Restricted Free Agency Could Benefit Players
Instead of covering free-agent signings like usual, members of baseball’s media have been forced to address the conspicuous lack of them this offseason. Dave outlined another possible explanation for the dearth of activity, noting that neither the Haves nor Have Nots are incentivized to spend money on a marginal win or two. There simply aren’t enough teams in the middle ground for whom a move might change their fortunes. There’s increasing speculation on and discussion about whether clubs might be colluding, as Zack Moser argues at BP Wrigleyville.
Wrote Moser:
“Free agency is the most important mechanism by which players can actually earn what they are due—after years of minor league, pre-arbitration, and arbitration salary suppression—and to argue for its obsolescence is to argue against the rights of labor in general.”
More than anything, I suspect the quiet offseason is a product of more clubs thinking alike and increasingly acting rationally. Emotion has largely been stripped out of the market (unless you can negotiate directly with an owner).
The other issue is the more potent luxury tax in the new CBA, which has essentially created a more rigid soft cap. There is an argument to be made that the players did this to themselves by focusing on issues like the qualifying offer instead of selecting bigger fights in the most recent round of bargaining.
While next year’s free-agent class — which features a rare wealth of young and talented players likely to be compensated handsomely — might give the impression that the system is operating in the players’ interest, it might just represent a temporary reprieve from the larger downward trajectory of the value of free agency. This is arguably the most important issue facing the MLBPA.
The MLBPA has fought for free agency — first to institute it and then to protect it — for decades. Now it might very well need to fix free agency. I’ve argued previously that the players should focus on a salary floor to promote more spending by owners, but there is also a free-market solution: restricted free agency.
Restricted free agency was actually proposed by the owners in November of 1994, a subject I visited nearly a year ago.
In the midst of the players’ 1994-95 strike, the owners not only briefly created a salary cap but abolished arbitration, replacing it with restricted free agency. Murray Chass reported on that series of events on Nov. 27, 1994 for the New York Times.
If major league clubs don’t like the selection of pitchers currently available as free agents, they need only be patient. More are on the way. When the owners, as expected, declare an impasse and implement their salary cap proposal, they will also eliminate salary arbitration, establish a salary scale for players in their first four years in the major leagues and create a new class of free agents — players who have been in the majors at least four years but fewer than six… Clubs will have the right of first refusal, meaning a club can retain a player by matching an offer from another club. With most of the best new free agents, offers from other clubs most likely only will drive up the price for their own clubs because their clubs will do what’s necessary to keep them.
It’s a fascinating development but one that was never implemented.
Free agency’s most significant problem is that the players available by means of it are generally over 30 and have either entered the decline phase of their career or are on the brink of experiencing it. Clubs know this better than ever thanks to data and aging curves. Free agency is often a losing bet for clubs because it represents an investment in a player on the decline.
What restricted free agency could do is bring in more under-30 talent, a lot more, into free agency and allow the market to value players rather than an arbitrator. This should direct more dollars to players, more dollars to younger players, and more dollars to the most valuable players in the game. This would make free agency a more relevant tool for talent acquisition.
Of course, there would have to be trade-offs.
Owners, today, would probably not be in favor of a cap-and-floor system or restricted free-agent model replacing arbitration. Owners today are no longer complaining about an imbalance in the share of revenue. And teams do spend significant dollars on drafting, signing, and developing amateur talent and would fight to protect their below-market control over players who reach the major leagues.
The implementation of restricted free agency, as in other major North American sports, would likely have to be complemented by stronger draft-pick compensation for teams losing significant under-30 talent. Restricted free agency could be a tough sell for small-market teams to accept, as it would reduce the incentives for young players to sign long-term contract extensions.
Restricted free agency could help fix free agency. It could direct more money into free agency and more dollars toward younger players who are largely underpaid for their on-field performance. Gerrit Cole and Jacob deGrom have expressed their disappointment with the pre-arbitration system in recent springs. Perhaps such voices will grow in number. If not something like restricted free agency, maybe players should focus on raising the minimum wage.
