Twins Daily Roundtable: Shifting Service Time

Quote: Basically, the owners are winning on both ends of a player's career.

Well, the players have been winning for the last 30 years and what we have is a largely boring product with steadily declining viewers and steadily declining attendance that an average family has to pay upwards of $400 to attend.

I hope that in the next CBA the players have the dignity to insist that minor league players get paid better. And yes, I know that minor league players are not paying dues.

It's a shame that no team has stepped up and increased MiLB wages on their own.

I hope that in the next CBA the players have the dignity to insist that minor league players get paid better. And yes, I know that minor league players are not paying dues.

 

It's a shame that no team has stepped up and increased MiLB wages on their own.

Why?  If minor league players were not being paid enough, there would not be enough minor league baseball players.  The supply of players is not a problem.

I think that players will need to have get control of their careers between the ages of 26 to 30 if the are going get paid for their most productive years. Clubs under this new analytical management have proven that most productive years are usually in that time spand. Today with way the agreement is clubs have been manipilating the players service time so these players are under team control durning these years. If we get these changes as fans for sure would see younger players on the small market teams much faster than we have seen presently. I also think that another change that would help is moving the trading deadline up to middle of June to first of July forcing clubs to put together team they think they can win with and also requiring them to move players to majors if they think they can win. Second is that teams maybe shouldn't automatically get first draft pick with the worst record because it has put in place teams that want to fail to rebuild quickly. This was fine when we had where all team tried to win each year but this new group of General Managers have been manipulating the system to put together dynasty team for the future. The analytical people have improved statistics of the game but in my mind the changes have made game boring and also less exciting because now they have figured out how to stifle the offense of the game. The game with flaws led to more upsets and cinderella teams would have been great now with expanded playoffs. They need to get back to that where you had more flawed game.

Why are baseball and professional sports unions different than most other unions.  If you have a carpenter crew, they all get paid the same unless you are an apprentice.  So a player's first year is at a fixed rate as a rookie/apprentice.  After that, the league takes 50% of the revenue and divides by the number of players.  Everybody gets paid the same.  Build in some type of bonuses for doing X, Y and Z.  Maybe the bonuses can double or even triple your annual return.  

That's how the trade unions do it, or at least did back when I was building things.  Why not baseball?

Given the salaries of players, I don't really care if they have to settle for a lousy $10 million or so via arbitration for one more year before they get to be a free agent.  Make the owners spend more money on the minor leaguers.

Nobody watches a game to see the owner sit in his private box. The players are the game so I don't get people complaining about them getting paid. It's a very small percentage of players that do get PAID well. It's very difficult to be a major league player and even harder to be a very good one. The people that own teams don't need more money, to most it's a hobby.

I hope I never complain about players getting paid.

Why are baseball and professional sports unions different than most other unions. If you have a carpenter crew, they all get paid the same unless you are an apprentice. So a player's first year is at a fixed rate as a rookie/apprentice. After that, the league takes 50% of the revenue and divides by the number of players. Everybody gets paid the same. Build in some type of bonuses for doing X, Y and Z. Maybe the bonuses can double or even triple your annual return.

 

That's how the trade unions do it, or at least did back when I was building things. Why not baseball?

Let me know when trade union workers generate billions of dollars of revenue because people watch them work.

I'm 100% on board with delaying a rookie's debut for service time considerations. After all, you're only talking about three weeks to start the season. Who cares. It's a smart investment.

But doing this after a guy has played for a couple of years, after he leads the team in WAR in a year and earns a Platinum Glove? Wow. Sure, send a guy like that to the minors if he needs it. But keep him there for service time? Again, wow.

Arbitration is the cause of high salaries, not free agency. If players were free agents after 4 years instead of the current 6, salaries would eventually go down because the supply of free agents would be higher and the quality better (because they would be younger). Arbitration setttlements are simply an artificial way to increase salaries. Don’t believe me? Consider Kyle Gibson. Made $2.9 in 2017 coming off a season in which he posted an ERA north of 5 and generally terrible peripherals. He proceeded to post almost impossibly identical numbers in 2017 and then LOST his arbitration case giving him a salary of “only” $4.2 mil in 2018.

That’s the system that needs to change.

