NPB Tracker

This post comes at the request of Matt, but I’ve been a fan of Hayato Terahara since he represented Japan as a high schooler and Tommy Lasorda tried to recruit him to the Dodgers before the old Fukuoka Daiei Hawks drafted him. Note that Terahara has been on my to-do list since I started the site.

I’ve chosen Terahara’s recent complete game victory over Hiroshima to chart out.

Read on to check it out…

The post I wrote yesterday on the discarding the MLB draft certainly generated some lively debate. I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to comment. I’m also happy to see that this topic spawned interesting conversation on other sites, particularly Orioles Hangout.

To summarize what I wrote yesterday, the problems that I observed and would like to see addressed were:

• the inequity between players born in the US and outside the US
• the fact that the draft system can still be gamed by teams, players, and agents
• the potential for domestic leagues in other countries (Japan in particular) to get into bickering matches with MLB over territorial rights to players

I realize that this is in some ways an oversimplification, but my biggest point is that the current MLB draft is an outdated system that fails to account for the diversity we have in baseball today. My proposal was to eliminate the draft entirely, and replace it with a regulated free agent market, in which teams would have specific parameters on spending and number of players acquired. Some readers seemed to like the idea, others had different suggestions. Here are a few:

• force all players wishing to enter MLB through a draft
• move to a free agent system with strict bonus slots (nod to Crawdad @ Orioles Hangout)
• change the ages at which players are allowed to sign with MLB organizations
• keep the draft, but enforce caps on bonuses
• leave it alone

I’ll end this one with a question: what would you do to improve the MLB player entry system?