Free agency appears to be facing its greatest challenge as an institution for players, and in the next collective bargaining agreement talks, the MLBPA ought to have bigger goals and aspirations.
A Cleveland native, FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Big Data Baseball. He also contributes to The Athletic Cleveland, and has written for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Sawchik.
I like the idea of changing the arbitration rules. However, I think unrestricted free agents will put the small market teams at an extreme disadvantage.
MLB is awash in money, and there are multiple ways that the major league clubs could address this. More revenue sharing, or perhaps pay visiting clubs a pro-rated share of the home team’s television money, in the same proportions that they do with ticket sales.
Why should the players have to be the one to subsidize smaller market teams? This is a problem for all of baseball, but the players should not be the ones that pay the price to keep smaller revenue teams competitive (or at least solvent).
If the MLBPA association were smart, it allow for more incentive based contracts for older players. $5mn base + $5mn/WAR would make it a lot easier for Front Offices to sign older players.
Are there limits on how teams can issue incentive-based contracts. They seem to always be based on playing time, not based on actual production.
There are currently, but a new CBA could change that.
I really think the way to get more money to the players earlier in their career is to start arbitration earlier. You could start moving it in one year each CBA, and eventually get it to Year 2.
Restricted free agency is an invitation for the Yankees and Dodgers to sign everyone to enormous contracts that other teams would have a hard time matching. The competitive imbalance would make permanent superteams, beyond what we’ve already seen.
That’s fine. If you start arbitration earlier, then more marginal money will go to players in arbitration, earlier in their careers.
And less money will go to players in FA.
All that will happen is that there will be a “more efficient” allocation of existing player costs as between FA and arb players.
But really, that is what Sawchik is complaining about now.
There is the slight problems for teams that they can’t just replace outgoing expensive players with guys making the minimum, since those guys will no longer make the minimum in Year 2/3. So for teams on strict budgets they would take it out of the FA budget.
So that would start to take small and mid-market teams out of the premium free agent market and lower their budget for the mid-tier free agent market. It isn’t clear whether how many would bow out, or to what extent.
This would likely exert a smaller amount of downward pressure on the premium free agents (for whom smaller market teams are largely absent anyway), and a larger amount on the mid-tier free agents. The extent to which there would be downward pressure would be determined by the amount of teams bowing out, and by how much.
There would be some pretty unpredictable effects on extensions. It would cost more money to extend a player early in the career but more players would have leverage to go into free agency, making the pool of free agents better.
I think the real issue is how much demand this reduces for free agent labor. You are essentially arguing that this will reduce the demand for free agent labor so much it would completely counteract the raises earlier in the career. I’m not sure that will be the case. The reason why I’m uncertain is that teams won’t suddenly stop being in competition with each other, nor is there a lot of evidence that the top 10ish spenders or so are bound by fixed budgets that constrain top free agents.
One thing it is very unlikely to do is hurt player earning power, plus there are benefits of having money earlier in your life after being a minor leaguer for a while.
It would result in a more equitable distribution of money to the players. As it is now, a 1-2 WAR player who can play long enough to make it to free agency can usually sign a one year $10 million contract. In the real world, one such contract would be enough to make someone financially secure for life.
Under the current system, young players who have real value for a short time never last long enough to get the big payday. Obviously, with young talent more freely available, teams would be less likely to spend megabucks for free agents on the wrong side of 30.
Like any market, it will adjust itself. Many younger players will see the 400 to 500 million that Harper and Machado get and stop signing these ridiculous pre-arb contracts. It has already started to happen. The current system is very unfortunate for pitchers. So many peak early and can not stay healthy into free agency.
Maybe my perception is wrong or outdated, but it seems that a lot of players are choosing the security of a guaranteed pre-arb contract over free agency.
