Anyone For Some Horse Trading? Part 1 - Setting the stage

 Twitter is buzzing with lots of opinions about what baseball needs to thrive and a lot of tweeters are spouting gloom and doom about a work stoppage in 2027.

And I can see why people are concerned, given what it will take, just from an approval perspective:

1. The owners have to UNANIMOUSLY approve the new CBA that will be proposed?

2. That a majority of players have to approve it and that vote can be influenced by the thirty union reps (one for each team) and the executive committee of the MLBPA.

And that is after the negotiations between the MLBPA (led by their new Executive Director), and the Labor Relations Department within the office of the Commissioner of Baseball.

Just from a numbers and personalities perspective it seems impossible to believe that this could get done.

Still, let's assume reasonable heads will prevail and both sides WILL want to hammer out an agreement to save the 2027 season. 

How would an agreement come about that the owners and the players would be able to approve?

From some good, old-fashioned horse trading, that's how.  The trick is to know what compromises will have to be made on each side and how those compromises fit together.

The thing that rankles me is that the Labor Relations Departament and the MLBPA do not appear to be seriously negotiating yet.  Now when I began college my preferred study method was all-night cramming before an exam.   But as I got a little older I saw that if I just studied more along the way it made preparation for tests a lot easier.

So I think the the MLBPA and the MLB owners need to do less crammng and more work along the way, starting today.

Part 2 will lay out, using my 7 part series on how to fix baseball, what points will be horse traded.  That is, what points I think the players union and management will be willing to compromise on, including  sub-groups within each group.

So, look for part 2 soon.  I am working on it now.

What Would An International Draft Look Like?

 So, I was thinking: What would it look like if we had an international draft?

From my previous posts on the subject:

General

• The goal of the international draft would be to distribute the talent more favorably to teams that needed it the most while making sure that the top players were still going to make similar bonuses to what they had made previously.
• The draft would be 5 rounds, with 150 players being selected
• Non-drafted free agents could be signed for $150,000 or less and not count against a team's draft pool. There would be a limit of 30 players any team could sign in one year
• Draft order would be based on the regular season record in the previous year 
• The draft would have a hard draft cap for those 5 rounds.  If a team exceeded their cap they would lose the ability to participate in the international draft in the next year.
• All teams who receive competitive balance picks in the Rule 4 draft would have an additional $2 million added to their draft budget.  A competitive balance team that has one of the first 5 picks in the international draft would not be eligible for this additional bonus money.
• Teams must spend 90% of their draft budget
• International bonus money could no longer be traded
• Trading of international draft picks would not be allowed as this could be used by teams as a way not to have to spend money on bonuses for this draft.
• An add-on to the draft would be that the rules of control change so these players can not become minor league free agents until after their 7th season (current is after 6 seasons) and the Rule 5 draft is abolished. In this way teams have enough time to develop these players and yet the players are still young when they can become minor league free agents, even including the 3 options years if they are added to the 40 man roster at some point during that period.

What would the draft budgets look like?

Looking at the top 150 bonuses from the international signing periods of 2026 and 2025, I came up bonuses for the 150 slots in my draft.  If you follow the bonuses that come out of these signing periods you'll see that the slot values are generally flatter than they are in the Rule 4 draft, meaning that I had to do some work to make sure that bonuses continued to go down slightly with each pick with the goal to keep the 150th pick having roughly the same value as the 150th highest signing bonus for the most recent international classes.  I also compared those bonuses to the top 150 draft slots in the 2025 R4 draft, finding that all the R4 draft slots were significantly higher, as expected, than the equivalent slot values in my international draft. That made me feel good, knowing teams would be spending significantly less on 16 year olds than they spent on 18-21 year olds who likely had more polish and were more known quantities. 

So, how did all this turn out?

Cleveland, based on their 2025 record, would draft 22nd. Their bonus pool would be $4,070,000 with the additional $2 million added to their budget given them a total pool of $6,070,000 of which they would be required to spend roughly $5,500,000.  Note that their bonus cap for the 2026 international signing period (includes all bonuses of > $10,000) was $8 million of which they spent roughly $6.7 million on signing prospects.  It is very reasonable that they would meet their bonus pool spent this year if we included all the additional prospects they would sign as NDFAs in the international draft who they signed for over $10,000. If Cleveland used their entire bonus pool AND signed an additional 25 players to bonuses of $150,000 they would have a total budget of almost $11 million to work with as they could spend up to $3.75 million on those additional 25 players if all signed for $150,000.

Colorado, based on having the worst record in 2025, would have the #1 slot and their bonus pool for the first 5 rounds would be about $8.5 million. The Chicago White Sox would have a budget of $8.2 million, and the Washington Nationals would have a budget of roughly $7.9 million. The LA Dodgers would have the 30th slot and, as a result, would have a 5 round bonus pool of roughly $3.6 million, which would almost double if they signed 25 additional prospects to bonuses of $150,000.

THOUGHTS

There would be some wrinkles that would have to be ironed out to have an international draft:

• How would these players be trained if the current buscon system was dissolved.
• How would talent be evaluated leading up to the draft?
• Would these measures ensure that teams are appropriately spending on amateur international player acquisition or would we need additional guard rails to make sure teams were spending enough to acquire quality NDFAs under this new draft.

