I’m pretty sure if Ben Sheets was not gonna cost the A’s a first rounder he would already be wearing a green and gold uniform. Not sure about Cabrera but I don’t really want him anyway.

Wasn’t/Isn’t the point of FA Compensation to help out smaller market teams (or teams with less payroll) to stay competitive by giving them picks when their top players leave? Thus, these low payroll teams aren’t likely to be signing top FA’s for big dollars, and will never get any compensation, and their current homegrown talent that leaves for greener pastures won’t return a high(er) level pick. Of course, if you institute the sandwhich round, the pick can’t fall too low. But I think that the compensation should still be decided by talent. I just don’t know what kind of talent metric one should use.

and continue to take checks from the other teams that do. Tampa was the poster child for this before going to the big show this year. The Marlins always come to mind. They have completely blown up their team twice after winning the WS. Although, they have done that mostly their trading their talent away, as opposed to letting their talent walk.

They got screwed with Burnett.

If they just got some better people doing the “rankings” and gave out “Type-A” status to fewer people.

I’m not sure why they have to drop all the way to the next round. They could then just remove the Yankees 2nd and 3rd round picks completely.

Also, the A’s should get a draft pick for every FA signed. So when the Dodgers signed Furcal (resigned) then the A’s get theirs. When the Yankees signed their 3 tops FAs the A’s get three top picks from the Yankees.

Or to be a bit more realistic how about if the teams get a sandwich pick for type A FA’s after the first round. Then they get a sandwich pick between the 2nd and 3rd rounds for a type B.

We needs to talk wit youse about extending da brand.

Allowing a team like the Yankees to dominate the FA market AND have unlimited access to international FA’s AND be able to have a full draft creates the potential for them to overwhelm the majority of teams through sheer financial willpower. Signing the next Sabs or Tex on the FA market should cost a team a draft pick.

I like the idea of multiple pick compensation and from that suggest that when a team signs more than one premier FA it loses the corresponding draft picks and to avoid anyone getting Toronto’d having a tiered system of assigning supplemental picks. If a team receives a 1st round pick as compensation for losing a FA they get 1 sup pick, much like the current system. If a team is forced to accept a 2nd round pick they get 2 sup picks; 3rd round pick leads to 3 sup picks and so on as necessary. I’d also make it so only the Top 10 picks in the 1st round are protected.

What I’m not clear on is what you propose to do about teams having to offer arbitration prior to receiving compensation. Care to explain?

…actual free agency? Contract is up, player is free to sign with any other team, including their present team, at any mutually negotiated price. No restrictions, no offering arbitration games. None of that crap. Contract’s up —→ player’s a free agent.

The response option on the poll more than anything else.

“They can have any color they want, as long as it is black.”

In your system Brewers are going to get three picks in a row from 34 to 36? That seems weird to me.

Admittedly, I can’t come up with any good reason why a team shouldn’t get three consecutive picks, but it just seems wrong for draft picks not to alternate between teams.

Interesting.

Let the free market dictate free agent compensation.

…FA compensation is anything but free market. The idea of a team offering a lowball contract to a player whose contract just ended, knowing full well that he’ll reject it, simply to get compesatory draft picks from that player’s next team is an obstacle to a truly free market.

In a truly free market [that is, post player-control, post arbitration eligible years] if the previous team does not make a competitive offer for the player’s services, the previous team get jack. The only thing they get is a freed up roster spot for not ponying up the money to retain the player.

If the larger market teams would benefit from this [this: the absence of FA comp picks] then perhaps the questions that should be asked are why those teams are big market teams to begin with and why the owners have a bigger purses. Life isn’t equitable and niether are some businesses in relation to others…but fairness does exist; it’s just that many do not like the outcomes when the rules aren’t rigged to favor those with less resources.

Best poll ever.

/comicbookguy

Unfortunately, this one would be easy to game…. we’d see a lot of contracts like this:

1 year, minimum salary guaranteed
Huge bonus for playing 100 games
Multi-year extension kicks in after first 100 games are played…

So basically none of the money would be guaranteed until after the draft.

Perhaps this isn’t allowed today, but this is what people would try to push through based on this approach.

So, I think it has to be based on a better Type-A/B/C system than is there today. That said, I do like the sandwich round idea a lot.

clarifications you provided in the comments and some of the other ideas that were presented for fine-tuning the allocation of the picks in the sandwich round and draft order for those compensation picks (cascading by value in a draft order, not bunched.)

A couple things for sure- the arbitration process for free agents is a joke and needs to be abolished or seriously reconsidered, and the draft pick compensation system for loss of valuable free agent players due to economic viability is not working.

I like the ideas of eliminating the “penalty” part of the compensation system and of simply awarding compensation picks in a sandwich or supplementary round… I wouldn’t make the supplementary round a specific number of slots, but would make it dependent on the size of the free agent class and all that like others have already suggested here.

I wonder if the “contract value” approach for determining number of compensation picks for a player and draft order in the supplementary round is a viable mechanism… I can see where it would get pretty complicated pretty quickly, and as others have mentioned in the comments here (like dylan, above) it might lead to a wave of bizarre contract structures or something. Plus, values shift over time and it would have to be adjusted to reflect current economics and contract values, sometimes on an annual basis. Maybe some incarnation of Deep Puddle’s formulation earlier in the thread here would work…

But personally I think it would be easier to just recalibrate the Elias rankings for Type A, B, and C players so as to make Type A players a more truly elite grouping, Type B the “average to decent” and largest grouping, and Type C could perhaps be eliminated completely. From there, I would allocate 2 picks for Type A free agents, and 1 pick for Type B free agents… or, if it makes more sense (since there would be few Type A free agents any given year now) to allocate 3 picks for a Type A and 2 picks for a Type B.

The biggest things would be eliminating the useless dance involved with free agent arbitration, and eliminating the uncertainty of draft-pick compensation for clubs losing players while also eliminating the draft-pick penalty for clubs investing in those same players. You do those two things, and fine-tune the Elias system, and I think you’ve done enough without having to completely reinvent the free agent valuation mechanism.

the libertarian i am gets warm and fuzzy with the “let the open market dictate compensation” part…