Some are. It’s a reasonable decision for some. Why risk injury for several years in hopes of a $100 million contract when you can take a guaranteed, say $25 million right now? $25 million, while not that much in baseball terms, is a lot of money.
The biggest problem I believe is the lack of constant communication between the MLBPA and the owners. Presenting the goal that “in the next collective bargaining agreement talks, the MLBPA ought to have bigger goals and aspirations” has the underlying mechanism that the MLBPA should be discussing this specifically during the next collective bargaining agreement talks that inevitably happen just a short stone throw from when the agreement is about to expire. But that narrows the scope of time too much. Overhauls like the one suggested in this post would/should require extensive amounts of time to hammer out/negotiate details. Talks should begin ASAP even if the end product may take so much time that another CBA extension has already passed. Granted, the goal of overhauling free agency may be only championed by one side, but if that’s the case, then the MLBPA needs to get the talks going now of what and how much to give to owners in the negotiations to get enough onboard with an overhaul.
I think that you’re both (1) making an incorrect assumption about how long these talks presently take and (2) ignoring the dynamics of negotiations in general (including the CBA).
As for the first point, the last CBA was finalized in late November 2016. Here’s a report that Manfred and Clark spoke face-to-face to lay out a calendar for talks in February 2016 – https://twitter.com/MikeBerardino/status/700799328621871104 . Here’s a report about negotiations being on the CBA being underway no later than July 2016 – https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2016/07/mlb-could-reduce-schedule-length.html
As for the second point, there’s a reason that negotiations tend to go close to the wire of deadlines. Deadlines create a sense of urgency. Crucially, a looming deadline also encourages each side to figure out compromises of what points are most important to each respective side and where to compromise. There could be multi-year negotiations, but each side has some pretty clear incentives just to repeat its opening positions with little movement until a looming deadline creates the motivation to get down to brass tacks. And neither side has much incentive to agree on compromises point-by-point, as the dynamic of negotiations is typically to lay out a final list of key open issues (which can easily be on the order of 10 or more overarching points) and then figure out a package compromise where each side bends on the respective points that are less important to it.
Also, Tony Clark has a plenty effective way to signal to Manfred and owners which potential changes will be most important to the MLBPA, and also to throw out ideas for consideration in the next CBA talks: media interviews.
Why don’t we just cut to the chase here?
CBA’s are done in five year increments. Raise the minimum salary to $2 million in year one and then $2.5, $3, $3.5 and $4 million.
By year five there would be a new equilibrium. Players who were egregiously underpaid would no longer exist. We would not be looking at the best player in MLB being paid $580,000 while a guy like Matt Wieters was pulling down $10 million.
Someone like Wieters would either get $4 million or he would retire, but he would have already made good money since his service time would have paid him $4 million per year.
This is what labor unions are supposed to do. However, it is painfully obvious that this union is driven entirely by their adversary. Why was Omar Minaya working with Tony Clark on the last CBA and now Minaya is back with the Mets working for the worst bloodsucker in MLB?
I guess. That would be great for the young, new players, but much worse for the owners. Such a dramatic increase in the minimum salary might lead to more ped usage or cutthroat competition among young players. Recently, a Japanese Olympic kayaker was busted for slipping ped into his rival’s drink.
I’m not impressed with your fear mongering.
NO FEAR.
“This is what labor unions are supposed to do.”
Perhaps in your stylized ideal, but the clear counter is that Matt Wieters is a current member of the union and those future players who would earn much higher minimum salaries than current levels aren’t. It’s hardly surprising that, in a negotiation of the many issues in the CBA, the MLBPA has shown less interest in negotiating issues that matter most to future players not yet in the union.
It’s a bizarre and unrealistic view of human behavior to think that players who fall into the Matt Wieters category are going to like your idea at all. Their clear personal incentive is to dig in and fight like hell against it.
