FG on Fox: Who Needs a Draft?

Yesterday, Major League Baseball officially declared Yoan Moncada — perhaps the most coveted player to defect from Cuba in the last few years — free to sign with any Major League club. The bidding is expected to be intense, with the Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers tabbed as the early favorites. Given the tax that will be levied on on the team that signs Moncada, the high-revenue clubs are at a significant advantage, and Moncada’s signing will likely be used as evidence of the need for an international draft.

In his conversation with Ken Rosenthal last week, Commissioner Manfred publicly supported such an idea, stating that his “long haul goal” would be “to get to an international draft.” With the big money clubs blowing up the league’s system for signing young international free agents, an overhaul of the process is inevitable. But while the draft has become the de facto method for sports leagues to distribute incoming young talent — under the guise of competitive balance, but with the primary goal of holding down acquisition costs — I’d like to suggest that Major League Baseball go the other direction instead.

The logistics of incorporating international players into a draft are problematic, which is why baseball settled on its current recommended bonus system instead. And there is merit to the structure that the league created; if you have various spending allocations in place, you don’t actually need to go through the process of draft positions. The best players want the most money, so by simply creating a system where some teams have more money to spend than others, you can funnel incoming talent to certain types of teams even without handing out specific draft positions.

The problem lies in the execution of MLB’s international system, as the bonus pools are akin to speed limits instead of actual barriers. Because teams have calculated that Moncada’s talent is worthy of paying the penalties associated with blowing their budgets out of the water, the limits are functionally useless. But if the limits were firm caps, and teams were unable to exceed their pool allocations, then we wouldn’t be facing a situation where the richest teams in baseball were flexing their financial muscles to add an elite talent while the have-nots sit on the sidelines wishing for a more level playing field.

So what if there was no draft? Instead, what if we just lumped all new players — foreign or domestic — into a single acquisition system where each player was free to sigh with the team of their choice, only with firm spending caps in place to ensure that young talent flows more freely to clubs who can’t compete on Major League payroll alone? In other words, a team’s talent acquisition budget would be inversely tied to their Major League payroll; the more you spend on big leaguers, the less you get to spend on prospects, and vice versa.

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