Message #899366

[Lintyfresh85]

While the lottery for extra picks is designed to give teams with smaller payrolls an extra draft pick each year, the value of that pick pales in comparison to those teams prior ability to compete for young players by allocating their resources more heavily to those areas. Here’s the list of team spending on the draft in 2011 – you’ll notice the Pirates ($17 million), Nationals ($15 million), Royals ($14 million) at the top, followed closely by the Diamondbacks ($12 million), and then the Rays, Mariners, Padres, and Blue Jays who all spent $11 million. Thanks to hard slotting, this strategy is no longer viable, and these low-revenue teams who had been focusing heavily on acquiring talent through the draft will now have to find another way to add talent to their organizations.

Likewise, the competitive advantage of scouting internationally has essentially been demolished. If you look at the list of top international bonuses paid out over the years, you’ll notice a lot of smaller revenue clubs investing heavily in these markets. While the Yankees have enjoyed significant benefits from higher Major League payrolls over the years, they haven’t been as big of spenders internationally, and small-to-mid-market teams have been able to increase their talent bases by pursuing the top 16-year-olds available in foreign countries.

With a flat cap for the upcoming year, any advantage these teams have has been completely removed, and teams will now all be submitting remarkably similar offers to the best international talents, causing these players to choose which organization to join based on factors beyond signing bonus. No longer will teams be able to create systematic advantages in international scouting, as they simply won’t have the resources available to bring in more than one or two additional significant talents per year.

Overall, these new rules will work to dramatically decrease the overall spending levels of teams on new talent, but will do so at the cost of allowing small to mid market teams to pursue strategies that focus on developing talent internally. The lotteries simply won’t make up for the inability to increase spending on talent acquisition, flattening the differences between organizations and making winning at the Major League level more about acquiring veterans and less about acquiring amateurs.

These rules are fantastic for big market teams who can maximize the advantage of their revenue streams by spending on Major League talent. These rules are absolutely terrible for teams who cannot afford to build teams by paying the market rate for those same players.

Congratulations, Major League Baseball, you just screwed every team that doesn’t have the capability of running out a $100+ million payroll, and you just made winning a lot more about Major League payroll size than anything else. In the name of cost reduction, you just made it even less likely that teams like Tampa Bay or Oakland will be able to build long term winners. This agreement will set competitive balance back significantly, and now our only hope is that the damage is so obvious that these changes get repealed as quickly as possible.

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/did-a-steinbrenner-write-the-new-cba/

Read: We're freaked.