Free Agency Part 2 - Crazy in play

By examining the following example of the free agency system in play, I will demonstrate why the system needs to be changed.

There are rules in place to guard against a team giving up too much in the draft for signing more than one free agent. Last winter, the Yankees signed Mark Teixeira (Type A), CC Sabathia (A) and AJ Burnett (A) to long-term contracts. Under the rules of Free Agency, these players were all ranked by Elias and it turned out that Teixeira was ranked higher than CC, who was ahead of Burnett. Therefore, when the Yankees signed Sabathia on Dec. 10, 2008, the Brewers were in line to receive the Yankees' first-round pick as compensation. But when the Yankees signed Teixeira a month later, due to his higher ranking, the Angels were actually awarded that first-round pick and the Brewers only a second-rounder. To compound this was that AJ Burnett was also signed, but since he was lower than the other two players signed by the Yankees, the Blue Jays were only awarded a third-round selection for letting him walk.

This is the kind of action that shows me how MLB is protecting the proliferation of its richer and more marketable teams. Only the richer teams are going to be able to afford to sign multiple Type A free agents. Not only are the Type A free agents generally the better players, but the teams that sign them usually have the most money and build a bulk of their roster through free agency rather than through their farm systems. Therefore, they are in a position to give up their first- and second-round picks. Even considering this, MLB allows for the exact teams who can afford to lose their draft picks to actually keep them, almost as a sort of bonus for improving their roster!

I would also think that if the Brewers thought that they could only get one draft pick for Sabathia instead of two, that they may not have given up their top prospect (Matt LaPorta) for CC. I have to believe that the Blue Jays would almost certainly have traded Burnett away the the in-season trade deadline if they knew that they were going to only receive a third-round draft pick for AJ's services. The best part about all of this is that MLB is essentially saying that based on all of these irrelevant statistics, some free agents are better than others, and so the teams losing the players (not the teams that sign the players) are forced into being penalized by the governing body.