There are numerous issues that players and owners have a difference of opinion and that’s why we’re in the midst of a lockout. But they all boil down to one thing at the end, money. One thing that doesn’t immediately sound like it’s about money is the player’s goal of making more teams competitive. But that’s about money, too, and in more ways than one.

The union feel like the system is set up currently to encourage teams not to field the best squads possible. And it’s done that way in several instances. The first is revenue sharing. It used to be that clubs needed to field winning teams to make money in a given year or to have more good years than bad ones over a longer period of time. But now clubs can be guaranteed a year in the black before the first game is played, with national TV revenue – shared equally – and payments to small-market teams, to make it even easier for them to compete.

Why spend money to field the best team you possibly can if you can instead make token spending efforts – the Pirates’ annual “Drive for 75” wins in the span they went two decades without making the playoffs being the most obvious example. Why spend money on players with no guarantees you’ll make the playoffs, much less the World Series, when you can build a new ballpark (at taxpayer expense), create a fan-friendly environment and still make some money in the short term and make a killing in the long term when you eventually sell?

And from the players’ perspective, money that large-market teams are giving to the other clubs in revenue sharing is money that they no longer spend on free agents.

Adding to that is the powerful draw of tanking for a few years to get high draft picks and use those cheap impact players to build a powerful team down the road. We’ve seen the Nationals bottom out, use first overall picks in back-to-back years to draft Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper and then add Anthony Rendon the following year when they picked sixth overall. Those players helped transform a team that went 188-299 (.385) to a team that won 93 or more games three times in four years and bagged a World Series championship in the process.

There clearly was more to it than those three – especially with Harper leaving as a free agent the year they won it all – but the tanking is what people saw. No different than what the Astros did, when tanking led them to Carlos Correa and George Springer thru the draft and ultimately a string of playoff appearances and a championship.

Clubs – and fans – now act like you either need to be competing for a championship or competing for the highest draft pick you can get. If you’re a team that can make a few trades and be in the hunt for a playoff spot or make a few trades and get a draft pick 10 spots lower, the pull to tank is so strong that it’s not a slam dunk which one to pick. The 2021 Mets opted to compete – making a trade for Javier Baez. But they didn’t make enough trades, didn’t make the playoffs and fans are upset that they didn’t outright tank.

Of course, the tanking part is the easy half of the equation. You still need to hit on your draft picks. The aforementioned Pirates had plenty of desirable draft picks and did next to nothing with them.

Regardless, the tanking process isn’t a one-and-done process. It’s something that you engage in for several years. And if you’re not trying to compete for years, it makes it less likely that you’ll spend on free agents. Why shop for a $300 million SS if you’re hoping to lose 90+ games and pick in the top five?

And the final thing is the draft itself. It’s been around since the mid-1960s and now seems as much a part of baseball as four balls equals a walk. People will tell you the draft itself is a competitive balance issue. It may serve that way in reality but the best that can be said is that was a selling point after the fact.

The reason owners instituted a draft was to save money.

Prior to the draft, teams signed amateurs on a free market. And eventually, these amateurs pulled down much-larger paydays then major leaguers received in yearly salary. A term grew for these highly-compensated players – bonus babies. If you catch a hint of jealousy/derision in that term, you’re right. There were guys who were bonus babies who grew into great MLB players – Al Kaline, Harmon Killebrew and Sandy Koufax, among them. But they’re were just as many, if not more, who completely flopped.

One of those flops was pitcher Tom Qualters, who the Phillies signed to a $40,000 bonus. It was Qualters’ misfortune to come along when MLB, which tried various rules to deal with bonus babies before the draft, had a particularly bad rule in place. The rule that greeted Qualters was the requirement that he stay in the majors for two seasons, starting immediately. In 1953 Qualters appeared in one game and had just 0.1 IP. But an eventful 0.1 IP it was.

After being unused since joining the club early in the season, Qualters finally got into a game on September 13 against the Cardinals. The Phillies trailed in the game, 11-1, and sent out Qualters to make his MLB debut in the home eighth. The first batter who faced him homered. The next two batters reached base on a walk and a hit by pitch. Next came two singles. Finally, Qualters recorded an out, as he got Red Schoendienst to ground into a fielder’s choice. Stan Musial chased Qualters from the game with an RBI double.

It was even worse in 1954, as Qualters was on the roster all season but didn’t play in a single game. He was sent to the minors in 1955 once his two years was up. Qualters eventually made it back to the majors in 1957. But he never really delivered on the promise that got him a big contract. And, oh yeah, the $40,000 he got as a bonus baby was more than the combined salaries of his Hall of Fame teammates Richie Ashburn and Robin Roberts.

This earned him the nickname “Money Bags,” as shown on his Baseball-Reference page. Qualters claims the nickname was given to him by a newspaper guy but you have to believe that some of his teammates called him that, too. What would be really interesting to know is what the owners who gave him that much money called Qualters.

In 1964, Rick Reichardt from the University of Wisconsin pulled in a $205,000 bonus from the Angels. That nearly doubled the salary of Willie Mays, who made $105,000, and who was the highest-paid player in the majors that season. According to “The Baseball Draft: The First 25 Years,” that wasn’t the only time that season when amateurs bested professionals.