People can downvote away, but all I’m seeing from it is a bunch of other commenters here who apparently aren’t willing to consider the incentives inherent in an institutional structure where current union membership is already dominated by players at or near free agency.
The MLBPA agrees to a CBA structure where veteran free agents can earn salaries (in marginal cost per WAR) that are well higher than the average cost per WAR that teams will spend on an entire roster. There’s a pretty simple math here that it’s possible that changes to the CBA could lead to more overall dollars going to players (higher minimum salaries, more player-friendly arb rules, less service time before free agency) while also decreasing what individual free agents earn. From a personal incentive standpoint, that’s not terribly attractive as a veteran player who is already a free agent or even as a player who has largely taken his lumps under the current system but is now only 1 or 2 years away from free agency.
As further evidence, look at the CBA’s for the NFL and NBA. Both of these player unions have also agreed to CBA’s that limit the earnings of young players through rookie salary pools or salary scales for draftees. The trade-off that’s negotiated with the owners in agreeing to a CBA is more freedom for veterans to maximize contract value in exchange for limits on the earning power of younger players, including those who haven’t yet entered the league.
Are you saying that Wieters couldn’t sign for less than the $4 million? I don’t see a problem with letting veterans who have already made their money signing for less. That was typical before free agency. Most players would get raises while on the upside of their career, then start signing for less as their skills faded. It was one-sided back then, but if Wieters wanted to stay in the game and was willing to play for $2 million, why not?
CBA’s are always based upon history and previous agreements – that is how we have ended up with arb and the protected exclusive time with developed players. Barring economic catastrophe wholesale change will not happen. Also the owners know a strike in not viable since players earn so much in real terms vs revenue pie terms. So the best bet for the players is a reduction in the penalties for exceeding the salary tax threshold or pushing the threshold much much higher.This has always been the players method of driving player salaries: let the top teams and talent set the market and the rest will float higher as well. It has been a very successful model. The current CBA took away part of the upward pressure with draconian tax implications, this along with cost certainty in the draft and international markets gave the owners too much. Combine this curtailing of the luxury tax penalties with roster expansion & a better pre arb min salary like 800k-1M-1.2M would drive the early career earnings and push the arb salaries higher as well. A min salary also acts as a defacto salary floor. All of this would drive the revenue pie share back to parity while maintaining the same model that has evolved over the past half century of labor negotiations.
Especially for older guys breaking into the league, the clock starts very late on them. Donaldson isn’t hitting free agency for the first time until his age-33 season.
What I’d suggest:
-1 year of service moves to 80 days instead of 172. That means if you want to keep a young guy down for an extra year of service, he has to spend half the year in the minors. Eliminates this stupid “wait 10 days for Bryant to be ‘ready’ for MLB”
-Eliminate super 2, and put people through arbitration starting year 3.
-Keep free agency at 6 years (or maybe drop to 5). Don’t really care either way.
-Add an extra rule that anyone with 4+ years of major league service who would be entering their age-31 or later season is now a free agent. As well, anyone entering their age-27 season starts their arbitration clock, regardless of service time.
So for Donaldson, basically his first year of arbitration would have been 2013 instead of 2015, although with 300 PA to his name, it’s not like he would have gotten a huge arbitration award that year. And he would have been a free agent before last season.
It’s very easy to sit down and think of changes to the CBA that would benefit the players. All the things you listed certainly would. But how do you propose to get the owners to agree? Another strike?
The owners aren’t going to spend more money than they have (or have to spend). The aim of suggestions like these are to distribute the total money in a different way, not increase the total amount of money spent. The increase in money spent on players at the bottom of the pay scale would (most likely) be offset by a decrease in money spent on players at the top of the pay scale. It’s not the owners that are against this.
Yes another strike.
It’s time.
But let’s make it worth it. Let’s fix the problems with the radical changes that need to be made. The players have all the power. Those TV contracts are instantly voided if there’s a strike and it’s the media revenues that the owners get rich off.
