A question was presented to me regarding Type A free agents.
We currently award a 3rd Round pick to the team losing a Type A free agent if the contract is less than $52.0m. But what happens if you sign a second Type A free agent and both contracts are less than $52.0m?
After considering this, I am hopeful that this interpretation is acceptable to everyone since it has not happened before. My only interest is being fair to both sides of the transaction. We could prohibit the signing of more than one Type A free agent, but we have not done that in the past and I don’t think anyone would view that as a viable solution. If there are objections to this interpretation, then we could discuss possible solutions and hold a league wide vote at a later date, but since we have already begun free agency, and we only have three Type A free agents this off-season, hopefully this will suffice. If needed, we can revisit this issue before the 2022 free agency period. Hopefully, everyone understands this is a unique situation and the following is an acceptable solution.
You are not prohibited from signing more than one Type A free agents. You would normally lose a 3rd round pick if one was signed for less than $52.0m, but since you are signing two for less than $52.0m, and getting two quality players, you would lose a 2nd Round and a 3rd Round pick. The GM losing the Type A player to the highest contract would get the 2nd Round pick and the other GM would get the 3rd Round pick. If the contracts were identical, then the higher pick would go to the GM with the lowest rank in the previous year’s standings.
We don’t have a Compensation Round like MLB because we decided it was detrimental to the quality of our league, so we adopted the loss of a draft pick so the draft order would not lose its value. As I said, you are essentially giving up a draft pick for a quality player, and giving a 3rd & 4th, instead of a 2nd & 3rd, would seem unfair to the GMs losing players and tilt in favor of the GM getting the Type A players.
Further, we did away with the Compensation Round because it devalued the subsequent picks for the rest of the league. Please remember that the signing of a Type A free agent really boils down to a team getting a quality player for a draft pick and the impact of that transaction should, from my perspective, be limited to the two teams involved and should not impact the rest of the league.
If a Type A free agent is signed for more than $52.0m, then we will still adhere to the awarding of a 2nd and 5th Round pick from the signing team to the team losing the player.
We try, as a league, to anticipate all scenarios, but sometimes things are unaccounted for, and as such, interpretations like this are needed. As I said before, we can come up with a different solution at a later date if this is not acceptable to everyone, but for now, we will go with this.
You can post your thoughts if you’d like.
