficial to the team. The fans of any team, contender or not, would want their team to control the young star for 6 years plus 24 weeks as against just 6 years. Everybody knows this to be true, but it seems nobody is willing to accept this as sound business practice. Are businesses that loathed that they cannot operate under reasonable policies?
But the league will never go for this. What I’d do is make one day a year, but extend control to seven years. While on paper that is more, in reality it isn’t (Jason Heyward notwithstanding). Then you make the super-2 cut 60 days flat. So if you start on opening day-end of July/early August, you get arbitration after 3 seasons. If you have any of your first 3 seasons under 60 days then you get arbitration after 4 seasons.
You also fix arbitration to more closely represent value.
I like everything but the seven years part. Get it down to 5. The team control thing is the remainder of the reserve clause and needs getting rid of.
I’d love to see minor league players added to the union and CBA. We’re talking about minor league players under the whim of a major league baseball club on when they get called up. They are not at all protected by the union so they can’t do anything about it. Expand the union to all minor league baseball players that are in milb affiliates, and then properly protect their service time manipulations while also addressing minimum wage.
As for your suggestion, the whole super 2 rule is why this manipulation happens…. adding an extra year for the club to control the player does the same thing as the super 2 rule exists, while delaying free agency for the non-superstar/super2 players. I don’t think that helps the majority of baseball players. You’re trying to fix a rule for Kris Bryant while making it harder for the Merrifield’s to get their payday.
I agree, expand the union now.
I don’t see all minor league players ever being added to the MLBPA for one simple reason: they would be an overwhelming majority of MLBPA membership.
I’ll have to ask someone more familiar with labor law to confirm, but I don’t think that a union can legally set up a voting structure other than “one person, one vote”. MLB players as a group aren’t realistically going to turn over voting control of what’s been their union.
Thing is if the MLBPA won’t do much about it (whether it involves allowing MiLB players to join or not), well then… how much can players really complain about this issue? Afterall, we’re talking players who are MLB-ready and would definitely make the Show, not really MiLB journeymen types.
Seems like the issue just isn’t really that big a deal (in the grand scheme of things), IMHO… other than some of us wanting to see players called up sooner than teams are willing…
The union has been throwing minor leaguers under the bus for years–draft slot money, international signing limits–all intending to maximize team expenditures for MLB players. Many of those trade-offs would be reversed if minor leaguers controlled the union come CBA time.
More money would flow to younger players and less to the older players.
Not what the union wants.
Agree. This is counter to the other narrative.; If we bring up young guys, there are free agents not getting signed and the free agent market is “broken”. Which is worse? I say play young guys but give them more money while they are worth that money. If they are paid better/ more equal to their value the need to “cash in” when older/ less valuable will be less and it should move more money from teams to the players overall, which is the real issue. It is not that Harper only gets 290mil but that revenue is not distributed more evenly between players and owners.
The minor league players aren’t a similar enough workforce to be in the same bargaining unit as the MLB players
What I dont understand is why the MLBPA doesn’t rebrand itself as the “Professional baseball players union local 1” and then organize the minor leagues as separate locals and separate bargaining units under the same structure
This would keep the conflicts of interest out of the bargaining (milb and mlb players have different interests), but could organize the players and would also provide them with significant resources (from MLB player union dues funding the entire organization).
In that instance its likely it would make the most sense to organize each league or level separately. Players join the union, and move from local to local as they change jobs, just like a member of the IBEW will change locals as they move between cities, or between bargaining units if they switch companies.
The biggest problem with service time manipulation to me is that it is never focused on what’s best for the player. It’s possible that players could benefit from coming up later or being demoted mid-season (I’m looking at you, Rougned Odor), but those instances are rare in comparison. The best idea I’ve come up with to address this issue is to tie service time to time spent on the 40-man roster directly and make a single day worth a year of service time.
You can give teams the seventh year of control that they basically have now anyway. This way there is no incentive to ever send a player down when he can help a team, and you’ll add players to the 40-man roster only when you think they’re ready or in conjunction with Rule V protections (I do like the idea of going back to the old 3/4 year splits). This could be exploited at the end of the season in cases like Vlad’s last year, but it would end early and mid-season manipulations entirely.
I agree that being on the 40 man should start the service clock. That’s when players join the union, and once you are on the 40 man there is no way for teams to remove a player without placing him on waivers. This also ties nicely into the Rule 5 draft, as essentially if a team is willing to pick you and keep you on the 25 man roster all year, they are saying you are MLB ready. And since optioning a player won’t stop the service clock, more guys will reach FA sooner.
I would say that a service year = more than 1/3 of the calendar year, which means a team can give players a September call up and not burn a whole year. The Blue Jays would have likely called up Vlad Jr. last September since they’d have to wait until this September to delay his FA.
Moving the Rule 5 up a year would help. Another option would be to give teams up to an extra year of control if they add a player to the 40 man at least a year before he is eligible for the Rule 5. Teams would still get their 7 years of control, but the player would be called up sooner and get paid more than under the current system.
