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Tuesday, April 06, 2010
How many service days is a service year?
Dave suggests:
n yesterday’s chat, when this came up, I suggested one possible alternative; reduce the amount of days needed to count as a full year of service towards free agency. Right now, the number is 172, which means that a player has to be on the active roster or the disabled list for about 95 percent of the season in order to accumulate enough days for one full year. A player who is on the roster for 90 percent of the season will not get enough days of service to count it as a full season, which makes no sense whatsoever.
If you lower that number to, say, 100 days of service, now you’re making teams hold players back until July if they want to get that extra year of club control. That is a much tougher sacrifice to make when you’re staring at a big league ready prospect at the end of March. Would the Nationals have been willing to keep Strasburg in the minors until July? I really doubt it. Given the shifted incentives, he would almost certainly have broken camp with their big league team, and Washington fans could have had a Heyward moment of their own to look forward to.
In MLB, you earn one service day for each day you are on the 25-man roster or DL, up to a maximum of 172 days in any given season. The service days roll over, so if you earned 170 days one year and 50 days another year, that’s 220 service days, or 1 year and 48 days (1.048).
In the NHL, a service year is a season in which a player plays more than ten games (13% of a season), including playoffs. There is no “rollover days” that there is in MLB.
So, if JJ Hardy starts the year with 4.000 service years, and plays for 170 service days, he’s at 4.170 service years, and still not at 5 service years. In the NHL, he’d have reached 5 service years after his 10th game (or I guess 20th for the MLB-equivalent) because there are no partial seasons in MLB.
Dave’s suggestion still holds strongly to the idea of partial years of service, when I don’t know that that should even be the negotiating point. Why even have partial years of service? One advantage to MLB over the NHL is that you simply have to be on the roster and not even play, while in the NHL, you have to play. That said, in the NHL, 19 players are pretty much guaranteed to play in each game for each team.
I’d be in favor of counting a service year as being on the 25-man or DL roster for 31+ days (so that September callups don’t get any service time year for being on the roster for 30 days).
Of course, since the MLBPA is getting something (for its young players), they have to give MLB something. And since we know veterans don’t care at all about young players, this point is practically speaking only academic in nature.
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