Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 163: All About the International Draft

Episode Date: March 20, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss the rumored approach of the international approach with highly informed guest Jorge Arangure.

Everybody wants to rule the world California. Joining me as always is Sam Miller. One of the things that we want to do more often this season is have people on to talk about things that they know about, as opposed to pretending that we know about those things ourselves. So with that in mind, we have postponed the listener email show to later this week and gotten ourselves a guest. And if you've listened to the Up and In podcast, you have heard our guest before. If you have read basically any website on the internet, you have read his writing. This podcast is not long enough to list all of the places he has written for. It is Jorge Arangure. Hello, Jorge. What's up, guys? How you doing? Good. So we brought you on to talk about the international draft, which has become a topic again this week.

It was a topic, I guess, about a year ago or when the new CBA was agreed to. There was sort of a sense that the restrictions on international spending that were imposed were kind of a placeholder. Bud Selig said an international draft was inevitable at the time. And now we seem to be approaching the point at which it will become a reality. There were some reports earlier this week from the Sports Business Journal that the commissioner's office is pushing for an agreement to have some sort of draft in place by June 1st, or agreed to at least by June 1st. So we wanted to have you on to kind of ask what form you see this draft taking, or when you think it will be implemented, if you do think that it will be implemented. There are

lots of questions that still have to be answered about whether it will be one global draft or an international draft that's separate from the Rule 4 draft and which countries will be included and all kinds of logistical concerns that have to be sorted out. So how do you see this happening? How do you see it playing out? I think, you know, for me, I think it's always been the number one objective for the owners who have been the ones who've been pushing for this is to kind of knock down bonuses. So I think logically that means that you would have to have one worldwide draft. I can't see you having two drafts because then, you know, the number one pick of both drafts would have an argument that they should be paid equally. And so that sort of defeats the purpose of what the, you know, what the owners are trying

to do, which is basically knock down all the bonuses. So I would imagine that when it does get implemented, and I think, you know, if Bud Selig's saying it's, you know, inevitable, I think it's going to be inevitable that it's going to happen. I, you know, realistically, I still think having an international draft by next year would be a challenge. I think there are some things that need to be figured out, certainly with different countries, in regard to different countries. I actually have a story tomorrow that's going to appear on Sports on Earth that talks about sort of a wrinkle regarding Mexico, the possibility of that, you know, I don't want to talk too much about it in case something gets held

or something like that, but it's regarding Mexico and certain player rights and free agency. So it could be a wrinkle, not that that would be an obstacle completely to an international draft, but it's some of these issues that you might see as all the countries try to get implemented into the same kind of system. So we have so many different types of systems where in Mexico what we have is sort of a system in place where teams deal directly with the professional teams down there. So, you know, major league teams are competing for talent against these teams,

but the advantage that the Mexican league teams have is they can sign kids when they're 13 and 14 years old. So it would be interesting to see how that plays out in terms of, you know, do teams select players that are already owned by professional teams in Mexico? So there's that sort of logistic that needs to be involved, which there's other professional leagues too, in Korea, Taiwan, Japan, of course, that sort of have these same type of issues that will need to be sorted out.

So you mentioned MLB wanting to save money and cut bonuses. Why is there such a fixation on that when you consider how little these players are making compared to, say, how much major league players are making or how much major league teams are spending in other areas, especially after international spending was already restricted with the new CBA. I think according to MLB's numbers, spending was down or bonuses were down 11% last year from the year before. So why the fixation on reducing these already fairly trivial amounts compared to how much teams spend on other things. You know, it's really bizarre.

You know, I hardly get it either. I mean, I think it's just simply a matter of what they see as unproven talent. And I think, you know, a lot of teams are willing to spend on unproven talent. You know, teams like the Rangers have spent a ton in Latin America. And I think some of the other owners just don't want to have to compete with those types of dollars. And I think it sounds silly when, you know, you have teams paying $140 million for players or they're haggling over, you know, players who get $1 million. It just seems really silly. But I think it just simply comes down to the fact that they're unproven.

