2014 Draft / Compensation

[h4cheng]

Are we making any changes to the 2014 draft to align ourselves with the MLB draft changes?

[Colby]

Are we making any changes to the 2014 draft to align ourselves with the MLB draft changes?

What changes would that include?

[h4cheng]

Things that MLB doing differently:
- Salary pool to be used on the draft, penalties if team go over said pool
- Cap on international signings
- No more Type A/B FAs
- Draft lottery for small market teams

These are the more important that would affect how the draft is working.

I guess the two question is two fold: should we follow MLB, and if so, to what extend?

And just to re-iterate, I do not think any changes should effect the 2013 draft as many have already acted/planned according to the current set of rules.

[Colby]

Things that MLB doing differently:
- Salary pool to be used on the draft, penalties if team go over said pool
- Cap on international signings
- No more Type A/B FAs
- Draft lottery for small market teams

These are the more important that would affect how the draft is working.

I guess the two question is two fold: should we follow MLB, and if so, to what extend?

And just to re-iterate, I do not think any changes should effect the 2013 draft as many have already acted/planned according to the current set of rules.

I agree this would affect the 2014 draft.  The Type A/B FAs is a key concept that we will be losing.  How does the draft lottery work for smaller teams?  Can we match the salary pool?  We have been working with our own slotted version based on Baseball Prospectus rankings and seems like it would be fine to continue using.  What is the cap on international signings?

[h4cheng]

Competitive balance draft:

The Competitive Balance Lottery, which was agreed upon as a part of the 2012-2016 Basic Agreement between MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association, gives Clubs with the lowest revenues and in the smallest markets the opportunity to obtain additional draft picks through a lottery.  The 10 Clubs with the lowest revenues and the 10 Clubs in the smallest markets were entered into a lottery for the six selections immediately following the first round of the First-Year Player Draft.  The eligible Clubs that did not receive one of the six selections after the first round, and all other payee Clubs under the Revenue Sharing Plan, were entered into a second lottery for the six picks immediately following the second round of the Draft.  A Club’s odds of winning the lottery were based on its prior season’s winning percentage.

Cap on International Free Agents (e.g., Guzman) is 2.9M this year (I think).

IMO all the caps are drafting are pretty difficult and pointless to implement.

[Colby]

We should explore the lottery picks considering they replace the Type A/B FA.  The intention of both are the same.

[h4cheng]

We should explore the lottery picks considering they replace the Type A/B FA.  The intention of both are the same.

Just to clarify, the lottery would not replace Type A/B. It would supplement the FA compensation scheme. The new FA compensation scheme (this is kind of hard to implement):

The current system of draft pick compensation will be replaced with the following
system:
A. Only Players who have been with their Clubs for the entire season will be subject
to compensation.
B. A free agent will be subject to compensation if  his former Club offers him a
guaranteed one-year contract with a salary equal to the average salary of the
125-highest paid Players from the prior season.  The offer must be made at the
end of the five-day free agent “quiet period,” and the Player will have seven days
to accept the offer.
C. A Club that signs a player subject to compensation will forfeit its first round
selection, unless it selects in the top 10, in which case it will forfeit its secondhighest selection in the draft.
D. The Player’s former Club will receive a selection at the end of the first round
beginning after the last regularly scheduled selection in the round.  The former
Clubs will select based on reverse order of winning percentage from the prior
championship season.

[shooter47]

We should explore the lottery picks considering they replace the Type A/B FA.  The intention of both are the same.

The lottery picks do not replace the Type A/B FA compensation in MLB.  In the MLB you can still get FA compensation under the ew CBA for losing a free agent as long as you make a qualifying offer that is a one year deal with a value equal to or greater then the average of the top 125 salaries for the previous season. 

Not sure how or if we would be able to implement a similar system.  In real life the player would turn down the offer and become an FA.  However here we don't get the oppurtunity to negotiate with players, we just extend them.  Maybe we could implement a system where if a player has an extension value that is higher then a certain value then the team can choose not to re-sign the player and instead get compensation picks?

[shooter47]

We could implement a system where the player would have to have an extension value higher then the average of the highest 125 extension values to recieve FA compensation.  With the current extension values being used the average would be 12.9M which is very similar to the real life estimates of the MLB qualifying offer of 12.5-13.4M

[h4cheng]

Let's get going on this. First, we need to decide to the overall direction. We can try and follow the MLB draft set up or do something slightly different (e.g., allowed to trade picks).