Another solution is to put the player under team control until a certain age, say like 28. There is no benefit to holding a player down in the minors using this system as he’s a free agent after the age 28 season regardless, so you might as well call him up as soon as he’s ready to contribute. Of course, not all players are ready at a young age, so you might get a bunch of good prospects that do not blossom until 23-24 and the team only gets a handful years of their services.
The more general problem here is there is no perfect system. No matter what you do you are going to get these sorts of side effects that most people do not like. There are better systems and worse systems, but nothing will ever be perfect. And, frankly, neither side here wants a perfect system. The owners would be happy to go back to the reserve clause “I own you forever” practice, which would solve the problem at hand quite nicely but would be unacceptable to the players. Players want large, guaranteed free agent contracts for which they get paid even if they get hurt and provide no value, or are healthy but are actively making the team worse, which the owners have obviously soured upon in recent years. Tinker at your own peril.
2 main issues:
1. College players, esp SR’s, would be totally devalued. If a 21 year old draftee needs 2-3 years & comes up at 24-25, the team now has only 3-4 years of control.
2. Guys that come up at 19 (Harper, Machado, Acuna, Soto), the team now gets 2 more years of control, a star player (which is what teen MLB guys usually are) has to play 8 years until FA. Is that fair?
Couldn’t you tweak the Rule 5 rules to say that a player becomes a free agent 5 (or 6) years after being drafted?
The problem there is now HS players lose a lot of value as they generally need more time to get to MLB ready.
An unpolished, but high ceiling, HS player goes from a good draft position to way down (or probably not even picked), as the team goes from 6-7 years of control starting in 3-5 years to virtually no team control.
The NCAA sure would love that rule.
I guess right now there benefit would be minimal to MLB, but if future CBAs significantly raised MiLB salaries, maybe we’d get to a point where teams would rather get rid of a level or two of the minors and let NCAA handle the extra players?
Re point 2, you could do earlier of: (a) 6 yrs of service time; or (b) age 28 season.
Russell Carleton’s proposal (linked in Craig’s article) is exactly an age-based system like you mention with free agency at the end of age 28 season. He also proposes a related change to age-based arbitration.
It’s worth noting that this proposed system benefits some players versus the current system but is worse for others, and the particular players who would be *worse* off after this change are good players who can make it to the majors very young: exactly players such as Acuña, Vlad Jr., and Jimenez.
I think that’s going to be an issue with any age-based system that’s a realistic get for the players in the next CBA. The amateur IFA’s and high school phenoms who can make the majors at 19 or 20 are outliers. An age-based system could get them to the majors sooner, but a negotiated free agency age would almost certainly be based on averages that don’t work in their favor.
I suppose that would mean the Acuna Jrs of the world would stay longer in arbitration, guaranteeing them annual raises (barring a nontender which would grant FA).
To me, the benefit to holding a player down in the minors using this system is pretty much the same benefit as is currently enjoyed – not the extra year of control, as it doesn’t exist in your hypothetical, but being able to avoid paying arb escalations by a year or more is still nothing to be sneezed at.
It seems to me the only way to “end” service time manipulation is to eliminate service time as a factor in free agency. Short of that, any proposal just “curtails” or “mitigates” service time manipulation.
Here’s my wildly untested, totally off the cuff proposal that management will hate, but eff them anyway: all amateurs are true free agents. If I sign vlad at 16 to an 8 year contract, then he’s a free agent at 24, and so on and so forth. You can sign someone for however long or short you both want, but at the end of it, they’re a free agent. You’ll definitely get those early years cheap(er) because even vlad didn’t know he was VLAD at 16. It also eliminates the bullshit draft.
(I realize craig is being more generous in proposing something that has half a shot in hell at flying in collective bargaining)
I would generally agree with this idea. Drafted players get a fixed length contract. Perhaps informed a bit by their age at the time. Something in the 6 years for HS draftees, 4 years for college. When that term is up, the team will have 1-3 years of pseudo-control (arbitration or RFA). After that it’s UFA time.
There’s far less incentive to keep a talented prospect down. Some sort of team control still exists until age 27 or so regardless of when a guy gets called up. Players will get a bite at the UFA apple before they age into oblivion.
If this was the case, what stops the Yankees (plus a handful of other big market teams) from using their finances to scoop up basically every premium amateur, leaving the smaller market teams to fight for the scraps?
Nothing in my proposal, if that’s what the Yankees want to do. You could add in some kind of salary limit in a bidding cycle, like exists now for J2 players. Or you could count expenditures on amateurs toward the luxury tax or something. I’m totally fine with making it a free for all but there’s plenty of ways to put some limits on it.
More revenue sharing, a hard MLB+MiLB salary cap, spending caps only for amateur FAs, etc. There are many possible solutions.
This proposal is just begging for Occam’s Razor.
Interesting proposal. This would definitely be a boon to Vlad Jr. and other young phenoms. I can see how this could hurt fringe players though. The extra option year and expanded 50 man roster would mean fewer teams would be forced to put players on the major league roster like Jesus Aguilar, who was out of options this year. Aguilar used the opportunity to hit his way into a job.
In this scenario Aguilar would’ve been sent to the minors and had to wait another year before the team was forced to place him on the 25-man or grant him free agency.
