By the way, there will not be a labor stoppage because the Montreal Expos won't be leading the NL East. As any Quebecois(e) will tell you, the last two labor stoppages corresponded with the only two years the Expos were leading their division.

The pain of the current system also means you have to make decisions on players...take Trevor Plouffe, for example. Not worth his arbitration salary, yet the Twins might've kept him if they could've signed him for what Oakland signed him for. So in that way, the system works against both the team AND the player.

 

You can argue how much time a team should have control of a player before overpaying, so to speak. Is six years outrageous (or more if you have parts of seasons). If the player does produce, they make big bucks. If they don't, they go into a limbo...sometimes having an okay years (see Escobar this year) which results in some riches.

 

Sometimes you do forget the up front money some of these guys do make now in the draft.

 

 

If players are generally hitting free agency around 28...

 

What factor should competitive balance play in any restructuring?

 

Should there be a concern that the large market teams will have the majority of the best players in their peak seasons?

 

Two kinds of players might populate the mid market teams. They might have good prospects in their initial struggling years with a good season or two prior free agency. The others might be players in their decline in their 30s. These might be guys originally signed by a large market team but traded off for the last one or two years of their contract or players they signed as free agents at 28 who were near average in their primes but mediocre in their early 30s (and the last few years of their contracts).

 

I don’t think they can fix the service years without also addressing the current lack of competitive balance that could become more imbalanced.