And I think, you know, kids, you know, who might not ever make the majors as opposed to at least, you know, you're paying three, 4 million for a utility infielder that,

you know, at least we'll be on the major league team. So that there is some value to that. It seems silly for me to think that, that that's where they want to cut costs. I mean, especially when the system, the way it's been right now, has worked so well in producing talent out of these countries, that when you think about messing with that and what it might do, even

if you're like the most pessimistic person and think that some of these countries, the production of talent is going to be knocked down. I just don't see why you'd even mess with that. But, you know, they think that they're saving some money. So that's, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't make sense, but that's sort of what they're looking at. So this is a collective bargaining issue. It has to be jointly agreed to. The players union could veto it if they wanted to, but it doesn't seem like the executive director, Michael Wien even thinks that its members will make more money if they limit what these amateurs are making. Yeah, exactly. I mean, when you see some of the reports, I think Buster Olney was talking about how the owners are ready to make concessions on minimum salaries and all that in order to get the draft.

I mean, that's like brilliant negotiating by the union because they're basically using as leverage, you know, players that they don't even represent. So in the end, that's not a fight that they're going to fight until the end. The union has no stake in any of these kids. So, you know, the fact that they're even negotiating for them seems awfully silly to me. But, I mean, it really is what it comes down to. I mean... you know

michael wiener in conversations i've had with a mythic as express the fact that you know a lot of the latin american players have really you know come up to him and and have been you sort of anger at the thought of an international traffic to kill you know the production of talent in their countries but in the end i mean it's not going to be enough of uh... voting block within the union to stop something like this from happening.

So, you know, because it's going to benefit some of the, you know, lower tier players who are just going to end up having, you know, bigger salaries if you start to raise some of the minimum salaries. Jorge, in the, you know, in the draft as it is now um signability is often a big deal uh players have some leverage because they have uh the ability to go back to college or to go to college um and you know a lot of players in the lower levels won't necessarily sign if they have an education already um for an international draft, do you think that signability would be a significantly different thing? I mean, is signability going to be an issue? Do players in an international draft sort of have some of the same leverage points? Or is it conceivable that the salaries could be sort of suppressed by the fact that if you only have one team

and you don't necessarily have Arizona State offering you a four-year scholarship, you don't really have another choice? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think you're going to see in some countries, I mean, especially some of the poorer countries, for example, the Dominican, where you're going to see kids who do get drafted. I mean, first of all, the kids who are going to suffer the most are those kids because if you're competing, if you're a 17-year-old Dominican kid who hasn't played much organized ball and you're in the same draft as 18-, 19-year-old American players who have been playing, you know, in high school and you're competing against college players in the draft,

I mean, you're not going to be a top 10, 15 pick unless you're a generational type of talent. So those kids' salaries are already going to be knocked down. Plus, as you mentioned, their leverage is going to be basically nothing because a kid may decide in the Dominican to not sign if he's drafted. Okay, he goes back into the draft next year. But as we've seen sort of historically in Latin American countries, kids who are older usually end up getting lower bonuses anyway.

So, because teams think that they're losing a year of development by the time if a kid didn't sign at 17 and now he's 18, well that's a year lost that he could have spent in the minors. And so, as you see within the marketplace as it is now as a kind of a free market, the younger kids always get bigger bonuses than the older kids.

I mean the better ones, obviously there are some exceptions, but in a general sense, the younger you sign in the Dominican, the more money you're going to get. So it's going to be – there's no kids are, there's no incentive for kids to not sign because they're basically losing money by not signing. So they're going to be, most of the top picks are going to be, you would envision like 16 year olds being drafted. I would think that, you know, I would say at the very least that at least, you know, MLB will have to raise the signing age or the draft age in Latin America to 17, I would think. Because I don't think it's fair. I don't think you can have 16-year-old kids

competing against 22, 23-year-old American college kids in the draft. I just think that's really, really difficult to have those kinds of circumstances. Because in the end, a lot of teams are going to go for for the guys who are you know more closer to development than kids that are such wild cards I mean obviously like there will be exceptions like I said you know there are generational type of talents you know there are the the Sanos who would probably have been a top 10 pick no matter what but I mean that's good those are going to be the rarities Those are going to be exceptions if you have everybody in one sort of lump draft. Yeah, I'm going to go back. Yeah, go ahead.