[Allowing 50 man players to accrue half day service time wouldn’t alleviate this because the ways a player reaches minor league free agency faster (by declining minors assignments) kick in at 3 years & 5 years of major league service.]
This proposal is way too complicated. Just add restricted free agency, which solves all the problems. The issue with service time manipulation is there’s always a way around it, and the player doesn’t get paid like he should. With RFA, even if a team eats up a year of service, the rest of the league will force you to pay him what he’s worth, because if you don’t you’ll lose him to an offer sheet.
So yeah, the Jays get an extra year of control…only for Vlad to super two, become RFA eligible, and Vlad gets paid. And likely Vlad would get a deal here going into that 7th year, where he should have been a FA, and he’ll be paid that year like he’s a FA. And he’ll get way more than he would under the current arb system.
Something tells me with RFA, a lot of these issues will go away, because teams will be given incentives to call up a player earlier, rather than later, because RFA will make sure these guys get paid what they should during their years of control and beyond.
My only problem here is it gives the teams more opportunities to collude. Otherwise, I am all in on this idea.
I don’t see how that really changes the underlying issue, because there would still be some cut-off at which a player is eligible for restricted free agency.
Depending on the exact structure, I’m also not sure that a team would view the protections of restricted free agency as much of a benefit with respect to its superstar-level young players. We’ve already seen that with qualifying offers, which are a form of restricted free agency. They no doubt have sometimes impacted the market of players who are in the lower tier of those receiving QO’s, but the QO-related lost draft pick(s) are a very small percentage cost in the context of long-term, high AAV contracts (e.g, Harper).
RFA is never going to work in MLB. It’s a non-starter.
The RFA system would disproportionately hurt small market teams given the current structure of the league. There would have to be significant changes to revenue sharing and a potential cap to make RFA work in the MLB.
One solution I’ve thought about at least a bit to avoid service time manipulation would be having players concede the 7th year of control in exchange for starting arbitration a year earlier and implementing a higher salary floor that grows in line with revenue growth.
The arb system would have to be revamped under this proposal, with salaries better tied to a player’s actual value and not counting stats. Players would start the arb process after their 2nd season and get up to 5 total seasons of arbitration. Seasons 4 and 5 of arb would approximate the player’s market value given the previous platform years.
Compared to the current environment I see the idea:
-Benefiting all young players financially, but conceding a year of control isn’t ideal
-Hurting non-premium veteran free agents since more money is going to younger players, somewhat offset by these playing getting more money while younger
-Bigger market teams benefiting more from smaller market teams not being willing to pay market rates at the end of arb
Any solution that would be agreeable for both owners and players will essentially just be pushing piles of money from one group to a different group. Paying one segment of players more is going to correspond to less money going in another direction unless players convince ownership to give up a larger share of revenue in some way. So I don’t think this solution is perfect but I do think something along these lines could be realistic.
“I just don’t see him as a major league player. He’s 19.”
Jeez thats terrible. I dont really care too much about teams managing service time, its what they should do given the rules, but I hate when GMs say nonsense like this. Do they really think people are stupid enough to believe this? Just say something like “Obviously he’ll be up for the majority of the season, but not the start for obvious reasons”, this is just bad by the Jays GM
If he says that, he’s handing the grievance case to the player. That’s why we have “working on his defense”.
I have always thought that the simplest rule would be that a player is a free agent in the sixth off season after he first appears on a major league roster.
what happens to guys who were injured. what about players who come up for a season, don’t do well, get sent down for another year, then get injured for a year, need to rehab for another season. 4 years are now up, so the team only gets 2 years of actual service? I don’t think that works very well.
Right now, if a pitcher gets called up and blows out his elbow, that time he’s disabled goes toward service time. That sounds fair to me that the team, not the player, bears that portion of the risk of the player being injured working for them. I’m fine with that applying to guys who get sent down and blow out. Especially since teams often send down guys who should be on the 25 man but are sent down because they have options and someone else does not.
Every time I see an article like this I think of this one:
https://www.si.com/more-sports/2010/01/14/andrecheck-freeagency
The reserve clause was used for evil but it could be a really good thing.
Hmm…
A shares-based approach?
A total pot split by a combination of roster time, WAR, usage… bonuses for team performance and player awards…
Could get dicey if one player’s gain means somebody else’s loss.
No easy answers. Every system will skew one way or another.
Seems it would be easier to just say any day in majors is a year of service time and give teams an extra year of service (basically, player would have to play 14 or so more games than they have to now to hit free agency). In exchange for the extra 14 or so games, teams double minimum salaries and arbitration is reworked such that players are paid near the league average (not free agent market value) in $/WAR (i.e., ~55% times total baseball revenue divided by 1,000 WAR).
I would like to see something along the lines of:
All players drafted out of High School become free agents X years after they’re drafted.
All players drafted out of College become free agents X years after they’re drafted.
All international free agents under 18 become free agents X years after they’re drafted.
All international free agents over 18 become free agents X years after they’re drafted.
This would certainly incentivize teams to promote their top prospects as soon as possible.
You should replace some of the Xs with other letters, as reusing the same variables generally means that each uses the same value.
