The devil himself, Scott Boras, is at it again, making sure he does his part in ruining baseball. He is seeking a ridiculous deal for the Nationals' number 1 overall pick, Steven Strasburg. Granted he is statistically the best college pitcher ever, but so was Mark Prior and we all know how that turned out (poor Cubbies... HA!).
Boras is seeking a deal that will likely be worth several times the $10.5 million deal given to Prior when he was drafted. Thankfully the Nationals are not too keen on the idea of setting a new rookie salary precedent, even for a talent like Strasburg.
The Nationals have already started their counteroffensive, saying they're not going to throw baseball's salary structure out of whack for one player and that the expectations surrounding Strasburg have reached unrealistic proportions.
I have a feeling that, in the end, the Nationals will lose out and that Strasburg will get a deal near what he and Boras are seeking. I commend the Nationals for wanting to put up a fight, but they really are in a crap situation. Had they chose to not draft him, they would have caught so much flack and lost too many fans (if they have any). But now that they have drafted him, they run a high risk of financially handcuffing the whole organization for one player. A player that hasn't proven anything at the next level and if history is any indicator (which it usually is), has a reasonable chance to fail or get injured. The classic Catch-22 that small market baseball teams are forced to deal with every year in the draft. I really do feel bad for the Nationals, because they are supposed to be awarded the number one pick for enduring such a sorry season, in hopes of improving their team. But in the end, it could likely do the opposite.
This is just another reason for the MLB to go to a structured rookie salary system like the NBA has. I'm not suggesting the MLB necessarily needs to go to a full salary cap system like the other major sports have; nor do I think the rookie pay scale needs to be as stringent as the NBA. I am saying that something needs to be done, as the system is failing us. The draft is designed to give the worst teams the best picks, so they can take the kind of talent that can change a franchise. But instead, every year these smaller market teams are forced to take lesser talent in order to save money, because the big talent kids are demanding ridiculous amounts of money.
ESPN.com's Buster Olney:
This is the problem with baseball's draft, in a nutshell, a problem that many general managers want to fix during the next collective bargaining negotiation. They want the worst teams to be able to take the best players in the draft, rather than the most affordable good players. Or, they want the worst teams to at least be able to have a chance to realize the value of their draft position -- so if the Mariners didn't want to pay Dustin Ackley's demands, expected to be in the range of $6.5 million, they could at least trade that pick to another team for other assets.
"There isn't much margin for error for the small-market teams to win, and the draft is the best way for those teams to get better," one GM said recently. "But if they don't have access to the best players because of the way the draft is messed up, how are they really going to have a chance to compete?"
Olney pretty much sums it up: The draft system is flawed and we can all hope that something is done to change this in the next labor negotiation.
Sources:
Boras: No. 1 pick 'different breed of cat'
Signability still an MLB draft trump card
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