So, in summary, this is just one possible plan to handle the international draft.  My premise of 5 rounds could be faulty although teams serious about talent in this part of the world might be more incentivized under this system to scout more heavily as the pool of uncommitted players after a draft of this type would be huge, as there are about 550 players who were signed during the international period this year, meaning that there will be about 400 players of signable quality who would be available in the NDFA part of this process, as opposed to the situation in the past, where probably 90% of those 400 being committed to teams long before the signing period began.

Again, one guy's thoughts.  But I hope we can agree on one thing: to aid in competitive balance we need an international draft now.  

Potpourri - February 10, 2026

FREE AGENT THOUGHTS:

 Here are some truths about free agency

• If you invest in free agency you are likely to overpay but...you get talent you don't have.
• If you don't invest in free agency you have two choices
• Just go with what you have and hope or...
• Trade players (and maybe a draft choice) for players you could have had in free agency

This winter in free agency teams like Pittsburgh, Chicago White Sox and Detroit have invested in free agency. In some cases they also made trades.

But the bottom line is that they have gotten better...at least on paper.  In Detroit's case, they got a lot better, even though their recent signing of Framber Valdez might just have been a precursor to them trade arbitration winner Tarik Skubal.  

The Guardians, on the other hand have done the following:

• Sign free agent Austin Hedges (money well spent, and I don't care what anyone says)
• Sign free agent Shawn Armstrong (I'll reserve judgement on this one, cough, Paul Sewald, cough)
• Sign free agent AAAA RPs, Connor Brogdon and Colin Houlderman to MAJOR LEAGUE contracts and FA AAAA OFer Stuart Fairchild.  Never can have too many AAAA FAs, although you don't usually sign those guys to ML deals.
• Have gone public saying that they are (1) they won't be signing any top, expensive free agents and (2) they inept at signing meh free agents so they don't plan to sign any of those, either...and publicly bet money that the media couldn't identify the mistakes they have made trying to go cheap in free agency over the last several years.
• Said they are going with their own, LHH-heavy prospect pool to fill out their roster as they have to give these guys a chance..right before the Tigers signed Valdez, given the Tigers two of the best LH SP in baseball.

To summarize, the Guardians have, in the past 7 months:

(a) Were sellers at the ML trading deadline

(b) Won the AL Central championship with a historic finish/historic Tigers collapse

(c) Said they weren't going to sign any good or meh FAs

(d) Proceeded to sign two AAAA FA RPs to major league deals

This on the heels of way underspending their 2026 international bonus budget, signing a bunch of middling prospects instead of 1-2 top FAs AND having a really, really bad draft in 2025 where they seemed to panic and make a lot of bad, overdraft decisions and the 2024 draft where their first #1 overall pick in team history is looking like a case of bad scouting, their second round pick looks like an overdraft with the upside of a quality major league backup catcher.  This, of course, follows two years of overdrafting LHH college slap hitters and, for the most part, getting away from the one decision showing they MIGHT be the smartest guys in the room, that being the 2021 college pitcher draft that has netted Williams and Bibee and other potential future ML pitchers.

I remember a movie called "And Justice For All".  A small part of the movie was a subplot where a judge used to eat his lunch on the ledge of his building and, if I remember the story right, would fill up the tank of his private plane and fly it a little further out over the ocean every day to see how far he could go without running out of gas and crashing on the way back. The Guardians' FO seems to want to prove that they can have success with less and less resources every year, sort of like that judge and his private plane.  

My advice to the Guardians FO and ownership is stop trying to get the same result with less resources and, for the Guardians FO, stop trying to be the smartest guys in the room.  This team cannot afford to make mistakes on amateur player acquistion and development and on finding cute ways to compete without spending.

I love this team and always will.  But this crap has to stop.

GENIE IN THE BOTTLE

Continuing on the free agent theme I am still seeing a lot of "But wait, there are still things the Guardians can do"

I have seen free agent signing proposals, trade proposals and extension candidate proposals.

Besides the extension candidates that I already wrote about (Ramirez, Kwan, Cade Smth, Williams), I don't see anything else I would do at this point.

There is a story about a genie trapped in a bottle who sat around waiting for someone to set him free.  At first, when he had hope, he thought he would give the person who set him free the three best wishes possible, no tricks.  But the longer he was trapped in that bottle his hope turned to despair and, eventually, anger.  After a while his only thought was to get out of that bottle and trap the person who eventually freed in in the bottle just to show someone else how bad it was.

Well, I have become the genie.  Except for the extension candidates above, at this point I will be really mad if the Guardians actually sign a free agent or trade valuable minor league resources for a player of the type they could have had in free agency.  Hays, Robert Jr., Ozuna and many other viable free agents went to other small market teams.  It would be a slap in the face for the Guardians to turn to the bargain basement bin to pull out a remaining free agent.  Yeah, maybe guys, especially starting pitching, on minor league deals in case of injuries.  But the Guardians have been clear.  They want the young players to play.  

At this point I am resgned to that happening.  Any change in course now that costs us money and/or rosters spots and/or prospects to try to upgrade a team that CA and Chernoff have purposely NOT tried to make better over the winter is bad management and a slap in the face to Cleveland fans.  Hey guys, you have done nothing all wnter.  Don't do anything stupid now!

OK, I'll say it.  You have proven you are the smartest guys in the room. Now sit back and enjoy the ride.  You wouldn't want to do anything to mess up your brilliant strategy now, right?  So let's, for the rest of this season (except for the extension candidates above) just sit back and all admire your brilliance.  Doing anything now might muddy the waters of how brilliant your strategy is.  So, let's not!