That said, often there is a big difference between a college freshman and a college senior in terms of their development, so you probably want more than one tier for the college players.
Likewise, I’d probably want the over 18 int’l split up into a couple of buckets. Really, why have different criteria anyways? High School vs College, is basically over/under 18 anyways, so you can probably get away without different rules.
<18, maybe 10 total years of control, including the draft year (FA after 26-27)
18-19, 9 years (27-28)
20-21, 8 years (28-29)
22-23, 7 years (29-30)
24+, 6 years (30+)
Looking at the 2000 draft and some of the premium players to come out of it:
Adrian Gonzalez would have been a FA after the 2008 season, three years early
Rocco Baldelli would have been a FA after the 2008 season, same as reality
Chase Utley would have been a FA after the 2007 season, three years early
Adam Wainright would have been a FA after the 2008 season, four years early
Kelly Johnson would have been a FA after the 2008 season, one year early
Grady Sizemore would have been a FA after the 2009 season, two years early
Chris Young(P) would have been a FA after the 2007 season, three years early
…
So, looking at this SSS, maybe I want to tack on two years to each to still be player friendly, but not quite so huge a swing.
Why would contract lengths need to vary based on age? If a high schooler needs more development time, don’t draft him.
Giving an extra, let’s say, 2 or 3 years of team control for high school draft picks makes sense because they’ll, on average, need more time to reach the majors than your average college draftee.
Possibly stupid question… why is service time the way contract lengths are measured? Why don’t teams get a flat X years of control (majors, minors, IR, etc). It seems like the service time issue isn’t a thing in other sports.
Obviously, player development tends to take significantly longer in MLB than in the NFL but it seems like that would just mean 9 years of control instead of 5 as the default.
It isn’t a thing in the nba or nfl but that’s because they have higher age limits and slavery…er, the “student athlete” system of college sports…that takes care of the developmental time for them. They don’t have a minor league system to send their players back to, short of the G league, which no good players go to (with rare exceptions)
Part of it is what CC AFC says – the norm in the NBA and NFL is that a drafted player goes straight to the team roster, so there’s no majors/minors distinction to worry about.
Another issue in MLB is the differing average minor league development time between amateur IFA’s (who are often 16), players drafted out of high school, and players drafted out of college.
Otis makes a comment above proposing setting a separate number of years from draft/signing until free agency. That could work conceptually. Realistically, though, the negotiated years for each of these categories would be based on averages and therefore aren’t going to look appealing to players like the ones mentioned in this article. Amateur IFA’s who are major league ready by 19 or 20 (Vlad Jr., Jimenez, Acuña) and a college player drafted in 2013 and in the majors by early 2015 (Bryant) won’t be the players who benefit from such a system. If anything, they’ll almost certainly be *worse* off than under the current system.
The logical question then is- Who is the system for? The “stars” or the “average” MLB player? Likely the average player, they’re the ones that need the protection more than the stars. The stars may not get all that they’re worth, but, they’re still getting 9 figure contracts. The run of the mill guys don’t get that under any system..but, getting them to FA earlier (esp. college guys, who then take 3-4 years to develop ) likely makes them significantly more $$, if they can be FA’s at 28 instead of 30-31. Same with pitchers (See Jacob DeGrom) that miss a year or 2 of development with TJ injuries.
BTW, the NBA/NHL have max contracts that also tend to depress the pay of the best players. Guys like LeBron, Harden,etc. are probably really worth more than $50 million/yr, but, the max contract is less than that. The NFL salary cap has a similar effect in that teams can’t afford to spend too much on 1 player, lest they weaken the overall team to have 1 star.
People are saying this is too complicated to be a “modest” proposal, but everything Craig is talking about changing is already arbitrary. The size of the roster, the number of option years, Rule 5 eligibility, the manner in which service time is accumulated, etc. None of these things are core parts of the game. They’re basically just rules that were hammered out at some point and that we’ve all grown accustomed to, but there’s no reason they should be considered immutable. The Baseball Prospectus proposal of shifting to an age-based free agency model, for example, is far more radical than this.
I don’t agree.
As one example, some of these ideas – such as 50% service time credit for time spent in the minors on the expanded 50-man roster – have impacts beyond what Craig addresses here on things like how the pension plan is structured (right now players vest in a pension with 43 days of MLB service time).
I think this is a brilliant solution
Ross Atkins is messing with Vlads life and livelihood……a real scumbag. Like anyone believes anything he says.
To me this simpler the better. Any time on the major league roster before September 1 and you have earned your first year of service. In exchange, drop the last year of arbitration. Three years at team control, two years of arbitration, then you are a free agent.
Seems like an awful lot of trouble to solve a very minor problem. So a couple of players each year have to spend an extra two weeks in the minor leagues, big deal.
also this, it isnt exactly a huge deal to make players wait 11 days.Sure it is shady financially, but from a baseball perspective it isnt a very big deal.
I disagree that it’s a minor problem. First, for the player, you’re losing the ability to sell a prime year (your most valuable asset) in an open and competitive market. Vlad, for example, will lose the ability to sell his Age 26 season. Although he will likely be relatively well compensated through arbitration for that year, he will lose the ability to package that Age 26 season in a long-term contract. If Vlad seeks a 10 yr deal in FA, he will be selling his Ages 27-36 seasons, rather than his Ages 26-35 seasons, essentially substituting his Age 26 season with his age 36 season. This will negatively impact his earnings potential.
