One of the myriad issues in the CBA negotiations is that of a new draft for international players. The league would very much like there to be one. The Players Association would not.
To sum up their positions, the league wants an international draft because the current system is a garbage scow of corruption. Here’s an example of how things work, from The Athletic:
The system, as Cabrera and others with knowledge describe it, works like this: An area scout from a major-league club ventures outside his assigned region to find talented players. The scout, after identifying a prospect he likes, influences the player’s trainer to sell a percentage of the youngster’s future bonus to another trainer from the scout’s own region. The player transfers to the trainer and commits to signing with the scout’s team, often for an inflated bonus. And the scout is compensated by the new trainer, sometimes in the form of cash, other times with housing arrangements, vehicles or other material goods.
Right now, Latin prospects are ineligible to sign until they’re 16, but in the real world, they have under the table deals at 14 years old, or sometimes as young as 11 or 12. A draft would eliminate that possibility, and the kickback-for-scout scheme outlined above, and give every team — including the one that you personally like! — a chance to get a top-quality international prospect.
The players, meanwhile, think a draft is unnecessary because all the league has to do is actually care about enforcing its rules. Like, you have all these rules, and then you have all these team employees brazenly and openly skirting them in ways that are absolutely public knowledge in Latin America. Just…punish them? Make it clear that they can’t do that? Take away their livelihoods? Doesn’t seem that hard, really.
So this is the disagreement. “Let’s try something new” on one side, and “You never really tried the old thing” on the other.
And look, I don’t like playing this card in labor negotiations, but…oh man, I can’t believe I’m about to say this…(sighs heavily) both sides have a point.
Look, the players are right that the league isn’t putting a lot of effort into fixing the broken system. In that Athletic argicle, players float the theory that MLB is letting the system be broken on purpose so they can point to its brokenness and replace it with a draft, which is entirely possible.
And yet, this system will necessarily lend itself to corruption. It’s essentially unavoidable. If teams are jockeying to sign a player, then they will find a way to make a deal. If team-employed scouts are banned from doing it themselves, then they’ll hire middlemen. If the middlemen are punished, then new ones will step up. There’s nothing to lose. The money will still be promised early, because there are too many incentives not to, and people will find a way to skim their share of a very large amount of money.
Fortunately, though, MLB is still wrong about a draft fixing things, and I am relieved for the sake of my brand to be able to type those words. There will still be large amounts of money going to the Latin players, and therefore to the ecosystem of trainers all around them. This will create incentives for trainers to get 14-year-olds into their training complexes, and to promise them opportunities in games with scouts watching, in exchange for a percentage of the player’s future signing bonus.
Outside of MLB setting up entire systems of their own in multiple different Latin American countries, investing tons of money in order to create its own bulletproof system that cuts out all of the bloat, the corruption will be an inevitable part of scouting international amateurs.
Then, after you take that fact that a draft won’t actually fix the problem, you add that drafts are inherently immoral. People should be allowed to choose where they work. Under the current system — under negotiation but not particularly likely to change — this means a player could be under a team’s control for 12 years before hitting free agency. 12 years! Shouldn’t you be allowed to pick the company you’re going to have to work for for 12 years? Shouldn’t you have a say in your own life?
So what is the perfect system for identifying and developing talented young players from Latin American countries? Open baseball academies all over the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela, and Colombia, and Panama, and anywhere else there might be players, and then bring in pre-approved representatives for the players, and then hope nobody figures out where the inevitable holes are in that system? That’s the best that I can come up with, but I don’t feel great about it, and not only because owners would never pay money to set up a good system when they can simply sit by, paying no money while someone else runs a bad one.
Any system will have drawbacks. There will be a way to abuse anything people come up with. The Players Association is probably right that the two sides should start with cracking down on bad behavior in the current system, and MLB might well be right that that won’t solve the problem of rampant grift.
But they have to start somewhere. This seems like easy ground for the owners to cede in order to keep some other shitty advantage they have. I’d guess we’ll see minimal progress on this, whenever the CBA is actually agreed to. Baseball will punish a few scouts who are the more egregious offenders and everyone will act like that solves things.
That won’t solve anything, of course, but at least people will be able to tell themselves they did something, and then they won’t have to think about the harmful effects of their industry anymore. It’s the American way!