Tanner wrote:If there are fewer players in the minors, then prospects will be paid more. At least they should. If you want to argue they should be paid more regardless then that's another story, but by MLB decreasing the amount of levels and prospects all teams can have, it should remove the quantity and replace it was quality. It will be easier and faster to weed out the bad prospects as the level of competition in each level should in theory be a lot better. Sure maybe it might hurt the super raw 18 year old's who might take longer to develop due to age and other factors, the reality is beating up on **** competition isn't going to make them better. It's when they start seeing those high spin breaking balls earlier in their development, or face hitters who can hit high velocity fastballs, etc, that will make them better.
The shrinkage is going to be happening on the low end of the pyramid, where right now the total amount paid to the players is, effectively, a rounding error. The total player wage bill for a short-season team is in the $40-50k range per month. Spread that money over all the players at higher levels and they'd be looking at a raise of $200/month, for the few months of the season for which they're paid.
To give you a sense of scale here, we once spent a sum that exceeded the combined annual player wage budget for our two short-season teams at the time in order to trade for and immediately buy out a player to get the 57th pick in a draft.
Imagine if the G League was twice the size as it is now and twice the amount of teams. At some point you'd notice the quality of basketball decreasing and the league would be filled with players who wouldn't ever be good enough to become the 15th man on the worst NBA team. That's what the MLB minor league system is right now. Way, way too much filler and young kids being taken advantage of in the hopes of a catching a dream.
The G-League expanded in recent years, specifically because there was recognition that the league could benefit from i) a better distribution of playing time, so that prospects weren't crowding out other prospects, and ii) a desire to keep some Good Pros in the fold, where they can provide a higher level of competition for raw 19 year olds rather than plying their trade overseas.
And basketball is a sport with much smaller rosters, and where there is far less variance in the production of drafted players...if you took the top 30 players in the NBA draft, and pitted them five years later in a seven-game series against any other basketball player in the world who was draft-eligible in that year, the players from the top 30 would win each and every year. It'd be rare for them to lose a single game, such would be the disparity. If you did that in baseball, they'd lose a great deal of the time. Probably most of the time.
I'm not sure how the elimination of affiliates and lowering the draft to 20 rounds will affect how much a team can spend on the draft, but if the allocated draft pools are going to stay more or less the same, except condensed into 20 rounds instead of 50 (or whatever it is now), then even better. Pay the real amateur talent more. Maybe we won't see as many Pillar's becoming big leaguers, but in the long run it should help the quality of baseball if done right.
It will have no tangible effect on how teams spend in the draft. First, after the top ten rounds, no player is guaranteed a bonus...any bonus they get is purely out of the team's desire to sign the player. $1000 bonuses are not uncommon. Any team with half a clue already spends every cent allowed under the capped bonus pool rules.