All right, so I'm reading Dollar Sign on the Muscle, which was written about a decade after the draft was implemented in the United States. And one of the things that scouts were bemoaning a decade later was that essentially, in a lot of ways, the draft kind of killed a lot of scouting because it took some of the skill out of it. You were scouting players you really had no chance to sign because you wouldn't get to pick them in the draft. And there wasn't the same kind of personal connection that you would make with the players you wanted to sign because basically they were going to sign when you drafted and they only had one choice and so i was just wondering if um there's a similar situation where uh this draft would an international draft would kind of take some of the skill out of scouting internationally or whether it's not really comparable because it's already kind of an information saturated market and you knowated market, and I don't really know how it is. You know, it's interesting. I mean, I think in talking to some scouts about this,

I mean, they really think that this sort of environment benefits sort of the lazier teams, because, I mean, it's already happened now, even within the free market system. MLB has really tried to centralize the entire market by sponsoring some of these big workouts. You know, they have their own, you know, sort of youth league, I mean, sort of, you know, teenage league, prospect league that they do now. They're basically trying to have all the prospects in one place at one time so that the scouts can see them. And, you know, obviously the advantages for the players is, you know, you get seen by

all these scouts and if you're really good, you're going to be, you know, you get seen by all these scouts. And if you're really good, you're going to be, you know, raised up and you're going to your profile is going to be higher than it would have been before. But I think, you know, like you said, I mean, they're in especially in the Dominican. I mean, you know, scouts who, you know, you hear the stories about the scouts who drove to the, you know, further away places about, you know, and found this kid and they signed that nobody else had ever heard of. I think it will still happen every once in a while, but I think by the fact that MLB wants so badly to have all these kids there at once so they can see them, so they can track them, and they sort of want to do this to sort of minimize the age thing too.

They don't want to have kids sort of repeat being prospects and then show up again at 18 if they didn't sign when they were 16 and pretend they were somebody else. You sort of want to start identifying these kids when they're 15 years old so that, you know, they have a, so they have sort of a written sort of trail that they can follow. But it is going to eliminate some of that legwork that a lot of these scouts sort of thrived upon in terms of finding, you know finding some of those hidden gems, so to speak. So a related question. A couple of years ago, you wrote an article for ESPN about the Rays' plans to open up an academy in Brazil.

If there's an international draft, is there any incentive for teams to cultivate new markets or establish kind of a presence or plant their flag in new markets if they then can't really count on having a leg up on signing those players? And if teams aren't operating academies, then who will fill that void or will anyone? Will MLB, will some local entity spring up to kind of fill that hole? Yeah, you know, the interesting thing is that, I mean, MLB really, really wants to control that amateur process. Because, you know, they do camps in Brazil. You know, they've done one a couple years ago. They've done in the last few.

And they basically have, you know, make available to, make available to whatever scouts want to go down there. They have a group of prospects. They'll have camps down there that a bunch of kids can play, and scouts will go down there and look at them. So it is sort of taking away the incentive of being a team that's down there and spending the money on an academy if MLB is going to just try to make the process easier for everyone by just having these sponsored events where they can go down there and sort of see them. In some ways, I mean, I think it's sort of a shame in that I think some of the more creative organizations would find ways to find some of that talent that doesn't show up at these showcases, but at the same time, is it worth the cost now of

having an academy down there? And I think in the end, the whole country suffers in terms of baseball development, because if you encourage more teams to go down there, you're going to have more development down there. But if you just have a certain select group of kids going and showing up at a showcase sponsored by MLB, then I think obviously you're not going to have as many kids persuaded to play. So if this is sort of the environment that we're headed, I think you will see a little bit less incentive for places like, you know, for teams to invest in places like Brazil. You've also written a lot about the corruption that surrounds the culture of baseball in some countries and all the difficulties of

