New CBA rules... How to prevent a lock out

[Doc Munson]

With three easy additions to CBA, virtually ALL issues will be resolved.

#1 Pace of Play.   Lets not burden ourselves will all sorts of extraneous new rules to try and speed up the game. Just incentivize teams to play faster!!Games will speed back up in their own.  SO... you simply incentivize teams by having all tiebreakers be pace of play. the faster the average 1st 9 innings of games the higher you are. This includes the draft order!!!  you draft (partially..see below) based on pace of play, not solely your record. I GUARANTEE  if playing slow makes a team drop a handful of spots in the draft, they will speed up!!!!  with no artificial rules!!!

 

 

#2 ELIMINATE TANKING...  GOing to a weighted lottery system will NOT eliminate tanking. The only way you eliminate tanking is by making teams EARN their draft spot.  And how do you make teams earn it?  Well by PLAYING FOR IT of course!!!!  SO what you do is you have a Draft Tournament!!  EVERY TEAM plays in the post season!!  if you do not make the playoffs, then you head to the Draft Tournament. Team swith the best records get the best seeds, and then it is just a regular tournament, with the winner getting the top pick, and all other picks are assigned based on how far you go in the tourney!!  Again using regular season pace of play for tiebreakers.  could be single elimination or 3 game series at most. This would be an exciting tourney!! would bring in TONS of additional revenue!!  and teams could use prospects if they want without impacting time towards FA. broadcast rights alone would bring in MILLIONS!!!

 

#3 Lets make managing payroll more flexible!!  and truly reward smarter front offices, This rule could also allow smaller market teams to possibly compete with bigger market teams. Thsi would give FO more flexibility which would get them to sign on, and overall SHOULD/COULD help push player salaries higher which would get them on board!!  What is this rule??  First need to say, you keep salary cap luxury threshold in place and its penalties. Second you create a Salary FLOOR as well (which is already being discussed) and you penalize teams for not getting to the salary floor by them losing their 1st round pick the following year should they not reach teh Salary Floor.

 

Now that we have the constraints in place lets talk about the flexibility to manage around these constraints year to year.

 

FLUID CONTRACTS!!!!

How fluid contracts work is simple. You can pay the player as much as you want, or as little as you want each year, as long as you meet a minimum salary each year.

Lets take Eduardo Rodriguez's contract for example.  5 years $77M. or  $15.4M per.  

Each year the FO sets the starting wage at whatever they want at the beginning of the year. This has to be AT LEAST the league minimum. The team MUST pay the player that much AT LEAST.  then at a certain date during the season the team has to lock in the FINAL pay for the year. It can be any amount. It can stay at $1M or it can be $50M.  the only constraint is that by the end of the contract, all $77M has to be paid out.

 

So if you are a team needing to reset the luxury tax penalty, you can do this by mixing and matching big contracts and small contracts.

If you have some financial challenges, you can use the flexibility to pay less one year (knowing you will have to make it up later). 

You can turn a player with mediocre to average trade value into a player with LOTS of trade value.

Taking again Rodriguez's contract, lets say year 1 he has a Cy Young type season (or even just an above average), and your team has the financial ability to pre-pay a good portion of the deal.  then you lock in say $50M as the final salary year 1 (using an extreme example to prove the point... but it COULD happen).  now that leaves him on a contract of 4 years $24M.  Suddenly you have a player with significantly more trade value!!!  AND if you are on a small market team, you used that $50M to get above the salary floor!!

With this flexibility, teams now will NEVER have the excuse of being under a long term bad contract to prevent them from signing other players or contending for YEARS!!!

 

These three rules will GUARANTEE no lock out, and "save" baseball...

 

Thoughts?

 

[Otto von Ballpark]

I appreciate the creativity and enthusiasm, but I think this makes the issue more complicated than it actually is.

