Jeff Fletcher | November 23, 2011

I still keep hearing people claiming that the new CBA, as it relates to the draft and international markets, is going to be bad for baseball because it’s going to reduce the talent pool. It’s a very simplistic way to look at it.

MLB spends less money on amateur athletes, so MLB gets a worse pool of athletes.

Well, it doesn’t work that way. An athlete doesn’t just choose the sport he’s going to pursue the way a person picks the station where he’s going to get gas.

The reason that athletes ultimately choose to sign to play baseball is because … they want to play baseball. We all pick careers based on our interests and abilities, not on what can get us paid the most. Otherwise we’d have a society with no teachers and no sports writers. We’d all be Major League Baseball players. I know I would be.

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Jeff Fletcher | November 22, 2011

Been hearing a lot about the impact of the new CBA. Most of the stuff seems pretty straightforward, except the draft stuff, which, depending on who you believe, is either the best thing or the worst thing ever for small-market teams. I lean toward the latter, but I’m now not sure.

Since I posted my earlier item, in which I said it was decidedly bad, I’ve actually seen the terms of the agreement, and it’s more murky. I’ve changed my opinion because I think it’s possible that the penalties for overspending, a very harsh tax and the loss of draft picks, are sufficient to also slow down spending of the high-revenue teams. In that case, maybe it acts more like a hard cap or hard slotting.

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Jeff Fletcher | November 22, 2011

First, I’d like to congratulate Major League Baseball and its players for once again peacefully resolving their labor disputes. Sure makes baseball look good compared to those fools at that other league. (What’s it called? I barely remember it. The one with the guys wearing the long shorts. Oh, never mind.)

That being said, I don’t like what they’ve done to the draft. (At the moment I’m going on what’s been reported, since the official announcement hasn’t happened yet.) As you remember, I endorsed the idea of “hard slotting” system over the summer. This is supposedly a compromise between that and the current system, but I think it’s actually worse than either.

What we’ve got, it sounds like, is a luxury-tax system, where teams get hit with a tax for spending more than a certain amount on the draft. So, what they’ve really done is increase the price of draft picks, which makes it harder for the low-revenue teams to take the best players in the draft.

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Jeff Fletcher | November 21, 2011

This debate happens almost every year at MVP time: can a player be the “most valuable” if his team doesn’t go to the playoffs, or doesn’t even contend? How valuable can you be on a fourth-place team?

Plenty, I say.

I’ve changed my opinion on this recently, but this is where I am now. If you ask a GM what “value” he wants out of his players, it’s to help the team win games. Period. The player who helps his team win the most games is the most valuable. If the team still doesn’t win enough games, that’s the GM’s fault for not having enough good players.

That’s why I’d have voted for Jose Bautista. He helped the Blue Jays win the most games, in my opinion, by being the best everyday offensive player in the league. Justin Verlander and Jacoby Ellsbury and Miguel Caberera were all awesome, but I’d have picked Bautista.

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Jeff Fletcher | November 14, 2011

Now that the winner has been revealed, and I can take some comfort in the fact that most of my colleagues agreed with me, here’s how I settled on my ballot…

I had a very tough time with this award. It went down to the wire. I think a reasonable case could be made for any of four guys: Jeremy Hellickson, Eric Hosmer, Ivan Nova and Mark Trumbo. And that says nothing of two guys–Dustin Ackley and Desmond Jennings–who might actually have been the best rookies, but who didn’t get enough playing time to warrant consideration ahead of players who did it for 120+ games, or 25+ starts. I also thought Jordan Walden, Michael Pineda, Guillermo Moscoso and Jemile Weeks had the type of seasons that easily could have earned them votes most years. Heck, Walden and Pineda could have won the award easily some years.

But this was a tough year to be an AL rookie.

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