verifying players' birthdates and origins. Do you think that an international draft could potentially end those issues and give teams the secure feeling that the player they're drafting is actually the player they're drafting and is as old as they think he is? Or is it just such a nightmare to actually verify all that, that there's still going to be loopholes and ways for things to slip through. I think the interesting thing is that since MLB sort of took over the investigation process in 2009, before they used to basically use subcontract, what essentially were lawyers in the Dominican to kind of like do the investigations and it wasn't actually officially investigators. They were just subcontracted people.

But in 2009, they basically had an ex-FBI agent go in there and take the lead in the investigations. They've really cut down on some of the age stuff. I mean, you don't really see kids who signed post-2009 get popped for age stuff. You know, most of the guys that you hear about now that have been found to have lied about their age were pre-2009. So I think they've sort of done a lot and made a lot of headway in that department. I do think there's – they believe that there will be an element, a criminal element, that will sort of be eliminated if some of those bonuses do go down

in the Dominican. They feel that a lot of some of the, you know, the less desirable trainers who are just in it to make, you know, a lot of money off of some of these bigger bonuses might not, you know, find the business to be as profitable anymore. And, you know, they might be eliminated. They might not want to be, you know, do the business to be as profitable anymore and they might be eliminated. They might not want to do the business anymore. But I think that's not the number one reason why MLB is doing this. If that happens, that's sort of a side result of what they're trying to do. They're literally just trying to lower the bonuses in some of these countries. They just would rather not have to pay as much as they've

been paying for some of these players who they see as still very potential risks. So my last question, if you listen to what MLB says, obviously they're not going to say that we're doing this to make money and cost impoverished Dominican kids money. They're going to say that it's because of competitive balance, which is something that they also said last year with the new CBA. And I think at the time, a lot of the reaction was from people saying that it would do just the opposite, that many small market teams like the Pirates or the Rays had been spending a lot on the international market or in the draft, and that they had been able to kind of catch up with big market teams who weren't doing that that way,

and that the CBA would restrict their ability to do that. At the same time, there wasn't anything under the old system preventing the big market teams from doing that. They just seem to have been slow to discover that strategy. So is there an interpretation that says that this could improve competitive balance in the long run or possibly protect small market teams? I mean, like you said, I think you've seen in the last few years in the free market, you've seen some of the, even before the caps, you saw some of the smaller market teams are the ones that spent the big money on some of the players. I mean, you had, you know, you had the A's spending on Inouye. You had the Twins spending on Sano.

I mean, you had the Pirates spending on Heredia, the Mexican kid. I mean, you have, you know, you've seen all these teams. You've seen all these teams. The Yankees are hardly ever the huge spenders in Latin America in terms of some of the teenage Latin American kids. And so I don't think you can really say that this type of situation is going to really help competitive balance because I don't think the other way was hurting it. So, you know, I don't find that to be a legitimate point in terms of them pushing for the international draft. To me, like I said, it simply comes down to wanting to knock down bonuses all around. And I'm not just saying that they want to knock down bonuses for Latin Americans. I mean, obviously this is going to knock down bonuses for American kids too because you're going to have the other players slotted in, you know, in there, in there. So you're going to have, you know, you're going to

have pretty good Latin American players who are going to push kids who might've been, you know, second or third rounders, maybe into fourth or fifth rounders. So it's going to cost every, you know, you're going to see sort of that trickle down effect where you're going to have, uh, all players of all races and nationalities being affected financially by this. All right. Do you have anything else, Sam? Nope. Then we are done.

Thank you, Jorge. Yeah, no problem. You can read Jorge, as he mentioned, at Sports Unearthed, also at SB Nation, Long Forum, at New York Times. You can follow him on Twitter, at Jorge Arangre. We will have another special guest on, we hope, tomorrow. So we will do listener emails on Friday. So send us emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.