DownSwinging.com

Let me start this article by acknowledging the fact that my proposal is everything that baseball tries to avoid. I understand that baseball has created a system that emphasizes the free-market and lets needs and resources dictate how much a player receives for his services. However, when I look at the current process Major League Baseball teams have to go through, when it comes to signing draft picks, I realize that something’s wrong.

The Amateur Player Draft was introduced, in 1965, to develop a system wherein amateur players are designated to professional teams. In the system, the worst teams (based on record) were granted the first picks, so as to even the playing field over the long-term. It works this way in every major American sport, as you surely know. Baseball prides itself on its blatantly capitalistic market model. Those who want to pay exorbitant amounts of cash to land free agents, for instance, can do so at their own discretion. Those teams who cannot afford such ready-made talent are forced to continually rebuild through the draft. This process has worked fabulously throughout the past several decades, and continues to work well. As research methods improve, drafting and scouting decisions become more calculated, and the weaker teams are prone to make better choices. So the worst teams get the highest-rated players available; everything’s fine, right? Well, no. Before a team gets to sign a player, it has to award him with a ’signing bonus’. For at least two decades, High School players have been able to use college commitments, and ’scholastic ambitions’ as leverage while negotiating for their signing bonuses. For instance,