In any system there are going to be inequities. The owners are going to talk to each other to find loopholes in the CBA. The agents are going to squawk about it and file grievances on behalf of their clients. Thats their job! The minor leagues should be part of the union and the minor league players should be paying dues to the union. This service time issue is going to bite the Twins in the butt because they so blatantly used it to their advantage and basically admitted it publically. If that's not shooting yourself in the foot then i must have seen something that nobody else saw. Now Minnesota, as an organization can be basically red flagged by every agent and veteran player as one that doesn't shoot straight and will get over on the players any way they can. I can't put it any other way. Nobody us gonna wanna come here because of our commitment to Winning Baseball in this regime. The question is what do we do now to fix it. Fixing it is gonna take way more effort than it was to screw it up in the first place. What surprises me is that this CBA doesnt even expire until 2021.

Tradesmen are never going to have some amazing ability that allows them to do their job multiple times better than every other tradesperson can.

Sports are not similar to other lines of work.

I don't know, if someone in the trades is that good they usually will go out on their own with the ability to make unlimited money or create a business at any scale. Just like sports the most driven in any business or occupation will take it as far as they do. The 10000 hour rule would apply here. In sports or any activity the best have put in an obsessive amount of work, an amount many would not be willing to replicate.

Nobody watches a game to see the owner sit in his private box. The players are the game so I don't get people complaining about them getting paid. It's a very small percentage of players that do get PAID well. It's very difficult to be a major league player and even harder to be a very good one. The people that own teams don't need more money, to most it's a hobby.

I hope I never complain about players getting paid.

I'm not complaining about the salaries as much as not caring about the final number for the players who make free agency.  I want more players to get paid more at the minor league level, rather than the individual superstars to individually earn more.

When Calvin Griffith owned the Twins, and the early days of Carl Pohlad, salaries were shameful.  I remember a very young Gaetti talking about how it was hard to stay in condition over the winter as a young player because he was bagging groceries all winter to pay the rent.  That's just shameful.  The major league minimum salary at that time was a joke for what players went through.  That's a big problem, especially in the minors today, compared to the difference between a really good player making $25 million per year or having to settle for $10-15 million.

So I'm not complaining about their salaries, but I don't feel sorry for them if they have to delay free agency a year.  An awful lot of players never qualify for that anyway.  Let's take care of the rest of the players.

I hope that in the next CBA the players have the dignity to insist that minor league players get paid better. And yes, I know that minor league players are not paying dues.

 

It's a shame that no team has stepped up and increased MiLB wages on their own.

The bigger problem I have is the fact that the minor league players are bound by the terms of the CBA, yet are not eligible to be members of the union. They just have to trust the MLBPA to look out for their interests, and it's definitely not a priority.

I dislike about what is done now:

1. Time on the disabled list counts toward service time.

2. A year of service equates to a full-calendar MLB

Maybe instead of getting of getting full credit for DL time, they could work out a formula based on total time accumulated and time credited over the past MLB year.  Maybe the initial 10-day period counts, then additional time counts at the percentage of the higher of the time spent on the MLB roster the past year or the total time/3 service years

IIRC, the service year isn't quite a full year, but it's ridiculously close (171/183 days?).  I'd like to see something closer to 120 in a single year or 150 over any combo of years that didn't reach that threshold.

I haven't given it a great deal of thought or played around with the math to figure out loopholes. Maybe any two consecutive years that add up to 270 count as two years (to be fair to the guy who was on the roster for 100 + 180 - that might discourage holding off calling a guy up until there are 119 days left.

I obviously don't have the full answer, but one thing I would try for if I was a player or the MLBPA is to eliminate the 172 day cap.  If you are up the full year, you get the full 183 days.  The cap essentially can give teams 11 days of to tinker with Service time each season which can add up to an extra year if they do it right, ala Buxton.

Maybe the answer could be to change the rules with options.

Maybe its 2 option years instead of 3. Maybe you give them a finite number of options instead of option years. Maybe you can't option them if they have been on the active 25-man roster for X number of consecutive days.

Not much deep thought, but just a couple ideas I jotted down on the spot.

My solution which will not be popular with anyone is to start the six year clock after two years of service to the team - minor league and major league.  I do not care how old they were when they signed - do they have different rules for high schoolers going in to the NBA?  Sign them, develop them, get them in MLB as quick as possible.  There will be other adjustments and I do not want to spend pages talking about career minor leaguers (although they would benefit from this) of slow developing players - contracts can adjust for this.  But right now it is a joke and our FO is the one that spoke up and pulled the cover off the travesty.

Team control based on age when the player signs, with the goal that players will be free agents at age 28. Replace the last 4 years of arbitration with restricted free agency (like in football) giving the controlling team the right to match the contract.

Simple solution: Bring back the Reserve clause.

Wishful thinking on my part. I'd be a bigger fan of free agency if my team ever used it to their advantage.