Post by vermontsox1 on Dec 6, 2021 11:35:53 GMT -5
Having spoken with a number of people in international scouting and the broader baseball industry while sourcing for this list, the general sense remains that the January signing day will take place as planned. Those transactions don’t come anywhere near the big league roster, this signing period has already been delayed once, and the status quo creates some form of industry activity during what is likely to be an otherwise totally dead period. There are some who think there’s a real chance that the signing period will be delayed, though, and that if it is, it’s a sign that immediate changes — changes MLB would be buying time to implement — are coming, perhaps including a draft.
An eventual international draft is a virtual certainty, and these CBA negotiations are likely to yield the framework for it, but the timeline for its actual implementation is foggy. Implementing it right away, for players in a class that still calls itself “2021,” seems absurd. It has literally been a couple of years since many of these players agreed to deals, and once they do, teams tend to stop scouting them with real intent. A short-notice draft would be an absolute mess from a scouting standpoint, unless MLB went to great lengths to have some sort of combine (players set to sign in January have to be registered with MLB, so they already have the names), and would also be extremely disruptive to the players, who assume their deals are done. But the chaos created by the moratorium put on trading pool space during the last signing period is evidence that avoiding chaos may not be a sufficient motivator for MLB if it costs something.
Speaking of trading pool space, I’m not sure whether or not teams will once again be able to for the upcoming period. Language in the reporting of the last period’s moratorium seems to isolate the ban to that year, but I haven’t yet asked around. As with last signing period, it’s likely teams had planned on trading for space to satisfy all their commitments.
An eventual international draft is a virtual certainty, and these CBA negotiations are likely to yield the framework for it, but the timeline for its actual implementation is foggy. Implementing it right away, for players in a class that still calls itself “2021,” seems absurd. It has literally been a couple of years since many of these players agreed to deals, and once they do, teams tend to stop scouting them with real intent. A short-notice draft would be an absolute mess from a scouting standpoint, unless MLB went to great lengths to have some sort of combine (players set to sign in January have to be registered with MLB, so they already have the names), and would also be extremely disruptive to the players, who assume their deals are done. But the chaos created by the moratorium put on trading pool space during the last signing period is evidence that avoiding chaos may not be a sufficient motivator for MLB if it costs something.
Speaking of trading pool space, I’m not sure whether or not teams will once again be able to for the upcoming period. Language in the reporting of the last period’s moratorium seems to isolate the ban to that year, but I haven’t yet asked around. As with last signing period, it’s likely teams had planned on trading for space to satisfy all their commitments.