-
Kiley McDaniel, ESPN MLB Insider
Baseball's draft can be pretty predictable. Not on a pick-to-pick basis -- no prognosticator can predict even half of the picks right, and that includes the scouts and execs making some of the picks -- but on the whole, things go as expected. There are slot values associated with every pick, and those add up to a club's total bonus pool. The vast majority of picks sign for basically that suggested amount, and under the draft rules of the past two CBAs, a team has never gone more than 5% over its entire pool (because that's where penalties begin). Only rarely does one spend more than 5% below its pool.
But, to be clear: The rules don't include a hard spending cap. Teams can spend whatever they want in the draft -- and, as a matter of fact, there is an amount a team could spend where the penalties would be worth it.
If you're interested in the nitty gritty, Jeff Passan wrote about this concept four years ago when these draft rules were still new in the previous CBA. The basic idea is that if a team goes 15% over its draft pool, it would lose its next two first round picks. I'll go into more detail below on what a haul could look like if a team was willing to spend far over its pool amount, but the broad strokes would be a team with one of the lowest draft pools landing seven or so players who landed between roughly 15 and 60 on its internal version of my rankings -- let's call it one or two players in the 15-to-30 range then five or six more in the top 60. They'd likely come heavily from the high school class where team-by-team evaluations can vary greatly outside of the top tier of players (and where such shenanigans are more feasible than with college players).
Scouts and execs from a number of teams have told me their clubs talk about doing it every year, but it never gets taken seriously by the GM and/or owner. This might be the year it's worth taking that leap.
Why now?
There's a couple key reasons this idea came up in conversations with scouts this spring. First, and simply enough: This is the best draft in about a decade, so you'll get a little more bang for your buck. On top of that, the strength of this year's class is prep position players slotted in the late first- to second-round range. That matters here because prep players are easier to move down the board due to bonus demands associated with college leverage. Also, because they aren't pitchers, these players come with more universal trade value if you're enacting this strategy for a quicker return via trade. Lastly, next year's draft (i.e. one of the picks you'd lose in the penalty) doesn't look particularly great, so teams could think of it as a reallocation of draft resources, pulling the future into the present.
Who should try it?
Let's quickly throw out some clubs that have no chance to try this to boil it down to the best fit.
1. Teams with big draft pools
Eliminates: Pittsburgh Pirates, Detroit Tigers, Washington Nationals, Minnesota Twins, Oakland Athletics, Cincinnati Reds, Seattle Mariners, Miami Marlins, Kansas City Royals, Colorado Rockies, Arizona Diamondbacks
Teams remaining: 19
This strategy serves to maximize your draft haul, so you have to be starting with a small potential haul for this to make any sense. This eliminates the top 11 teams in terms of draft pool size, with a cutoff at $11 million in pool space. You could argue this first filter in reality would eliminate 20 teams or more, but I'm being conservative and only taking teams out that could never take it seriously in this first round. For reference, the lowest pool tossed out belongs to the Diamondbacks, who pick 12th overall and have all of their picks, as well as an extra after the second round; that should already yield a solid haul.
2. Small market teams with small payrolls
Eliminates: Milwaukee Brewers, Tampa Bay Rays, Cleveland Guardians
Teams remaining: 16
The team should spend in free agency, thus likely winning -- and losing/lowering draft picks in the process so the lost picks. They also shouldn't end up with payroll size-based competitive balance picks to prop up a lower draft bonus pool. From a cash flow standpoint, allocating an extra $20 million for a blowout might be a heavier lift for a micro-payroll team. This rule eliminates the Brewers, Rays, and Guardians -- it turns out the other low-payroll-as-a-policy teams are picking high enough that they were caught by the first filter.
3. Teams already out of contention this year -- and maybe next
Eliminates: Chicago White Sox, Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals, Boston Red Sox
Teams remaining: 12
Contending in the present day mostly ensures the first rounders a team loses the next few years would come late in the round. If a team blows out the draft, has a bad season and ends up with a top 15 pick next year, losing that pick offsets much of the gain from blowing out their pool. This eliminates the White Sox, Cubs and Cardinals. Let's toss out the Red Sox, too, since they're borderline in this category and the first -- an average draft pool, a so-so playoff outlook this year.