Second, I think service time manipulation is teams, ownership, FO’s acting in bad faith at the expense of, specifically, their players, and more generally, the fans and the game. The CBA, negotiations over service time, the reserve clause, etc., are predicated, at a fundamental level, on parties acting in good faith, and when teams manipulate service time to gain an extra year of control, they are acting in bad faith and contrary to the best interests of the game, the players, the fans, etc.
Guerrero was major-league ready at the beginning of last year, and there’s no guarantee that the Blue Jays will call him up this April. Not only will he lose millions of dollars because of this, but this could easily impact if/when he goes to the Hall of Fame.
Guerrero looks certainly ready now, but calling a teenager who topped out at 209 PAs on A+ major league ready is an exaggeration.
People blame teams for calling up prospects too early and messing up their development all the time.
Arguably, however, Guerrero and Bryant were both kept in the minors for half a season during which they should have been called up, not merely two weeks. The Blue Jays put up exactly 1 WAR at 3B last season. Why exactly did Toronto fans have to endure that? Teams used to treat a “cup of coffee” as part of the development cycle, now it’s completely off limits for guys who are even thought to be future regulars. The service time manipulation begins before the season.
its way more than a couple players. Its all of the players ready to get called up. Once theyre are ready, they still manuever the time manipulation on all players.
@The Guru – if it’s “all of the players ready to get called up”, then who the hell are the players who are actually on major league rosters? Teams aren’t leaving 25-man roster spots vacant.
Are you saying that teams are going out of their way to sign veterans whose level of play no longer warrant spots on major league rosters? That’s the exact opposite of what veteran FA’s think is happening in their own markets. And the average age of players on MLB rosters has been decreasing for about a decade – https://tht.fangraphs.com/roster-movement-is-decreasing-and-teams-are-becoming-more-homogeneous/
yes, why do you think the average age is 5 years of service time? what do you know, its right before FA hits, what a coincidence. If they change the service time to 3 years in the new agreement, the new avg service time for MLB player will be about 3 years, book it. Yes they manipulate time on mlb players and minor leaguers ready for bigs.
Yes teams do manipulate time on all minor leaguers before they get called up……if a team is rebruilding/tanking then why would they call up their future starters and start the clock until they are ready? the answer is they don’t, they sign FA to 1 year deals trying to flip them until they are ready to compete. Yes it happens to all players before they get called up, don’t be naive.
Is there a reason it couldn’t just be… 8 or 9 years of control at either MiLB and MLB combined?
This removes any incentive whatsoever to artificially hold players down. If you only get Vlad Jr for 8 years no matter what… what’s the point in holding him down at AAA?
All changing the def of service time means is a different way to mess with it. If you set the standard to over half a season… teams will wait until game 82 to call players like Bryant and Vlad Jr up. Any other rule would be just as likely to manipulated.
There’s no way to manipulate drafted in 2019, eligible for free agency (no matter what) in 2027 offseason.
Any system tied to roster status can be manipulated, so the best option may be to take that out of the equation.
In addition to the current rules, I think it would be best for players and for the game to create a system of service time arbitration, similar to the salary arbitration that already exists. Have the arbitrators meets twice a year- once around opening day, once at midseason- and let any minor league player who wants make the case that they’re above replacement-level. Let the controlling team make the case against. If the arbitrators side with the player, his service time clock starts immediately and can’t be stopped. If the Blue Jays really, truly believe that Vlad needs to work on his defense at AAA, that’s fine- but he’s going to get service time either way.
The main criticism of this will probably be that owners will never agree to it, but it does still favor ownership in several key ways:
1) Because the arbitrators only meet twice a year, the owners can still steal several months of service time at the margins. A player who’s MLB ready in August, for instance, won’t see their clock start ticking until April.
2) As in salary arbitration, the team will have more resources and information at their disposal than the player, so they’ll likely win more than their share of the borderline cases.
3) A version of this system already exists, in the form of the grievance process that Bryant pursued. In a way, arbitrators already have the power to rule on service time issues, but only in a retroactive fashion that doesn’t serve the interests of either party well.
“Modest” = “Overly complicated without solving the issue”
Here’s a better idea: eliminate the draft and force teams to sign amateur players as free agents.
“The Best Days of Fangraphs are ahead of it”
In an alternate universe where Cameron, Sullivan and Cistulli all come back.
Is it manipulation, or is it “smartly following the rules of the existing CBA until they are renegotiated”? Zero problem with this as it is implicitly allowed.
A solution including things such as the age based free agency, plus earlier restricted free agency instead of arbitration, that would help align players’ earnings peaks with their performance peaks and shorten the amount of time before they would receive a “market” salary would seem better than increasingly arcane systems of counting months and days.