Once you have a salary floor, and the accompanying salary ceiling/cap/luxury tax threshold, calculated to give the players and owners each the share of total revenue they desire, that pretty much takes care of everything. Of course, getting both sides to agree on that is difficult, but that negotiation isn't made any easier by instituting "fluid contracts" or targeted anti-tanking measures. It's still the same underlying problem.

FWIW, I suspect a salary floor could be like the NHL's -- no punishment for going below it, but teams just have to pay the difference, to be split evenly among that team's players according to days on the roster.

[DJL44]

Hard NO to every team making the playoffs. Why even have a regular season.

Linking pace of play to draft order doesn't make any sense. The people playing slowly don't care about draft order. Teams can't predict draft order at the beginning of the season. It also takes two to tango - both teams have to agree to play faster. You need immediate, in-game penalties to incentivize pace of play (balls and strikes).

The salary floor is the MLB minimum contract - which needs to increase by at least 60%.

[Otto von Ballpark]

Also, in regards to your "fluid contracts" example, Rodriguez and the MLBA would gladly let the Tigers convert $50 mil of future salary to an immediate $50 mil payment, although judging by the Baez signing, I doubt the Tigers (or most teams in that position) would want to do that.

You could let the player get paid normally, but just use the "fluidity" as an accounting gimmick on the league side to determine annual team payrolls for cap purposes. Although I'd be concerned about teams finding and exploiting more loopholes with such gimmicks, like the NHL has faced with long contracts and long-term injured reserve.

MLB teams already have the option to include cash or "dead" salary in trade, negotiate buyouts/deferments, and front- and back-load contracts too.

[ashbury]

For a team to unilaterally convert guaranteed money to deferred money would require a larger total sum, due to inflation and net present value. 

[Doc Munson]

On 11/30/2021 at 12:37 PM, DJL44 said:

Hard NO to every team making the playoffs. Why even have a regular season.

Linking pace of play to draft order doesn't make any sense. The people playing slowly don't care about draft order. Teams can't predict draft order at the beginning of the season. It also takes two to tango - both teams have to agree to play faster. You need immediate, in-game penalties to incentivize pace of play (balls and strikes).

The salary floor is the MLB minimum contract - which needs to increase by at least 60%.

I didnt say everyone makes the PLAYOFFS, I said everyone has A playoffs.   the Draft Tourney is not the "Playoffs"

and pace of play is one of the biggest issue sin MLB, that is why they are coming up with all sorts of rules to shorten games. Finally pace of play for draft picks eliminates the purposeful tanking. if you are a crappy team, just play FASTER if you want the good picks. and of course it takes two.  That is why over the course of 162 games it helps mitigate the outliers.  AND when people start seeing the fast paced teams actually playing BETTER ball, then EVERYONE will adjust

 

[Doc Munson]

On 11/30/2021 at 2:39 PM, ashbury said:

For a team to unilaterally convert guaranteed money to deferred money would require a larger total sum, due to inflation and net present value. 

quit using big words!!!  LOL

 

and it is nto deferred money. it is still the entire sum of money paid in the same number of years. deferred money means it is paid out over MORE years

[ashbury]

1 hour ago, Doc Munson said:

and it is nto deferred money. it is still the entire sum of money paid in the same number of years. deferred money means it is paid out over MORE years

Sign a player to a ten year $100M contact. Decide to pay him MLB minimum each year for nine years. Pay him $90M+ the final year. That's deferred money by any reasonable definition - the team gets value now, the player gets pie in the sky by and by.

And I guarantee any team with competent bean counters will backload the payments in a manner like that, rather than the reverse you seem to think will happen, 99 times out of 98. Billionaires may or may not understand launch angles and spin rates, but they understand how to make use of working capital.

[DJL44]

14 hours ago, Doc Munson said:

I didnt say everyone makes the PLAYOFFS, I said everyone has A playoffs.   the Draft Tourney is not the "Playoffs"

MLB doesn't need a CarQuest Auto Parts Bowl for the last place teams.