That leaves 12 potential teams that could conceivably justify doing this: the New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers, Atlanta Braves, Toronto Blue Jays, Los Angeles Angels, San Diego Padres, New York Mets, Philadelphia Phillies, Baltimore Orioles, San Francisco Giants, Texas Rangers, and Houston Astros. Now we shift to finding the best fit from this group.
We should probably lean toward teams that are better fits in categories two and three. Let's look for teams likely to make the playoffs both this year and next and expect to be above the CBT threshold both years (as a proxy for willingness to go beyond financially). That eliminates the Orioles, Giants, Rangers and Astros, none of whom sit above the CBT. I think we should also trim the teams sitting around .500 -- a couple mistimed injuries, and they might be subtracting at the deadline and picking in the top half of the first round. That trims the Phillies, Padres and Mets. The American League wild card race is loaded and the Jays and Angels are fighting for that last spot, so I think we have to trim both of those clubs, too.
But wait, you might say! If we're talking about clubs getting all mavericky, can we really discount the Mets and Padres so quickly? This stinks of something GM A.J. Preller would want to do -- he executed a version of it internationally when he was with Texas -- and San Diego is among the best at drafting and developing prep players. It's hard to ignore the Padres being a few games out of a wild card right now, so the situation isn't ripe while the org, definitely in an all-in posture, is a nice fit for this idea. While Mets owner Steve Cohen fits this strategy emotionally, the Mets' whole offseason was built around free agent compensation rules and using them to preserve draft picks, so this doesn't feel like something GM Billy Eppler would push for, even if it's eminently affordable for Cohen and might be a choice they opt for in the future.
The three teams we haven't yet discussed are all blue bloods: the Braves, Dodgers and Yankees. All three are perennial contenders currently paying a CBT and who are strong scouting and development types. The Braves are the most borderline -- they've only recently spent into the CBT and are a notch or two below the other two in terms of perennial spending. The Braves also don't have the big scouting staff you'd ideally want to have to effectively scout more players than usual. In addition, Atlanta might still be staying on MLB's good side to get back an All Star Game in its new stadium, and one of the things you lose by pursuing this strategy is the benefit of the doubt with the league. So while the Braves have the lowest-ranked farm system in baseball where this strategy would fit their personnel needs, I think they have to be cut here.
And then there's the Yankees and Dodgers. Both teams have top-10 farm systems, strong player development history and big scouting staffs that can account for the larger number of targeted players. They both have farm systems that are concentrated in the upper levels; both are in competitive divisions with other big spenders and a younger, up-and-coming club to fend off.
A brief aside: If one of these two teams was confident they were going to land Shohei Ohtani this winter, that would actually make their case even stronger to try this. That would likely move them into a higher CBT tier, thus lowering their top pick and losing other picks while clearly going all-in on the next few seasons in the big leagues. In that event, stockpiling lower minors talent for midseason trades would meaningfully help the club more than just settling for second and third tier players by playing the draft straight. With surging interest in the sport and an historic player set to hit the market this winter, what if a gold standard organization also brought that level of intrigue and chaos to the concept of the draft?
Ohtani or no, what I'm getting at is both the Yankees and Dodgers are near ideal fits for this strategy. Which is more ideal? It's New York. The Dodgers' draft pool is roughly $2 million higher at 24th overall, so the Bombers -- at 29th -- are the best fit in a derby of multiple teams that could justify going all-in for this draft.
What would it mean?
Let's play this out. With the Yankees' $5.3 million pool this year, they'd try to float an elite talent to the 27th overall pick, hopefully getting a top-20 talent for a bit overslot if not even more extreme. Then it would take some doing to get a first-round talent to their next pick at 97th overall. If they could get, let's say, seven players total worth $1.5 million (i.e. second-round talent) to $3 million (i.e. first-round talent) bonuses, that would probably cost, with inflated bonuses and dollar-for-dollar penalties on the overages, about $25 to $30 million. If they just played it straight the next three drafts, they'd get about six of those players, for roughly comparable bonuses (more like $20 million total). Especially if those players are disproportionately high school players with longer developmental roads, it makes even more sense to get them ASAP.
Moving that expense up for a huge revenue team isn't that complicated, so you could see a justification from the accounting department. The worst outcome is if they have signed enough players post-draft to go over by 15% and enact the top penalty, then the bonus demands by the unsigned players go through the roof as agents sense the Yankees are pot-committed. To avoid this, the club would have to sign everyone on the same day to try to keep the concept of "market rate" static and not giving any additional leverage to a player after being picked but before they sign. There's certainly some risk involved, with some logistical hurdles to clear, and surely to be lots of pressure from other owners, but the value proposition for the first team to jump is clear.
