Every lottery ticket isn’t a winner
Since 2017, the Atlanta Braves regularly saw three to five names on everyone’s list of the league’s top prospects, but few emerged and hung around.
TNSTAAPP* is real: Max Fried, Ian Anderson, and Mike Soroka – when healthy- proved that it does indeed take ten pitching prospects to get two good starters.
Austin Riley is the only position player to make the adjustments needed against pitchers who adjust to him game-to-game and we’re still looking for a centerfielder for the 2022 roster.
I love to dream on prospects like everyone else, but sometimes those dreams turn into nightmares, which leads me to one of MLB’s great ideas.
* – There’s No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect
Prospects are suspects
The January 13th proposal by MLB to encourage teams not to screw with service time is nearly as hilarious as using any flavor of WAR to set arbitration salary.
Baseball America (subscription required) reported that MLB wanted to give a draft pick to a team if a player won an award.
". . .owners proposed a new incentive system where a team that kept a rookie on the roster all season could receive a bonus draft pick if that player (finished0 top three in Rookie of the Year, MVP or Cy Young balloting over the first three seasons of their MLB career."
However, there’s a kicker.
Also heard MLB owners offered a potential solution to service time manipulation in their proposal:
— Ben Nicholson-Smith (@bnicholsonsmith) January 13, 2022
•if a highly-ranked prospect (within top 150 on prospect lists) plays a full year and finishes top five for a major award like MVP, Cy, RoY his team would get a bonus draft pick
BA went on to say that adding such a caveat to the proposal wasn’t needed; Jarrett Seidler from Baseball Prospectus went further.
". . . rewarding teams for putting prospects on one of our lists is one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard. Not just ethically . . . but on the details of outsourcing this to prospect writers."
I mean, what could go wrong? Surely no one would try to entice someone to add a player to or remove him from that list. If a player isn’t on the list and wins an award — like, for example, Paul Goldschmidt — his team doesn’t get the draft pick because someone wasn’t smart enough to see what was coming?
Like most of MLB’s proposals – and the union’s so far – it doesn’t take a scholar to see the holes and laugh.
That’s a wrap
Prospect lists are fun, but in the long-term, no one cares if the prospect was selected first or 131st, as long as he’s doing well for the team.
BA looked back at the individuals who won the awards that would have earned their team a draft pick; only 54% fit that criteria. I want MLB to end service time manipulation; it’s not fair to the player or the fans.
There are ways to do it that will do nothing but improve the game for both sides. Solutions come from open and honest discussions. I look forward to that happening at some point because so far, all we’ve seen is jockeying for position.