Led by Reichardt’s lavish deal, a record $7 million-plus was paid out that year to amateur players, more than was spent on major league player salaries.

There were concerns that instituting a draft would make Congress examine MLB’s antitrust exemption, as the draft would deal with high school players, who were mostly minors, unlike the already-existing NFL and NBA drafts, which dealt at the time exclusively with collegiate players who had already reached legal adulthood. But the draft passed at the 1964 Winter Meetings and Congress did its usual job of ignoring any challenges to MLB’s exemption.

So, here today we have a situation where teams avoid paying for fee agents so they can get a high draft pick. The draft exists to hold down amateur salaries by restricting the player’s market to one team. Then the player gets into a system where the club can pay him the minimum wage for 2-3 years until he qualifies for arbitration, where he’ll make more money but still be paid at below-market rates. And most players won’t reach true free agency until they’re at the end of their prime. Jeff McNeil won’t become a free agent until 2025, when he’ll be 33.

The system is rigged and the players want a greater share. The owners don’t feel that way at all and they locked out the players hoping that the threat of missed paychecks will weaken their resolve. That’s never been a winning strategy for the owners previously.

The conventional wisdom is that the owners “won” the last CBA. But that came without a lockout. The last lockout came in 1990 and caused the season to be delayed a week but no games were lost. The losers were the owners, who tried to institute a salary cap and failed.

The previous lockout came in 1976, when owners tried to overturn the McNally-Messersmith decision that created free agency. The owners lost that one, too. The first lockout came in 1973 and the players won the right to have salaries determined by an independent arbitrator.

Will the players “win” this lockout? It’s too soon to tell. The encouraging thing is that after their failure in the last CBA, the players went out and hired Bruce Meyer to be their lead negotiator. Meyer has over 30 years in contested litigation and has won free agency battles for players in both the NBA and NFL. They’ll have a more experienced hand leading them this time around.

One thing that’s not mentioned often when discussing the labor history in MLB is that usually the MLBPA has the better negotiators. Marvin Miller and Don Fehr were simply better at their job than Bowie Kuhn, Ray Grebey and whoever else led the charge for the owners. Will Meyer join Miller and Fehr? If forced to guess right now, I’d say yes.

But the owners will still make out okay. They always do.

20 comments on “The amateur draft and other thoughts on the lockout

  • TexasGusCC

    How much do the owners at Tranamerica make? How about the owners at Walmart and Sam’s Club? Tired of hearing the crying about players. Again, start your own league. The tax breaks the owners get should be revoked and let some of that stupid money they make get funneled back into the system. That should really make the players bitch!

    The tanking is bad for the game. As for free agency and such, go to court like Curt Flood did.

  • Wobbit

    The owners have to lose eventually. Huge profits on the backs of the working man, even if they are overpaid baseball players, is simply regressive. They may win a battle here and there, but they cannot win the war… the 1950s are over, Reagan its dead.

    Tanking has to be eliminated… the worst thing for the game. We want our teams to compete, win some games, give us hope even when the cards are clearly against us.

    The best way, it seems to me, is to stop rewarding losing teams with draft picks. How? All teams who do not make the playoffs are in an unweighted lottery. No advantage for the worst records (unlike the NBA). If you don’t like it, tough… get better. If you don’t want to spend to get better, tough… sell your team. (If disgruntled, disappointed fans boycotted games, they’d get greedy owners’ attention really quick.)

    There are so many billionaires now, each one with a giant ego, that baseball may become very competitive regardless of market share. Steve Cohen could have bought the Twins or the Royals and done the same thing he is doing. Gotta love the A’s and the Rays for that reason… there’s more than one way to win baseball games…

  • Metsense

    Tanking is the result of the amateur draft so get rid of it. Let the MLBPA and MLB negotiated (1) a set amount of money equally that a team has the spend on amateur players and (2) how many players a team has to sign( The draft was 20 rounds in 2021 and 40 rounds in 2019).The team has to spend all the money anyway they desire so long as they sign the set amount players. The amateur players will be free agents. The teams would have to have a budgeting strategy.

    The arbitration process should be a step raise process in the first three years. The next three years should still be the same as is but with an exception that when a player reaches 30 before the season, then he should a free agent.

    The history part of the article was fascinating!

    • Brian Joura

      Thanks Metsense!

      I knew about Reichardt but the Qualters thing was new to me. I always knew about David Clyde and how the Rangers ruined him by rushing him to the majors straight out of high school. The Qualters usage was just as bad.

      • JamesTOB

        In the same way the Mets didn’t do Ed Kranepool any favors by bringing him directly to the Show.

  • Bob P

    Going back to Brian’s initial point that it’s all about money, it seems to me that the only way to truly stop tanking is to tie winning to money. So while I haven’t really thought this through and I know it’s too radical to actually get done, how about this:
    – Every team earns X amount for every game they win.
    – Of this amount a certain percentage (the same percentage for every team) is allocated to players salaries – the team “salary pool” – and the rest goes to ownership.
    – Each players’ contract is structured so that they get a percentage of their team’s salary pool.