Just one or two major agencies (two agencies collectively advise 30 of my top 100 prospects) understanding the strategy could see dollar signs and start maneuvering players down the board. It also doesn't hurt if the team enacting this strategy is a major brand desirable to young players outside their immediate region and also is one of the better developmental clubs, so agents and players stand to gain more in the long-term by playing along. Agents already advise players to give different bonus demands to different clubs based on their development success rate.
So, will they do it?
The only big picture reason not to do it is if your owner won't approve the strategy because he doesn't want to get grief from the other 29 owners for setting a bad economic precedent, something the league takes very seriously.
Once a team blows out their pool, the incentives are high to just keep doing it over and over again -- and just punt on the concept of draft picks (but not on getting talent in the draft). And once one team does it, the incentives get stronger for other teams to do it. This, in broad strokes, is what happened in the international markets years ago with similar budgets and rules; I couldn't find anyone to explain to me why those two markets are so different that the same behavior hasn't happened domestically.
Without a hard cap, and the way the rules are currently written, MLB teams could continually spend double or triple what any other team spends in the draft and keep forfeiting their top picks as penalties, still ending up with plenty of young talent (still at a discount from their true value) and losing only money. Not having high-round picks would be irrelevant: Teams could spend $30 million, get commensurate talent and not even pick in the top five rounds.
I'm pretty certain once a team did this twice, the league would want to change the rules (which would be tricky to accomplish as the MLBPA wouldn't want to help) or there would be comments by the league made toward the changes coming in the next CBA.
But until then, only an owner is standing in the way of this low-hanging fruit because every scouting director and GM I've spoken with agrees that, if executed, it's a value-creating strategy. There would be tremendous value in jumping first and getting to double dip while everyone else is debating whether to try it. (Multiple scouting directors encouraged me to write this article so their front office would think about it again -- or have something to forward to their owner. I checked with some rules experts who said I've read the incentives correctly, suggesting the league created these draft spending rules and penalties thinking no team would actually do this, despite the fact that they've done this exact same thing internationally in the last decade.)
The other main challenge, as Passan outlines in his article, is that you'd have to spend months if not a year selling the idea to agents, players and your own staff while also hoping it isn't so well known in the industry that bonus demands get out of whack. If every agent knew you were willing to pay above market prices on a large swath of players, it could limit what you could afford, even with an increased budget. It could also throw a bomb into the idea of market value as every player could be angling to fall down the board or just be posturing for more money. There's still room for a net positive result for a team even if that happens; the average first-round pick is worth about two times their signing bonus in trade/asset value, with some top of the draft types worth more like five or six times their bonus.
The eventual logical extreme of this could completely blow up the economic model of the draft. If one team does it, then does it again next year along with a couple of other teams, we would then see a bidding war for at least a few players. That would then logically lead to a Yoan Moncada (signed by the Red Sox for a $31.5 million bonus with matching penalty as an international free agent in 2015, implying a value of $63 million) or Luis Robert ($26 million bonus with the White Sox in May of 2017, thus a $52 million value) type situation where a team wins the bidding war with something very close to the true implied market value of the player, which has never been said or implied by a team domestically. Shohei Ohtani was a better prospect than both players when he signed with the Angels in December of 2017, getting a bit over $2 million because a different set of spending controls applied to him that didn't apply to Moncada and Robert. These rules were passed as a response to such bonuses and Ohtani was immediately worth something like fifty times his initial signing bonus.
If all of that happens, could the league then put that genie back in the bottle in the next CBA by instituting hard slotting in the draft when teams have demonstrated exactly how unfair that bonus is to many prospects? I don't think the MLBPA would let that happen again if the draft indeed went down the same path that the international market did. The draft could become a much freer market if a handful of owners did what was in their short-term financial interest which, when explained that way, doesn't seem very far-fetched.
"strategy" - Google News
June 23, 2023 at 06:00PM
https://ift.tt/yLT8rPz
How the Yankees could change MLB draft strategy forever - ESPN - ESPN
"strategy" - Google News
https://ift.tt/hjbpW1d
https://ift.tt/wl3Q4L2
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "How the Yankees could change MLB draft strategy forever - ESPN - ESPN"
Post a Comment