Revisiting the Rule 5 Draft - A dinosaur that should be placed in a museum and the path forward

 Here are some 'facts' that need to be checked but which I believe will be found to be true:

• The Rule 5 draft does very little of what it was intended to do. 
• Only 7 of 127 players selected in this draft between 2011 and 2019 have become impactful major leaguers.
• Only 56 of those 127 even were good enough to stick with their new team.  
• 27 of the 56 that stuck had no impact at all in the majors and many never played in the majors again.
• Due to the Rule 5, teams roster prospects long before they should just so they don't lose them.  The upshot of this is that these players start to burn up their 3 options long before they are even good enough to stick in the majors
• My experience tells me that if a good, solid study was done we would find that, on average, being selected in the Rule 5 draft is actually detrimental to a player's development and may actually hurt that player's chances to stick long-term in the majors.  is 

As I understand it, the Rule 5 draft and the 6-year minor league free agent rules were put in place to keep teams, usually the rich teams, from stockpiling talent in the minors.  Instead, the reverse is happening.   The smaller budget and the rebuilding franchises, that are actually supposed to be helped by these rules are being hurt by them.

The Rule 5 draft is bad and I hope Major League Baseball will eliminate it before the rosters have to be set this winter.

Here is how we replace it with a system that makes sense.

• For players signed before their 19th birthday they can become minor league free agents if they are not placed on their team's 40-man roster before the first December after their 24th birthday
• High school draftees will become minor league free agents EXACTLY when they would under the old system
• Latin American players, many of whom sign when they are 16 or 17 will get an extra 2 or 1 years, respectively, to develop before they are allowed to become free agents.   
• For players signed after their 19th birthday, they will become minor league free agents if they are not placed on a team's 40-man roster before the first December after their 25th birthday.
• Most of these are college players and they will get to minor league free agency a little before they did in the past, depending on if they signed when they were 19 or if they signed when they were 22.  This is a benefit for these players as they can get their freedom sooner than they would under the old system, in some cases.
• No player is allowed to have more than 3 minor league options once they have been added to the 40-man roster.

Thinking about how this will impact these guys in terms of making it to another organization, here is what we have:

• Latin signees and high school draftees, at the worst (full minor league career and 3 option years after being put on the 40-man) will have to be kept in the majors or DFA'd by the time they are 27 years old.   
• College players will reach that threshhold when the are 28.

For the college and high school draftees that will, essentially, not change from the current6-year minor league free agent rule.  For Latin kids, they will have 2 more years or so to develop.

How will this impact these minor leaguers

• The better prospects will have more time to develop
• The guys who turn out to not be good prospects will be released, probably about the same time they are released now. 
• Kids will still get the opportunity to move to another organization while they are still relatively young.

In summary, the goal of the Rule 5 and 6 year minor league free agent rules was to help the "have not" teams compete with the rich teams with deep pockets.   It isn't working and my plan above, or a similar plan, is needed to level the player development playing field and allow the weaker franchises to compete as they should do best: by signing and developing young, inexpensive players.