So we should just say nothing because it would be difficult to make a change? Glad you weren’t around before integration.
The problem with 80 days of service for 1 year rather than 172 is that it just moves the service time gamesmanship to a different cutoff. Yes, we wouldn’t have situations like Kris Bryant, but we’d see games to keep top-tier mid-season calls up just below 80 days of service time. Yoan Moncada almost certainly wouldn’t have gotten 106 days of service time in 2017. Minor league starting pitchers who might be called up mid-season to bolster the major league bullpen are a group who would be clear candidates for being held just below 80 days of service time.
As long as free agency has a clear-cut dividing line based on MLB service time, we’ll continue to see these games for players whose development dictates that they’d otherwise be right around the service time cutoff.
Set the clock for free agency based on time playing professionally. If the clock is running on Kris Bryant (or whoever) while he is in the minors, clubs are not going to play games and keep him off the major league roster if he is ready.
That was one of the few advantages (from the fans’ perspective) of the reserve clause. Since teams controlled players for their whole career (or until traded), they brought players up to the majors when they could make a positive difference.
“Set the clock for free agency based on time playing professionally”
That quickly gets complicated because of the differing ages and expected minor league development time for the various ways that players can enter the minors: college draftees, high school draftees, and amateur IFA signings. That’s not an unsolvable problem, but it is rather complex to work through. Such rules could end up with unintended consequences such as dramatically shifting the relative value of players acquired by each method or creating a system where virtually no top prospect wants to play college baseball.
Maybe teams are engaged in a form of implicit collusion – which comes from the market structure and not from cheating. Let’s say the Cubs and Cards view the NL Central as a HTH race, and the East and West as already decided. This leaves only two NL teams bidding on Arrieta/Darvish/Cobb level pitchers.
If either team adds one of them, odds are their rival adds another, and a lot of money is spent for minimal gain. Neither has incentive to add unless they have a desperate need or get a huge bargain.
The trades for Ozuna and Stanton are not like this. The Yankees can trade for Stanton and not only discourage the Red Sox from trying to counter, but there is no counter. Stanton is so much better than everyone else available what ever the Red Sox did could not match this. Once Stanton was dealt, Ozuna, at least in an NL context, was a uniquely impactful addition that would be very difficult for the already well-rounded Cubs to counter (another argument for Stars and Scrubs, but I digress).
This means most non-elite free agents, unless they are upgrading a “scrub” spot for a serious contender and there are two such motivated bidders, will either not get paid so much or will have a very long wait until they are the “uniquely best player available” (if they are good enough to ever have that status in a meaningful way), or until by some other circumstance the signing team can be confident that the move will not be countered. If AL teams sign Darvish and Cobb, you might see a more heated bidding war for Arrieta.
As much as we love data, game theory is often king.
I see there’s been a down-vote party going on in this post’s comment section… sheesh
It isn’t a party so much as it is improbable or ridiculous suggestions.
Like with trade proposals, fans just aren’t good at hypothesizing CBA changes. If they were, they’d be employed by a team, not sitting in the comment sections here.
I don’t think people here are proposing changes to the CBA as much a brainstorming how the CBA could be improved in a more perfect world.
All the up-votes have been reallocated to Dave’s farewell column! 🙂
More uninformed question begging, tbh.
The first things to look at in determining whether there has been any negative impact whatsoever on the players from anything teams are currently doing is to look at total player costs over time, average and median player salaries over time, and, with respect to the “health” of the FA market, the market value of $/win over time. Until you look at the actual, objective evidence (which isn’t being done), this is just worthless narrative perpetuation.
Also, as an antitrust lawyer (one who is generally on the plaintiff’s side, which in this context would be the players’ side), Zach Moser’s article is garbage. Even putting aside all the factual inaccuracies, if you’re going to write about things like “collusion” you have to start by knowing what those terms mean. Throwing around big words without knowing what they mean (besides being bush league) causes them to lose their power. It’s not “collusion” (or even evidence of collusion) if no team ultimately wants to give JD Martinez six guaranteed years or wants to give Eric Hosmer a $200MM contract.
