from Amazon
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
When Lawyers rule MLB…
...this is what happens.
“You see, Mrs. Longoria, there’s this rule called the Super 2s, whose impetus can be traced back to Roger Clemens and Peter Ueberroth. Roger was 30 days short of the 3 years vesting for arbitration. Now, vesting happens at around 2 years and 120ish days (depends on how other players were called up that year). Ryan Braun is at 129 days, so it’s going to be real close. And the Rays are not new to playing this game. BJ Upton has 1 year and 126 days and Jamie Shields has 1 year and 125 days.
So, these lawyers are trying to game the system, and trying to force vesting for these players at 3 years and 120 days. Could we fix that? Well, sure, we can include an age-based cutoff, and the player vests when either one occurs first.
What’s that, what if your boy is one day short of vesting by playing time, and one day short by birth? That’s why Tango doesn’t like tiered approach in anything (be it in arbitration or mortgage insurance or anything else), since that’s how lawyers game the system. You can have a sliding scale, so that one guy can be say 80% vested, and gets 80% of the arb value, and 20% of the slave value. No tiering, no gaming, no lawyers.
What’s that? No, this will never happen, because MLB and MLBPA will always throw the young kids under the bus, reasoning that those good enough will eventually get their due.
Now, let me go talk to John Tavares’ mom, and tell her that she should have conceived her son a week earlier. He’s already overqualified for his Junior hockey league, and he must now stay there an extra year, or go to Europe. The NHL doesn’t want him! A sliding scale system would have allowed a player like this to be drafted in an early round, like I’ve already posted about.”
Or just make everyone at every level free agents when their contracts run out.