No world wide draft

[southsider2k5]

Remember that worldwide baseball draft that appeared so imminent in the hours before the new labor deal was sealed last August? Uh, never mind -- at least for now.

 

As the labor agreement was going down, owners and players agreed on the concept for numerous changes in the draft. They just couldn't figure out the sticky details. So they decided to hold off for a year and let a new committee figure it all out.

 

Well, with the June draft just a few weeks away, zippo has been resolved. In fact, the committee has had precisely one meeting -- last week. And members were told, according to baseball sources, that if they couldn't get this mess worked out before this draft, baseball would just stick with the current system until the next labor deal.

 

However, another member of the committee says no deadlines whatsoever have been established, and that the committee plans to meet twice a month for the next few months "and we'll see where that takes us." But even if the goal is now to get a new system worked out by the 2004 draft, massive complications remain.

 

"They can't even agree on how many rounds the draft should be," says one source. "Is it going to be 20 rounds, or 32, or 48? They can't even agree on that. So I don't think there's much chance of them agreeing on the hard stuff."

 

The worldwide draft has proved to be such a logistical nightmare that, as much as some baseball people love it in theory, they have no idea how to make it work. It's so difficult to determine such basic information as accurate names and ages in some countries that teams stand a good chance of not even knowing whom they're drafting.

 

But even some of the other, simpler issues that were supposed to be reworked -- letting teams trade picks, eliminating compensation picks for lost free agents -- are still hanging. So can all this be figured out in three weeks?

 

"No shot," says one baseball man. And what are the odds of it ever being figured out? Not a whole lot better.

[Chisoxfn]

They got a whole lot of negotiating to do. If they cut the draft down to 20 rounds, then I would think those teams that pay their scouts the most would really dominate the free agent market. I mean whose to say who gets signed. One team could basically sign all the best late round picks and everyone else gets hosed if its fewer rounds.

 

I'm a fan of the nice long drafts in baseball because of all the positions needed to be filled, etc.