I don’t disagree with your second point, but I disagree with your first point — it is almost certainly bad faith manipulation. If it weren’t, there would be no need for teams to concoct pretexts for not calling players up. Teams don’t come out and say, “Yeah, we’re keeping Player X down for 2 weeks to get an extra year of control because it’s implicitly allowed under the CBA.” Instead, they act in bad faith and contrary to the intent of the parties under the CBA, and then peddle nonsense that no one believes in an effort to maintain (im?)plausible deniability, because if they actually told the truth, a grievance would be filed, and they would lose.
That does seem to be widely assumed. But until some team has the stones to say, “We are leaving “X” in AAA because we are allowed to,” we’ll never factually know if a grievance would be filed, or if the team would prevail if one was. A lot of fellows like us have opinions, but we do not sit on the NLRB. At least I know I don’t.
I’m going to be honest. I came here hoping that the solution would be for the Union to eat any front office executives that engage in service time manipulation. I was both disappointed and not reading what turned out to be a solid proposal.
Interesting, but I’d also like to see an age cutoff for Free Agency as a final cutoff. Unless an extension is signed, players should have the right to elect into Free Agency (or select Arbitration) after their year 28 season at the latest.
I don’t like this proposal at all. I think it will end up keeping some players down even longer (ESPECIALLY the uber talented ones who progress extraordinarily quick through the minors without needing protection on the 40). I also think this proposal would unjustly penalize teams that are great at developing talent through the minors. The teams in big markets would get even richer. I’m sorry I think that there would be far too many negative consequences from this proposal.
As some people have already said in the comments, these rule changes might help guys like Guerrero but have a chance of hurting guys such as Aguilar and Merrifield. My suggestion is to adopt a system which is a combination of this proposal, the current system, and the age based system:
Adopt four types of free agency: (for lack of better names): Full, Restricted, Limited, and Arbitration
Service time is accrued based on time spent on the roster. Every day on the Active Roster acquires one point. Every day on the 40 man roster but not on the active roster or in military service accumulates half a point. Time as the 26th man for a double header is counted as time on the 40 man roster but not the active roster. Time after the rosters expand on September 1 is counted as active roster time for players who cannot be optioned and as 40-man roster time for players with options remaining. A maximum of 150 points can be acquired in one season, and a maximum of 200 points can be acquired from time not on the active roster.
A player becomes eligible for full free agency at the end of the season in which he accumulates 800 points of service time, provided he is at least 27 years old. There are no limitations on the contract such a player can sign. The original team can receive no compensation for such a player should he sign elsewhere.
A player becomes eligible for Restricted Free Agency should he reach 800 points of service time but be younger than 27. There are no limits on the contract such a player can sign. Should the player sign with a different team, the original team will receive a choice: either match the contract offer with a 10% markup of salary and 25% markup of all bonuses or receive compensation in the form of draft picks or international free agency budget.
A player becomes eligible for Limited Free Agency should he reach 29 years of age but not 800 points of service time. Such a player cannot sign a contract of longer than two years. Once in the player’s career, his team can extend him a qualifying offer at the beginning of the period of free agency. This qualifying offer will be for either 1 or 2 seasons at the league’s average salary. If a player who declined a qualifying offer should sign with a new team, the original team will receive compensation in the form of cash considerations. In effect, most LFAs would probably re-sign with their current teams.
A player becomes eligible for Arbitration should he reach 400 points of service time, assuming he is under 29 years of age. At the start of the free agency period, a team must choose to tender a contract to any such player or to non-tender him. If a player is non-tendered, he becomes a full free agent. If a player is tendered a contract with a base salary of at least the salary he earned in the previous season, he will have until January 1 to negotiate a new contract with his current team. On January 1, if still unsigned, the player must notify his current team if he wishes to continue negotiating with them or to become a free agent. If he chooses to continue negotiating with his current team, the two sides have until February 1 to come to terms on a contract, before having an Arbitration hearing in early February. If such a player opts free agency, he cannot sign a contract with his original team until after June 1. He can sign a contract no longer than 2 seasons and a base salary of no higher than the league average salary; his original team will receive compensation in the form of draft picks or international FA budget.
The rules regarding options and Rule 5 draft will work the same except for the two following expections: 1) The Rule 5 Draft will be held twice per year, once during the All Star Break and once during the Winter Meetings. The midseason Rule 5 Draft will contain only the Major League phase 2) Two weeks prior to the midseason Rule 5 Draft, the Player’s Association will compile a list of 10 prospects (no more than 1 per franchise) who will become Rule 5 eligible even if the standard rules regarding Rule 5 eligibility would keep them protected.
Some rule modifications would need to be placed regarding how teams can manipulate the Injured List, perhaps increasing the minimum stint to 20 days (except for concussion protocol) to try to prevent teams from placing players on the IL with trumped up injuries in order to manipulate service time.
Under the new system, Guerrero would likely have been added to the 40-man roster at the All Star Break last year at the latest, and would have acquired about 75 points of service time. An additional interesting effect would be that a player who misses extended time due to injury can have his free agency postponed. On the other hand, players like Merrifield and Aguilar would have their free agencies mostly unchanged.
