No polemic or argument here — just a what if. You fill in the blanks.
The Rule 4 MLB Draft is weird. On its face, without any historical context, it’s just a way of adding younger players to organizations in a structured way. Worse teams pick before better teams, and it loops around until there are no players anyone wants to add left. However, because the players have to be treated at least perfunctorily as people and not as objects, they get financial incentive to join the organization, with players picked earlier getting more such incentive since the cost of not having them is relatively higher.
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That’s it, really.
Except then we’ve got the history of the draft as collectively bargained and sometimes unilaterally set forth, where it’s become this crazy thing with bonus pools and strategies and penalties for going over (but not if you only go a little over) and contingency bonuses and participating in the MLB combine to avoid getting too lowball of an offer. Some of these things were natural, perhaps needed evolutions. Some are just complicated for their own sake.
So, given all that: what if there was just a hard slot system? Team takes a guy, guy’s bonus is immediately set at the slot for that pick. Want to pay less? Pass on a pick. Want to pay more? Well, you can’t, without doing stuff that’s not allowed and possibly getting slapped on the wrist or worse by MLB. Guy doesn’t want to play for your organization for slot? Too bad for both of you: you lose the guy, the guy loses a payday and has to wait a year to get re-drafted by someone else. (Maybe this system would include more than a one-year signing ineligibility for players that avoid accepting the slot bonus.)
I’m not going to speculate much in the body, but I do think that if this went into place in a vacuum, the real action would be on all the interaction effects. If the Rule 4 Draft had hard slots, what would teams do in International Amateur Free Agency as a pivot? Would there be more focus on developing undrafted guys? You’d probably see fewer high schoolers taken overall, which might change the developmental role of college programs, and the structure of minor league programs, since they’d have fewer raw high schoolers other than the elite guys… but maybe more younger IFA signees to make up the difference.
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I will note that any hard slot system will probably be part of an MLB attempt to lower the cost of the draft and/or amateur talent acquisition overall. But, it doesn’t have to: there’s no reason why MLB can’t pair a hard slot proposal with a vast expansion of the slot per pick.
Anyway, what do you think?
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