I’ve read the articles on the internet explaining how the baseball draft works and I think I have a pretty good idea of the mechanics, but one question still bothers me.
The Washington Nationals are going to pick first this year and all the writers say they will be offering their selectee, a pitcher, a signing bonus of about $6,500,000. But since he can’t sign with anyone else, why do they offer him so much? Why don 't they just say “Here’s $1,000,000. Take it or leave it.”
Because AFAIK he’ll basically sit out, refuse to sign, and be back in the draft next year. And the team (the Nationals in this case) have lost a draft pick for the year, someone they can groom until he gets good and goes to another team 
Wasn’t it JD Drew who pulled this stunt (another Boras client)
And to add to that they can’t even hope to draft him next year - the player that doesn’t sign has to sign a waiver to allow that, and Strasburg will not.
Stephen Strasburg is widely considered the best pitcher in the draft since, what, Mark Prior? Possibly better than him… And I think the bonus will be well above $6.5 mill, right?
They will offer more than 6.5 mil. I expect he will get somewhere between 15 and 20 once he finally signs.
He won’t sign for a million. Players have the option of sitting out a year and getting redrafted by a different team next time. He would do that over signing for way less than market value.
In fact, the Nationals have the 10th pick of this year’s draft, because they couldn’t sign last year’s number 9 pick Aaron Crow. In the last CBA a provision was added that if you don’t sign a player you get the next pick the subsequent year. Thus, if Strasberg doesn’t sign they will pick 2nd next year. If they don’t sign the 10th pick they are out of luck. Crow didn’t get signed over a few hundred thousand dollars, so I can certainly see Strasberg not signing over millions. The Nats a re in a more desperate situation than he is.
There is another issue here, which is a bit more delicate. You can argue, in fact I have and probably will again, that the draft is a form of collusion. Instead of being free to sign with any organization, prospects are limited to the one that picked them. Strasberg might get $20 million from the Nats, but he would get triple that if he was on the open market. Sports have generally gotten away with this, but they need to be careful. If every team decided to not give draftees more than $1,000,000, I would expect the draftees to sue and win free agency.
In fact, the Nationals drafted a starting pitcher last year, Aaron Crow, who didn’t want to take their best offer, and he’s in the draft again this year – they’ve lost their chance at him for good. And if it wasn’t for Strasburg, he (Crow) would have a chance at being the #1 overall pick in this draft.
And yes, Strasburg is the best prospect since Prior, and is in fact a lot better prospect than Prior. He’s the best draft prospect in the history of the sport (which is a different thing from the best player, obviously, but it’s saying a lot at this point in the process).
So there’s a lot of pressure on Washington, and Strasburg knows it.
Edit: Hawkeye’s second post wasn’t there when I started this, obviously.
Hawkeyeop:
I don’t know how true that is. If there were an open market for incoming college players instead of a draft, the players will have less leverage because the teams don’t need to limit themselves to offering to one player before giving other teams their exclusive shot at all other players. The structure of a draft offers leverage of sorts and options of sorts to both parties.
The NHL has a cap on entry-level deals. I can’t remember what it is but it’s quite low. Of course, the cap is part of the CBA, not an informal agreement between the teams, so that may be why nobody’s tried challenging it.
I think you are wrong, I mean just look at baseball pre-free agency. The fact that teams couldn’t easily replace their stars, didn’t mean they got paid well. However that is the kind of semi-plausable argument you can make when paying the first draft pick $15-$20 million. If you are offering him $1 million that isn’t going to fly.
I still don’t understand why amateurs should be subject to CBAs. It isn’t like they had any say in the deal.
That’s true, and in theory an incoming player could (maybe) still bring a challenge. In practice they have little incentive to do so. Drafts benefit owners and veteran free agent players at the expense of incoming players. (Veteran free agents benefit because they face less competition–owners can only sign free agents or their own draftees.) Most incoming players–especially those who would be good enough to provoke a bidding war for their services–look forward to becoming free agents themselves, and thus are not prone to challenge the system.
The problem is a large percentage of draftees never actually make it to free agency and unable to get the rewards down the line. That also presupposes that if amatuers got paid more free agents would get paid less, and I don’t necessarily believe that is the case.
I saw something on the net yesterday saying Strasburg wants $50 million. He’s a kid with a 100 MPH heater, allegedly still throwing high 90s in the late innings. If the Nationals draft him but don’t sign him, he has the option of going to Japan.
Hawkeyeop:
How is this a valid comparison at all? Before the reserve clause was abolished (thus allowing free agency), any player attempting to negotiate with teams of his own choice was blacklisted from baseball altogether. The hypothetical we were discussing (I thought) was a complete free market for incoming amateurs.
The $50 million figure is Boras’s figure, which he pulled out to compare Strasburg to Daisuke Matsuzaka. Boras also claimed at one point that Alex Rodriguez wanted a $500 million contract; he’s prone to citing preposterous numbers.
Strasburg will doubtlessly be offered the highest signing bonus ever; I’m guessing $15 million. He won’t get 50, and if he holds out Matt Harrington will call him up and tell him to take the damned money.
I’m curious as to whether or not the system might also limit the number and length of negotiations, which coaches probably don’t want to do all the time. If everyone were free agent right fm the start, it might complicate things horribly. Coaches might have to spend all their time juggling around signing and negotiations. I suppose the current system limits many the number of players who independantly negotiate, simplifying things overall.
Coaches? Coaches are not involved in the signing/negotiation process.
You mean managers, and they don’t do any negotiating. That’s the GM’s job.
Not all that hypothetical – that was how things were prior to 1965. You could be signed to any team that wanted to pay you.
Of course, it all started with players being signed to minor league clubs, usually locally, and then having their contracts being sold to other clubs. Thus, you’d sign to a class D team for, say $500 a year. If you were a star, a class C team would buy your contract (and pay you more). Eventually, you made it to the majors, who’d buy your contract from a minor league club (probably AAA).
In the 1940s, teams started owning and managing their own minor league clubs, so they began signing players directly. At that point, a big high school star would be scouted by multiple major league teams and would sign with whoever offered the best deal. The draft was instituted to keep big market teams (primarily the Yankees) from cornering the market on top talent.
There were rules to limit payments to new talent (most notably, the bonus baby rule), but back in the 50s, few teams were willing to pay large bonuses even if the could. Revenue streams were much smaller then (even if you take inflation into account), so a team was limited in how much they could pay.
The baseball draft does not force a player to sign. If the team doesn’t come up with an acceptable offer, the player only takes a year off and can negotiate a better contract. Nowadays, they can play in college.
The various drafts have always been considered part of the agreement between players and owners, and no one has a right to play professional sports. It’s only when owners get together to limit how much they pay that collusion exists.
No, not always. The earliest drafts in each sport (football had the first, in 1935) were imnstituted with no input from players whatsoever.
No, collusion exists any time you restrict the employers with whom a laborer can bargain, as the courts found in the Yazoo Smith pro football case. It was only after the Smith case that owners began taking care to include the particulars of the draft in their collective bargaining negotiations. They’re still “collusion”, but they’re OK collusion because they’re agreed between players and owners.