I’ve mentioned it before, but the only way to end service time manipulation is to have an arbitration panel that convenes at the end of each season and hears every grievance from each player who believes he was held down for service time reasons. The panel would be allowed to award the player up to 3 years of service time depending on the nature of the infraction. Once teams start having 2 to 3 years of control taken from them as a penalty, I imagine they will stop with the service time games pretty quickly.
There are other ways to end the manipulation. You could base service time or arbitration eligibility on years in the organization instead of on the MLB roster, for example.
And speaking of Rule 5, Atkins picked 19 yr. old Luciano, with the stayed intent of keeping Luciano on the major league roster all year.. This 19 year old ( never above A ball) is a major leaguer, but not Vladito. The hypocrisy is amazing.
Agree with many posters that this is overcomplicated. Why not just go to the table with “A player who is called up at any point prior to September immediately accrues a year of service time, and in exchange teams get one more year of arbitration control.”, and then September service time doesn’t count against the clock at all.
While this would create a disincentive for August callups, it *would* create quite the incentive to call up a guy who can contribute as early in the season as you can.
You could even nuance it a bit and say that a player *can* be called up as a designated injury replacement and it won’t count against service time, but that player must return to the minors within 10 days and can’t be called up again to replace the same player
The big problem is that there is an enormous cliff in the form of the cutoff date.
I keep coming back to an idea that stems from the “most fair” service time-based status: a player is a free agent after X games on the active roster or DL. The obvious problem – we can’t have players becoming free agents midseason.
But if we can’t have them becoming free agents in July, maybe we could at least pay them like free agents?
So: things stay as they are, but after 891 (? – that’s 162 x 5.5) games, the player’s salary is multiplied by some factor for the remainder of that season, and then they become a free agent.
I’m trying to go through all the consequences, but if the multiplier is sufficiently large (1.5X to 2X?) then this would encourage teams to bring up players early in the season if they don’t want to pay that huge bump at the end of the deal.
It would, in effect, let teams choose between less service time and a “normal” (i.e. like today) salary, or more service time, but paying an exorbitant rate for the “excess”.
Thoughts?
The delay is 3 weeks. This is not a huge deal.
I do not believe this issue is worth the attention it gets.
What no baby eating?
I agree this issue is not worth the attention it gets … The players affected are the ones that ar going to get paid premium dollars anyway… I think more attention should be given to minor league salary and benefits. Also… In my opinion… Keeping Vlad (or whomever) down for three weeks is a positive for the fans in that market … Fans of a team unlikely to compete shouldn’t really want to lose a year of team value for the sake of three weeks of entertainment value. Again though… We are talking about a handful of players … I think we should move on.
As a simple fan of the game, this is becoming a legitimate issue for MLB. We know more and more about prospects than ever, remember all the hype for when Kris Bryant finally got called up all over ESPN?
I want to see Vlad Jr play baseball at the highest level possible. I don’t care how it happens. Until MLB fixes this, it’s just an embarrassment for them every year a world class prospect is kept from being shown on TV.
3 weeks… You will see Vlad for 145 games this yeqr.
Do you really watch every…single…Blue Jays game? And is it really so bad Vlad will be at AAA for the equivalent of 1 trip to the DL?
I think you are unusual if you are a fan of the game in general. Most fans are partisan in favour of a team rather than rooting for the sport itself, and would like that team to act in whatever way benefits it the most, rather than behave altruistically on behalf of the whole sport. Therefore if I was Blue Jays fan I would be happy to not see a talented young player for a part of a season, if it guarantees I will later see him for an extra year when he is at his peak, as he probably won’t remain with the Blue Jays when he reaches free agency.
expansion probably needs to be part of your proposal as well
How about, a modified rule 5 draft: if you’re not currently Rule 5 eligible you can still be drafted after two years, but your team can then protect you by starting your clock. Super stars like Vlad and Trout would then essentially have their clock start after two years in the minors and they will come up when they are ready.
I love FanGraphs when it’s actually doing real baseball analysis, but the thing I hate most about FanGraphs – after of course the utterly gratuitous “progressive” editorials – is the blind anti-team and anti-business bias of its commentariat.
Written rules will always have loopholes. Why not make it like arbitration? A player can ask to go before an arbitrator, requesting to be brought up to the majors. The team can present its case for why he needs more development. You could give a player 3 chances per season to test the water. Finding a good set of arbitrators would be the trickiest part. But any unbiased baseball person could see, for example, that Vlad is ready—the arbitrator would have to look no further than his projections.
Why don’t you give the union three free passes each year. Union can choose any three players at end of season and give them 2 extra years of service time.
Take Vlad as an example. If the blue jays hold him back to work on his def see and he comes up in May, the union can elect to give him 2 years, not just the one.
Blue jays would never take that risk and would be forced to bring him up.
Hugely biased and unfair and would encourage corruption within the union. Owners would love it.
The point being that no team would ever allow a n Acuña or Vlad to be held back if there was a really punitive penalty. There’s certainly no logic that says the owners would love this
And yes the union would then have to be careful about who they choose but as I said the issue would not really exist anymore because no team with a really valuale player would risk it
It also has the benefit of not having to re-write the whole topic as Craig has done
Why would they not just give the 2 extra years to Vlad and Acuna regardless of what the team did?