    This way the teams and players are aligned, and there is an incentive for both players and owners to win as they are compensated more by winning. Zero incentive to tank.

    To further help, the draft would be structured as Wobbit suggested with an unweighted lottery for non-playoff teams.

    I realize that there’s definitely problems with this idea, such as how to determine what % of the teams pool each player gets from year to year (maybe WAR could be part of the equation) and also what happens when players are traded and rosters change but I wonder if the concept could be worked out.

    • Bob P

      I also realize that this is complete revenue sharing and big market teams would never go for it. Just throwing g it out there as a way to truly stop tanking.

    • Bob P

      I also realize that this is complete revenue sharing and big market teams would never go for it. Just throwing g it out there as a way to truly stop tanking.

      • TexasGusCC

        You can say that again Bob, LOL.

  • NYM6986

    Perhaps all teams should be required to spend the money they get from other teams on ML salaries, instead of banking the cash. Any team that does not do so would need to return the money. Tanking has been part of every sport with an amateur draft. It will not change. And yes, it is all about money. I used to laugh when some MLB owners claimed they lost money when the reality was that such claims were often based on creative accounting. The rich owners will always have an advantage. Want to even the field a bit? Put in a dreaded salary cap. Have never been for it even when the dreaded cross town evil empire made the playoffs in 14 out of 15 years claiming they just ran their organization better. What a laugh.
    Let’s hope the Mets international signings can produce some impact players down the line. Let’s hope the two sides come to the table and compromise. Players need to remember that owners take on all the risk and therefore should reap the rewards. Owners need to remember that there are a finite number of MLB caliber players and they have no product without them. I’m sure that anyone on this thread would trade for the $570,500 minimum salary for players.
    I want to see our team on the field, not wondering if there will be a spring training this spring.

    • TexasGusCC

      6986, they can say they spent it all, but didn’t use any of their own in the process. There needs to be a way that forces them to try to win. I love the completely unweighted lottery idea that Bob brought up. I don’t agree with tying revenues given to each team based on wins because tough losses or any emotional outcome that’s tied to money will create a stress that will certainly influence performance. It’s like what the rationale was for suspending Pete Rose even though he bet on his team to win, and that is that the manager will try too hard to win and possibly even negligently risk injury or even push an injured player.

      • Bob P

        Gus, I hear what you are saying about the Pete Rose thing and risking players to win a particular game but I don’t think that’s the same thing here. It wouldn’t be in a teams best interest to do that because they would risk losing more going forward if they lost a player to injury for one game. I’m the Rose case it was because he may have bet big on one particular game.

        Also Wobbit came up with the unweighted lottery idea which I think is a great one.

        • TexasGusCC

          Yes Bob, I liked Wobbit’s idea alot.

          My point on the “pay per win” thought was an example. Say you have an owner that gives his manager a mandate to win each game at any cost or get fired. Now what?

          • Bob P

            I don’t think they would do that because it would be risking injury and therefore risking future wins. Someone could do that but it would be extremely short sighted and not smart business. I would think this proposal would discourage that. Either way it would never happen as the big market owners would effectively be agreeing to full revenue sharing with the small market owners. From a pure baseball standpoint it would lead to less tanking and should lead to more parity but there’s too much money at stake for many people to ever actually happen.

  • Wobbit

    The one amendment to my weighted lottery idea is to include all 30 teams in the lottery, not just the non-playoff teams. I mean, why should a team be penalized because they had a good season? That way, nobody has any reward for being bad.

    • TexasGusCC

      Wow. That’s radical…

    • IDRAFT

      That would be my plan as well but I’m not holding my breath.

  • Name

    If real competitiveness is desired, then MLB needs to go public and end privatization of clubs because then the objective changes from maximizing profit at each club level to maximizing profits as a league, which should benefit when more teams are competitive and in the hunt. Each team would also be able to have the same salary floor/cap because individual club economics are no longer a factor.

  • ChrisF

    The owners and MLB have had it good for so long its crazy…they have manifestly changed the game by getting the mean age down year after year to get these amazing kids in the game, while holding back salaries for controlled players. At the same time, no on wants to give a big FA contract to a 1.5 WAR vet, this holding down salaries at the back end. Sure you want Acuna and Albies in the bigs, but unless they sign ridiculously team friendly deals – as we have seen them do in star cases – mostly young kids generate the excitement and WAR for a team and do not get near the salary for it. I’ve made that clear previously in an earlier article: https://mets360.com/?p=43884

    I think there should be a floor and no cap, but a significant luxury tax that would be distributed on a pro-rated based record (?) basis entirely for player salaries (could not be banked or used in any way other than player contracts). This sort of gets to the position Name gets to – equity among teams. The fact is that ownership is making billions (realized or not realized), and players, young players in particular need to be paid their fair share as they generate the excitement in baseball for the most part.

  • IDRAFT

    Relegation would be fantastic as well but obviously will never happen.

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