Isn’t collusion one of the most difficult things to prove in court? My limited understanding of it is that short of an email from one owner to another saying something like “Remember that all 30 of us owners agreed that JD Martinez is not to get 6 years, and Hosmer cannont get $200M, so don’t think about it.” that it’s pretty impossible to prove.
M-W Definition of collusion: secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose
To put a legal term to it, nothing has happened this off-season that is inconsistent with conscious parallelism (and really, there isn’t even evidence of that).
I think that the answer to that is generally “yes”, though it’s become easier with the tendency of people involved in illegal business practices (including collusion) to say really stupid things in emails. See, for example, the LIBOR-rigging scandal that was a conspiracy among employees at several large money-center banks.
As I understand it, the U.S. Department of Justice also has a corporate leniency (criminal amnesty) policy that’s designed to encourage one member of a collusive price-fixing cartel to inform on the others in exchange for not being prosecuted.
So, while people and companies do sometimes engage in collusive price-fixing, it’s important to remember that it can be prosecuted as a federal crime. That doesn’t deter everyone, but individuals can and do go to federal prison for it, such as some ADM executives who were convicted in the lysine price-fixing conspiracy that was later covered by the book and movie The Informant.
What if the owners had hundreds of discussions, individually and collectively, and hinted to each other that $200m contracts ought to be very very limited, and that they should try and keep their costs as low and their profits as high as possible? Would that be collusion by your definition?
you don’t need direct evidence of agreement. A certain level of circumstantial evidence suffices
I agree with you.
Moser certainly didn’t help his case by appealing to the authority of a Michael Baumann piece about the Stanton trade (to which Moser linked), in which Baumann ripped the trade and showed little apparent understanding of the basic foundation that a player’s trade value is very much tied to his remaining contract.
And it’s beyond odd to me that when we see front offices appearing collectively to evaluate free agents more or less in line with the analytical principles popularized by sites like Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus, that we then see one author at Baseball Prospectus screaming “collusion”.
Baumann is a moron. He’s the worst sort of pontificator – very strong opinions and no foundational understanding of any of the theories or empirics underlying the system he’s commenting on. It’s certainly possible to make pro-player arguments that make logical sense sense – he just doesn’t do it.
That you can seriously entertain the idea that the reduction in spending on free agents is that suddenly, in 2017, front offices finally got smart, and not that they’re deliberately driving their own costs down; well, it leads me to believe that you might well understand baseball stats a lot better than me, but you certainly don’t understand the sort of people who own baseball teams and what their primary concern is (hint: it’s not baseball).
Getting smart and deliberately driving your costs down by not spending big on free agents who don’t justify their contracts are the same thing
You should wait and see what actual contracts these players get before assuming that this offseason will greatly drive down free agent spending below what we expected.
Look at the free agents who have signed so far versus Dave Cameron’s top 50 free agents and his forecast for salaries – https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/2018-top-50-free-agents/ and https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2018-mlb-free-agent-tracker
There’s no real evidence of teams finding bargains relative to Dave’s expected contract amounts. The market has just been slow to develop with very few signings relative to what we expected by this point.
Among the other factors, we perhaps should have expected this to happen with so many Boras clients among the top free agents: Martinez, Arrieta, Hosmer, Moustakas, and Holland. He has a playbook of starting with very high opening offers and then stretching out the signing process. It doesn’t always work for his clients, but it does quite a bit of the time. To give some idea, here’s a sampling of when Boras free agents signed in prior years:
– Matt Wieters, February 24 (and probably waited too long to his detriment)
– Max Scherzer, January 21
– Prince Fielder, January 26
– Jacoby Ellsbury, December 3
– Shin-Soo Choo, December 21
– Chris Davis, January 21
– Matt Holliday, January 21
– Jayson Werth, December 5
– Kyle Lohse, March 25
– Michael Bourn, February 11
– Carlos Gonzalez, January 3
In 2014, two Boras clients (Stephen Drew and Kendrys Morales) didn’t sign until during the season (May and June, respectively).
