International Draft Not the Key to Parity in Baseball

Reds GM Walt Jocketty with Cuban pitcher Aroldis Chapman, who he signed to a 6 year, $30mil deal in January.

Jorge Arangure Jr has an interesting piece up at ESPN (if you're willing to poney up for Insider) about the likely addition of an international player draft in the next CBA. This is an issue that's been discussed for some time and has recently intensified with the big time signing bonuses awarded to prospects like Michael Ynoa, Aroldis Chapman, Noel Arguelles and the impending 10 million dollar contract the Jays are expected to sign with Adeinis Hechavarria. In the 60's, the amateur draft was implemented as a parity driven measure to prevent big market clubs from scooping up all of the best and brightest leaving the smaller market clubs to take what was left. But is the international market really in need of similar measures, and could this seriously hinder the development of players on the international market?

We'll come back to the former, but to the latter question Jorge Arangure doesn't seem to think so. While the amount of Puerto Rican players in Major League Baseball has declined since they were included in the amateur draft (last year just 28 players spread out across 30 major league rosters), he feels that the economic differences between PR and the Dominican Republic should mitigate a huge change in that country's baseball culture. He points out that with the GDP per capita running between $5,000 and $8,500, a standard big league slotted signing bonus would still make a huge difference in a Dominican family's life. Contrast that with Puerto Rico, where the GDP is more than twice as high. Assuming that the baseball culture in the Dominican is driven by the pursuit of a better life as much as it is passion for the game, to Dominican families the crapshoot of trying to encourage a child's athletic development as a baseball player still seems like potentially very lucrative way to make a better life for their children.

But I think what the article leaves out is in the potential detrimental effect on the efforts by major league clubs to train and develop these kids. Almost every team in the Majors has a Dominican academy. Players can be signed at 16 and develop at home with the best instructors that American money can buy before jumping to professional ball at 18. The clubs themselves undertake this because they know that it is a cheap way of bringing in high ceiling talent with physical gifts and nurturing them. Big thing here is that when they're training at the academy of big league teams, they are under contract to those big league teams. Those teams have the rights to develop them into big leaguers and then have 6 years of service time under that team's control.

But what if that control was taken away? If developing a player's gifts for 2 years only made them more refined for the team that drafted them, why on earth would they bother wasting their resources? The answer is they wouldn't, at least not to the extent they are now. That leads to two years of less than optimized development, which inevitably leads to lesser players. I'm not saying that the Dominican is completely incapable of instructing and nurturing its own, but if these kids weren't getting better training at the big league academies the academies wouldn't be a success. Simple as that.

But let's set aside that question for a moment and assume that the Dominican system remained healthy and thriving. Is all of this really necessary? Small market teams are growing worried about the increasing disparity between themselves and the big market clubs. Bud Selig is looking at any and every way to address that disparity short of the obvious solutions, a salary cap and a balanced schedule. But is international free agency really where the disparity comes from?

From a tertiary glance, I can't see it. Among the recent big name Latin American free agents, Adeiny Hechavarria is expected to go to the Blue Jays, Aroldis Chapman went to the Reds, Miguel Angel Sano to the Twins, Michael Ynoa to the A's, Noel Arguelles to the Royals and Rafael Rodriguez to the Giants. Sure the Yankees got Gary Sanchez and the Red Sox got Cuban Jose Iglesias, but they've hardly dominated the market. According to Baseball Prospectus, Iglesias is the only prospect in Boston's top ten signed from Latin America (and one would strongly doubt Cuba would be part of any international draft). The Yankees have 4 after trading Arodys Vizcaino to the Braves, with only Jesus Montero and Sanchez considered players with impact ceilings. More than the Sox, but most of their top prospects still come from the amateur draft, which they haven't had a high first round pick in for 17 years.

The point is, unlike the amateur draft which has no mandatory slotting and clearly doesn't work, Latin American free agency seems to work just fine. I know that Chapman's 30 million dollar contract with the Reds has people crying foul over the fact that he's making double what Stephen Strasburg got. But it's not like it was a big market club using their financial muscle to steal yet another rising star. It was the Reds, who have never in their franchise history had a payroll above 75 million dollars. Then the Jays, who haven't been big spenders in 15 years, were able to take Adeinis Hechavarria right out from under the nose of the Yankees. And these aren't isolated incidents. Take a look at this list of the top 31 largest Latin American signing bonuses of all time. 19 of those contracts came from teams who had payrolls under $100 million in 2009. When these small to mid-market teams do their homework and like a player, they're more than willing to spend the money. I just hope that major league baseball doesn't take away their incentive in an ironic attempt to "help" them.