On Monday, Major League Baseball (MLB) held its (oddly in-season) amateur draft. This has become an important annual event for Blue Jays fans, who have had more to cheer for at the draft (because the team has spent buckets of money to purchase talented players other cost-conscious teams have shied away from) than during the rest of the season itself (since the Jays have not spent on the free agents that might have pushed them to contention). Sadly, this year, even this small pleasure has been snatched from us with the revised rules to the MLB draft that limit the amount teams are allowed to spend on players. Or so I thought. In fact, Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopolous seems to have found a sneaky way around these pesky rule changes.
The devilish little fan version of myself masquerading as a Blue Jay perched on my shoulder tells me (chirps to me?) that I should be delighted by the new Blue Jays draft strategy. Has Anthopolous found a new market inefficiency ? Is drafting college seniors and then paying them a fraction of what MLB says they should get for their draft slot--in order to conjure enticingly over-slot offers for high-upside high school seniors--not exactly the sort of wizardry a fan should celebrate? Well, yes... and no.
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| Alex Anthopoulos. Photo from The Score. |
This is why the fan on my shoulder has a distinctly satanic quality: over and over again, fandom produces and legitimises behaviour that would (I hope) otherwise be viewed as unethical. In this case, as it so often does, the fan lens conveniently transforms human, labouring athletes into objects that can be manipulated by a team towards the goal of winning. College seniors who want to play professional baseball have no choice when confronted by a low-ball offer but to accept it (unlike high school players or college juniors, who may reject the offer and re-enter the draft in a subsequent year). This means that they will labour for the team--risking debilitating injury--for an even lower wage than they previously would have received. These are precisely the sort of professional athletes who put the lie to the notion that athletes should not be seen as exploited given their multi-million dollar wages. Most professional athletes will have careers, like these college seniors, which pay little and leave them with damaged bodies.
In a sense, the Blue Jays have found a way to twist a system engineered to improve equity between teams of varying market sizes (previously, big market team paid big bucks to sign high-upside players with later draft picks who fell to them because poorer teams feared being unable to sign those players) into one that is even more inequitable for the players themselves. Top prospects will continue to reap huge signing bonuses, only now, this money will come from the pockets of other players instead of the coffers of mega-corporations.
Clearly, this is a structural problem with the MLB slotting system more than an insidious product of Anthopolous' imagination. Nevertheless, as a human agent with considerable power, the Blue Jays GM has the ability to treat these young men right. That he won't is little cause for celebration.
So, as I'm watching the Jays sign a number of these players, I've discovered a little irony in Anthopolous's approach - by working the system in the way that he has, he's actually able to pay most of the marginal pro-talents *more* than they otherwise would have made.
ReplyDeleteI'll explain very briefly: those college seniors that he drafted in Rounds 4 thru 10 are signing to bonuses between $1-10k. And, apparently, the signees who have given interviews are thrilled by this, because they had expectations of little or no bonus. (This is because these guys aren't even considered marginal-talents. The average minor-leaguer has something like a 1-in-10 chance of playing at least one game in the MLB; these guys are probably nearer 1-in-100.)
So, while they're being treated like disposable pieces - and they would have been treated that way regardless - at least they benefit from exposure that they otherwise would have never had, and from a few extra dollars. That's a win, for them.
Likewise, under the new system the guys who are being drafted in rounds 11 thru 17 - who are quite good players and would have likely ended up being the Jays' round 4 thru 10 choices, in the old format - would have been paid poorly if they had been taken before round 11. Since Anthopoulos needed to free-up something like $1 million to sign Smoral, and he needed players who would agree to sign for bonuses that were equivalent to peanuts in order to do so, they weren't going to get anything more than that $10k max. But falling to the 11th round means they'll get $99k. That's about $90k that they wouldn't have made.
So, to the extent that it's possible, Anthopoulous is actually being more generous to both the 4th-10th and 11th-17th contingents than the system would have otherwise allowed. (Because those guys at the top were *going* to be paid over-slot, no matter what.)
Now, of course, I wrote "to the extent that it's possible". The real problem is that system demands that the unlucky guys who *should* have been drafted in the 4th or 5th rounds but have fallen to the 11th or 12th are being totally screwed by the system. Sure, I can say that Anthopolous has devised a way to pay them $99k when other teams who *haven't* employed this strategy will *have* to screw some of them, but these are guys who, under the old system, would be signing to $300k or $400k bonuses. That's a catastrophic drop, especially considering that very few of them will ever sign another contract with such a big number attached to it.
So, in conclusion - there are a couple additional reasons to like how Anthopolous has handled this. But we should still find the system despicable.