Maybe It’s Time to Change The PTBNL Rules?
According to the rules of Major League Baseball, a drafted player cannot be traded by his team within the first calendar year of signing his initial contract. According to another rule, however, teams can agree to trade players to another organization without specifying who they are for up to six months, meaning that teams can actually trade drafted players six months and one day after they sign, using the player to be named later loophole.
This is the back door that the Padres are using to ship Trea Turner to the Nationals as part of the Wil Myers trade that should be announced shortly. When the deal is announced, no one is going to officially acknowledge that Turner is part of it; he will simply be referred to as a PTBNL. And then, when spring training starts, he’s going to report to Peoria and train with the Padres. He’s going to stay in their system until June 14th, in fact, meaning that he’ll spend the first two months of the minor league season playing for a team that actually traded him before Christmas.
Back before the internet and the land grab of information, this maybe wasn’t worth worrying about. Now, though, nothing a baseball team does remains in the shadows for too long, and Turner is certainly aware of the fact that he’ll be switching teams in June. And yet, he still has to go to camp with the Padres, play in their minor league system, get treated by their doctors, make friends with their prospects, and bide his time until the rules say he can finally join the organization who sees him as their shortstop of the future.
This just all seems beyond silly. The PTBNL is such an established loophole to the trade exception that it doesn’t really make sense to continue the charade. Teams can currently trade drafted players six months after they sign, so let’s just make that the rule. Why make Turner go through a few months of this? Why make the Nationals sit around and hope that the Padres don’t screw up their asset while they don’t have custody over him? What’s the point of any of it?
The PTBNL can serve a legitimate purpose — trade returns can differ based on how a player performs after a deal, helping mitigate risk when trading for a health risk — but I see no real benefit to requiring teams to use it as a loophole around the trade limitation. Let teams officially trade prospects six months after they sign, as they already can, and let the PTBNL be used for instances where teams actually decide later on who the prospect is going to be. Once everyone agrees to move a kid from one organization to another, how about we just go ahead and let him move?
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
This system does seem pretty absurd. The Padres now keep him for the first few months of next season, when they have no reason to want him to succeed? Wierd….
I mean, they have a general and somewhat diffuse incentive to make other organizations think that they are capable of successfully developing prospects rather than screwing them up.
Is there anything official, but not public, that requires Trea Turner, and Trea Turner only, be the PTBNL in this deal from the start? Or is he the agreed-upon player for now, with it subject to change until June?
Because what happens if he blows out his knee in April — does Washington have to take damaged goods, or can they negotiate getting another player from SD? Usually, I assume, this is not a huge problem since PTBNLs are often replaceable low-level, low-upside players, but this PTBNL is a major piece that could lead to serious disagreement between the teams were his value to change in the next six months.
This is an extremely valid question. It could be that the Nationals are simply taking the risk of a major injury/other issue in order to get the guy they want. If it was my team, I would hope that they drafted a list of lesser, but still good prospects as backups in such a case.
Aren’t PTBNL generally chose from a list of players? Turner is the preliminary choice, but nothing is set in stone and presumably if Turner loses an arm or a leg or something drastic, the Nationals can chose someone else.
correct, but the Nationals prefer Turner. And if he loses that arm, they want it to be on their watch.
Why even have a lag time at all — same logic as why teams can’t trade draft picks?
Wouldn’t that just lead to teams including draftees as PTBNL’s the day after the draft, then moving them 6 months later? Or would you want to officially ban recent draftees from being included as PTBNL’s? If so, that makes a lot of sense for the reasons stated in your article.
yes, you would ban the use of PTBNL on prospects not yet 6 months removed from the draft
It’s not the PTBNL that’s the problem here, it’s the no-trade until 1 year after draft rule.
There’s another situation where PTBNLs are used – after the July 31st trade deadline, so that players who won’t pass through waivers can be included as part of trades for players who will.
The current situation is indeed ridiculous. If the MLB doesn’t want to allow recently drafted players to be traded within one year, then why not simply ban teams from using such players as PTBNL?
That’s what I’ve always wondered. Seems like it would be simple enough for MLB to require any player involved in a deal to have been eligible for inclusion at the time the first player changes rosters. If Wil Myers officially becomes a part of the Padres on 12/17/14, then only players eligible to have been traded on 12/17/14 could be included.
This is the real issue at play here, not the PTBNL rule – as previously mentioned, making prospects eligible to be traded six months after signing would still require changing this rule or the new PBTNL loophole would effectively be trading players the day after they sign with an organization.
There is actually real purpose. Teams will give the trading partner a list of players. They then can scout them for the next several months and decide which one they want. Teams have an idea what these guys look like, but probably haven’t scouted them in a while. Say the scouts think Turner looks awful, but prospect X catches their eye. They can get prospect X instead.
That’s not the issue here.
The Nationals have already gone through that process and decided they want Turner. Everyone knows Turner is going to the Nationals. However, because of a rule saying that he can’t be traded until a year after he was drafted, he remains a Padre.
Yes, the Nationals can change their minds if something comes up, but all reports seem to suggest Turner is the guy. If that’s the case, then why can’t the Nationals get him immediately?