On June 10th and 11th, an incredibly abbreviated MLB Draft took place. There were no baseball games played of course, as America finds itself three months into the COVID-19 pandemic. Talks of a deal between owners and players have stalled in the meantime, and it is unclear if a season will happen at all. But the advent of the Draft was a chance for the league to lick its wounds and focus on the young stars of the future who would sign with their teams and kick off their MLB careers.
Well, it certainly was a draft. The Tigers took Spencer Torkelson first overall out of Arizona State, the Orioles ambitiously selected Heston Kjerstad second overall out of Arkansas, and second-ranked draft prospect Austin Martin fell all the way to fifth overall, where he was selected by the Blue Jays. The Houston Astros were conspicuously absent. It seemed like a normal draft, with storylines and interviews and player comps galore. But it was not a normal draft. One key reason why was the length of the event. The MLB draft is notorious for its length. A 40-round affair that was shortened from a whopping 50 rounds in 2012, it is a marathon that tests the patience and attention span of any prospect fanatic. However, this year, the Draft was cut to a meager 5 rounds, shorter than the NFL and NHL Drafts, and only three rounds longer than the notoriously small NBA Draft. It's hard to believe. Thirty-five rounds, axed just like that. This was supposedly done to allow teams to sign an unlimited number of undrafted free agents for $20,000 per organization. But how many undrafted free agents are there going to be? Would it not be more likely that these undrafted players return to playing at the collegiate level for the chance to actually be drafted in a still-shortened-but-significantly longer 2021 Draft? (That Draft will have 20 rounds.) And indeed, news on undrafted free agents has been slow a few days after the Draft's conclusion. Just two players, Francisco Urbaez of Florida Atlantic University (signed by CIN) and Carson Coleman of Kentucky (signed by NYY) have reached agreements with teams so far. It will be difficult to track just how many of these undrafted players sign, but it's unlikely to be anywhere near the number the league was probably expecting when they brutally stunted the 2020 Draft. Beyond that, plenty of players will fall through the cracks as a result of this shortened deal. Those who may have been signed in later rounds and fail to sign in undrafted free agency may be S.O.L. if they can't rebuild their draft stock. Some college seniors will just be done. It's not like there's school to return to. Even if it's in the late rounds, the opportunity has always been there for these kinds of players to keep the fire burning. Now, the match has been blown out. Even then, it might not have mattered. Earlier in this lengthy offseason, MLB gutted the Minor Leagues. They had flirted with lowering the number of teams for years, all while mitigating the rights of the players who often languished in the lower levels. Minor Leaguers have been designated as seasonal contractors, and do not have health insurance, overtime pay, or pensions. They often make under the minimum wage. MLB has not lifted a finger for these men, and the team owners were all too happy to justify not paying thousands of players, before cutting many of them loose in May. Countless Minor Leaguers had to hang up their cleats and give up their dreams, just like some of the college-aged players who may have been left stranded at the gate to the Draft. This mass exodus of players at the Minor League and draft-ready level CANNOT be good for a sport that is regressing in cultural relevance, socioeconomic accessibility, and viability as a career path. Now that this exclusive club has become even more exclusive, how can the sport grow in these manners if so much of the developing talented is abruptly uprooted and tossed aside? Care to guess something else that can't be good for a sport? That's right. Not playing games. As the MLBPA and owners battle it out over length of season, prorated salaries, and postseason revenues, the stagnation of a further delayed season threatens to reduce interest in the sport across the board. Owners have made unreasonable demands--in fact, it is just the same single unreasonable demand, packaged in four differently sized boxes--to the players, who are villainized by our capitalistic culture for not sucking it up and getting back to work. Clashes between players and fans on social media have grown more frequent as players have become more outspoken about the situation they find themselves in. The sport is hurting like crazy. They didn't need another bombshell. Seems like Murphy's Law around here. Yesterday morning (June 13th), a headline from The Athletic read "Judge orders 2017 MLB letter to Yankees unsealed; plaintiffs say it details sign stealing". Immediately, Twitter was whipped into a frenzy. If it was true that the Yankees, who were portrayed almost sympathetically in wake of the Astros' cheating scandal, were cheating as well, fans of other teams, most of whom hate the Yankees, would be laughing about it for decades. As the day went along and things started to quiet down a bit, it started to appear that there was no evidence of sign stealing, and the letter was likely to do with a bullpen phone-related misconduct incident from 2017 or earlier for which the Yankees were lightly fined. I have no idea what they did with the bullpen phone. I don't know if anyone does. The titular letter in that Athletic headline may have the answer. But the Yankees want to keep it sealed for some reason. That's not exactly the kind of behavior you want to exhibit if you're confident the contents of that letter will exonerate you. Maybe I'm overthinking an uptight action by a famously uptight organization, but there might be something in there. And even if there isn't, and the Yankees are exonerated, questions still remain. It's hard to believe that the issue of sign stealing is confined to just Houston, Boston, and New York. The greater question that must be asked is "just how many teams are stealing signs anyway?" If the answer to the question makes us uncomfortable, it's about time we started on devising some new rules on sign-stealing to make sure this doesn't happen. And please, please, better punishments to disincentivize the sign stealing. What the Astros got just wasn't enough for what they allegedly did, regardless of how much it actually helped them. Now, these issues all overlap and intertwine. And who is in the middle of this messy tapestry. The commissioner of baseball, of course. Rob Manfred is chiefly to blame for this league's downward spiral in viability and reputation. It all has to do with a lack of accountability. We saw it when the Astros were punished fairly lightly for their cheating scandal, and then seemingly given protections when it was announced players on other teams could be heavily fined for retaliating against offending players. In addition, if baseball returns, they will be lucky enough to have a home crowd, thanks to Texas' relaxed rules on distancing. (My advice to MLB: maybe don't???) The lack of accountability doesn't end with the Astros debacle. The team owners have gone out of control in their desire for control over the power struggle between them and the players. They have grown miserly in their free agent spending, cheap in their player development, ruthless in their mistreatment of Minor Leaguers. All the while, ticket prices have increased, and stadiums have continued to implement practices such a locker system in Nationals Park for fans' belongings that add more cost to the fan experience. The owners have made the sport less accessible for people of all socioeconomic backgrounds, and they have forwent spending on players to the point where solid major league contributors like Derek Dietrich had to settle for Minor League deals once they hit free agency. All the while they continue to insult the players with crappy proposal after crappy proposal, all of which go back on their promised prorated salary that they agreed to with the players months ago. Manfred has failed to keep them in check, and has in many cases gone to bat for them. Is this what a commissioner who cares about his sport should be doing? Now, the thing is, we puny mortals who write and chat about these issues don't have any say about who gets to be the Commissioner of Baseball. The owners do. It's the owners' vote that determines who becomes Commissioner. And if you're an owner, do you think Rob Manfred is doing a bad job? Probably not. I mean, baseball is certainly not what these owners care about the most; it's their bottom lines. And those have soared under Manfred, with baseball enjoying revenue records year after year. Is there any reason for them to change course? Absolutely not. So this is how it will stay. For the foreseeable future, you can continue to expect this sport to be relentlessly pilfered and gutted by a group of owners, enabled by their commissioner, much to the detriment of the players and owners who live for this sport every summer day. What a damn shame.
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About MeI'm Jeremy, and I like baseball. Watching it and writing about it mainly. This is where the latter goes. My other hobbies include video games, singing, biking, and slacking off. I live in New Jersey and go to school at Goucher College in Baltimore. That's me on TV! If you want a better look, check out this video. Watch the stands on Kyle Lewis' home run very closely. Look for the skinny guy with the Yankees hat.
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