Phillies Foul Balls

I don’t know whether it’s a reflection more on the World Series game tonight or on me, but I’m finding the details of the new Basic Agreement announced today to be more interesting than the game right now.

Actually most of it is not that interesting since it falls into the category of same as before, with some dollar levels tweaked for rising revenues in the sport. The most significant changes I can see are connected with the various drafts. First of all the change to the Rule 5 Draft is extremely significant. Most of the quality players selected via Rule 5 have been players who haven’t gone on the 40-man roster yet because they were felt to be far enough away from the majors that they’d run out of options before being ready to reach the majors to stay. An extra year before they are eligible will make a huge amount of difference, and the already rare Rule 5 success stories are about to become substantially rarer.

The change to the regular draft is even more significant. By moving the deadline for signing players up to August 15th, they’ve now completely eliminated the category of “draft and follow” picks, where a team would take a junior college player and then wait until after the next juco season to sign him. I think the basic idea here is to force the issue on draft negotiations. We’ll see if it results in fewer holdouts or more players not signing and going back into the draft. College baseball teams could benefit though since if a college junior has no chance of signing after August 15th, he might very well head back for his senior year.

I had heard rumors that they were going to completely eliminate the draft pick compensation for free agents, so the actual changes are minor in comparison. Still there’s now a large class of free agents (21-50% at each position) who can now be signed without it costing the signing team a draft pick. Given how many picks the Phils have lost over the past few years, I’m perfectly happy to see that.

The statement in the press release about eliminated deadlines is extremely unhelpful to say the least. As near as I can tell however what’s happened is that teams still have to offer arbitration to get the draft pick compensation. However that has no effect on whether or not they can re-sign a player, and there is no longer a deadline after which they can’t re-up the player.

Removing the right to demand a trade for players traded in the middle of a multi-year contract is likely to do nothing more than eliminate the ridiculous charade that happened a couple times a year where a player makes such a demand and then withdraws it just before the deadline where he would have lost his guaranteed contract. Technically a concession by the players but I suspect that was a bargaining chip from day one of the negotiations.

Most of the gains for the players seem to be in terms of raised minimums for minor league players on the minor league roster, and increased pensions for some retired players, presumably the fringe type players. I can’t argue with either of those, and in fact I’d say some of those guys have been overlooked in the past, so this is a good move.

The final item in the list about contraction being ruled out for the next five years hopefully means that absurd idea is on the verge of being buried forever. It was never a realistic threat, and did far more damage to the sport’s PR than it did any good.

All in all, it sounds like this was actually a relatively sane set of negotiations. Both sides came to the table to make a deal, not to prove any points (which the owners had done repeatedly in the past) and it showed.