Not every Boras free agent signs later than January 10, but it’s very common for them to do so. It’s also been clear from $200 million numbers reported as initial contract asks for Martinez, Arrieta, and Hosmer that Boras is starting with numbers way above the expected contract totals per Dave Cameron or crowdsourcing here, so we could just see a drawn-out free agent period that ends up with contracts generally right around what we expected.
“it might just represent a temporary reprieve from the larger downward trajectory of the value of free agency.”
This is nonsense. Relievers are signing more lucrative AAV contracts than ever before this offseason, and the projected value of WAR in the free agent market continues to rise consistently each year. This is just Travis harping on his pet theory, and it’s unsubstantiated.
Looking at the NHL, which does have restricted free agency, hostile offers (now called offer sheets) to RFAs are rare. There is a kind of “gentlemen’s agreement” not to do them, and to sign a high-priced RFA is costly in terms of assets too. They do give leverage to the players though, and the team has the right to match the offer (which happens usually) or receive compensation, which is determined by the value of the contract (and usually takes the form of draft picks). What usually happens is that the player’s rights will be traded before an offer sheet arrives. One thing the NHL has is a much faster draft-to-the-pros time, with no pre-arb except for the entry-level contract (max 3 years).
I agree that the MLBPA needs to focus its efforts on getting more money into the hands of the younger players who provide the most value. I don’t know how to do that, but that’s what the players and their union should look into, as that’s the best (and fairest) way for the players to get their share of the total revenue.
Increasingly, as mentioned, teams are acting rationally, and unwilling to dole out lots of money for players in decline. You can’t force teams to redo the Miguel Cabrera or Albert Pujols albatross deals: but a smart MLBPA should be able to figure out how to better compensate the most talented players.
I appreciate the willingness to throw out new ideas going on here, even if it does seem to be driven largely by lack of news. But I feel like there needs to be more effort put into looking at how other leagues which already have these features are succeeding with them. The NHL’s restricted free agency system is an utter disaster, and that really should have been addressed in this article.
I’m all for ideas that shift money to younger players. The current structure has far too few people (owners, old players) making far too much of the money compared to the younger, poorer, more risk-exposed players. However I don’t like RFA because it chips away at the first problem while contributing to a second: declining fan interest.
As an example, I used to be a pretty big football fan but these days when I turn on a game I hardly know who anybody on “my team” is. The turnover and attrition are ridiculous, which makes it much harder for fans to have emotional attachments to teams. Baseball is nowhere near as bad as football on that front, but let’s not take that fact for granted. Fans need to see that their team has some productive players who are going to be around for a while; otherwise it’s just a rotating band of mercenaries every year. And while I would still go to some games because I like the sport, I certainly wouldn’t care or invest as much (to say nothing of what more casual fans would do).
RFA would, at the margin, create shorter tenures for good players on small market teams, which is a bad thing for fan interest in the game. We should seek solutions that encourage much more money to younger players without needing them to leave their original teams as early to get it. That would be a win for the players and for the fans.
in the NHL restricted free agency exists but is mostly irrelevant because the penalties for actually signing an RFA are ridiculous. For example if you sign an RFA away from thier team and he makes over $7 million per season you forfeit four first round picks. FOUR!
If you sign someone who makes ~$6 million its two first-round picks, one second-round pick, and one third-round pick.
Not surprisingly, RFA’s rarely ever change teams . Only 8 RFA’s have even been offered contracts from other teams this century. So in reality it acts about the same as pre arbitration years in MLB. RFA’s get a 5-10% raise based on their previous contract.