I believe there is a cutoff line and the rule would only apply to those on the wrong side of the line
Most of the manipulation ultimately comes down to whatever boundary is set for a full year. But what if we remove that concept altogether?
As I commented on Sheryl’s piece, just count the actual days on the active roster/DL (perhaps exclude September, so a full year would be c. 160 days).
This would, of course, mean players becoming free agents mid-season. Their existing team would be incentivised to negotiate an extension to at least the end of that season, but if they were uninterested I’d propose that the player would be able to negotiate with other teams within 60 days of their contract expiry. Arbitration would need a little rejigging too.
Why not simply implement a rule that says when a player is drafted they have 8 years with that team?Regardless of whether or not they are called up. But if a player does not see the big leagues in say, 4 years, they are eligible for a draft.
I clicked this post hoping for a discourse on how eating babies will end service time manipulation.
I am very disappointed.
What happens if you just increase control to 6 years and a day? It’ll mean you can break camp with your best prospect, but for the most part won’t change anything for a large number of players.
My solution: If a team drafts or sign an international player at 18 or younger, they get 9 years of control, 19-20 they get 8 years, 21 or older they get 7 years. No matter what level they play, injured or not, every calendar year counts towards a year of control. No arbitration, just set salaries for highest level played that year. A+ and below get 50k a year, AA-75k, AAA-100k, 1st year MLB – 500k, 2nd – 750k, 3rd – 1.5 mil, 4th – 3mil, 5th – 6mil, etc. If a team doesn’t want to pay a player the set salary they can release them and they become a free agent and no longer bound by the service time pay rules. This would also make every player a free agent by age 29 at the latest.
The proposal is totally valid set of adjustments, but you make some assumptions that are not based in fact, eg, “they are deliberately choosing not to field their best roster, depriving the sport of its best possible product, ” Who are they depriving of what? You use the word manipulation, but you don’t describe the manipulation. That’s just a loaded word, an opinion. Jays mgmt are playing by the agreed set of rules. “The sport” didn’t sign Jr., the Jays did.
One thing not covered in any of these pieces,– How does this affect fans? (“Fan”Graphs..). Would a Jays fan rather have a real chance to ring the bell in 2025 or watch Jr go 2 for 5 in a 9 – 3 loss to the Orioles in May of 2019? You may not follow a team, but for fans, its about competition, not some abstract notion of purity.
All businesses make decisions based on the interplay between short term and long term resources. The Jays job is to win a World Series, not to field the most talented set of players in their organisation on May 1. They are choosing to field their best roster for the entirety in 2025 rather than the month of April. This will always be so, whether it is for 30 days or 81 games, etc…
There is no injustice here. Reading these various proposals, feels like group think. Vlad Jr’s employer has decided that his 2025 is more valuable than a few weeks on a non competitive team in 2019, that is what employers do, that is their role.
What about adopting a system like teh NHL has?
– Every player is eligible to be drafted when they are 17, including international players.
– Players become unrestricted free agents after accruing 10 years of service time, minor league or major league, or when they turn 28.
– Players can choose to go to college while the team maintains control while they are there; or, they can choose to go into the team’s professional academies, etc.
– If players go to college, they are unsigned and if they complete four years of school, they automatically become free agents.
Just a thought…
Why reinvent the whole wheel… look what is out there in other pro sport league… if you want to minimize service time manipulation, make a clear FA cut off… age 27 or 6 years of services. Yes the “odd” Vlad Guerrero, Ronald Acuna will happen… but they will be the exception rather than the norm.
Because baseball is not like other sports in that different players take wildly different amounts of time to develop in the minor leagues.
I would try to uncomplicated things. Just say that when a newly drafted player signs with a team, that team gets control over the player for X number of years from the time they were drafted. Now what that ‘X’ is I don’t know. Maybe 7 years? No incentive to keep a player in the minors if he is producing.
Why not make the rules the same as ROY eligibility? 45 days on the roster or 130ABs or 50IP and it counts as a full year of service. That’s short enough that contenders won’t hold down ready players for 3/4 of the season but long enough you can still call someone up for a couple spot starts or a short term injury replacement without burning a service year.
Instead of making a rule it would be ideal for players to say in public that if they are obviously having their time manipulated they will not sign any sort of extension with not only the team doing it to them but others who do the same.
Signs of obvious early season manipulation are projected WAR of the player vs the roster spot player.
If all the players made this known this year it would stop until the new CBA.
Saying such a thing is meaningless. Every player and agent would know each of the other 29 teams would have treated them exactly the same way. And who would they be kidding anyway? They will sign with whomever offers the best deal.
Do you seriously think any player would give up extra money just because 7 years earlier, the team did what every other team would also have done?
Why not make it more simple and just let players start service time once they sign their first professional contract and give teams more years of service time control overall (like 7, 8, 9, or 10 years for example)? And do what we all think is necessary, and protect minor leaguers under the CBA.
Why not go down to five years, but make no other adjustments?
Teams would be able to use the same manipulations to stretch players to 6 years.
I know some of the more complicated proposals MIGHT be better, but keeping things simple decreases the risk of unintended consequences. Complicated adjustments would create new risks for all parties.