Our Free Agency

[Rockies GM (Alex)]

Hey everyone,

First of all, I have to be the first to admit our free agency process wasn't the greatest or most well thought through. Here's the problems I see with it and possible solutions for next year. I would love everyone's opinion's on this.

Also, I've made it easier, the 72 hours was ridiculous. All trades will only need 48 hours as of noon CT December 5th, 2011. On December 9th, 7 PM all deals will go to 24 hours.

Okay, so here's my problems:

1. Teams were able to franchise and ARB players much cheaper than signing players in free agency. So you have Albert Pujols making less than Kelly Johnson. Big problem.

2. 72 hours is to long and I think everyone was losing interest in waiting around so long for players to become official.

3. There wasn't much depth to free agency, not enough guys to make it interesting or to balance out the league.

And many other small problems that contributed to an overall poor free agency.

Here's my solutions for next year:

1. Higher paid ARB and Franchise Tags
The amount paid per year for franchise tags will increase significantly, so keeping a player like pujols would cost more like 40m, filling up more cap room. ARB players will also have higher increases, making teams move closer to the salary cap.

Once the best players are being paid more, there will be less cap available to spend on guys like Jeff Francoeur... 25m for him??? I don't think this can happen.

2. 24 hours official for everyone. All you need is a bid standing for one day and he's yours. Will definitely shorten up the waiting around time.

3. The higher cap for the ARB and Tag increases will make it harder for teams to keep everyone through ARB and less likely to franchise guys for higher amounts of money. Also, we make it only 1 restriction tag.

4. The silent bidding process is expanded. We decrease the amount on top players... say:

1-25 reach 30m
25-75 reach 25m
75-125 reach 20m
125-250 reach 15m
250+ reach 12m

This way more players will have silent bidding, less deals with ridiculous prices because they were all driven up by competition... players are worth more because more people want them hey, just like the market crash of '29 US History's paying off... haha.

So, these are my thoughts, let's try to get through this year's FA, and I apologize it wasn't very well run.

Here's to 2012!

Thanks,

Alex

[Braves GM (Jared)]

I think we should keep the two restriction tags. The idea to add more money to arbitration and franchise is great.

Here is how I think we should do free agency...

First of all the entire process will be silent bidding format. The free agents are ranked (we can just use someone elses ranking system) and the free agents are released one at a time for one day at a time. You can put out a schedule of what players will be released on what days and that way the owners can make sure they send in a bid on the players they want.

So lets take Pujols for example...He is deemed the number one free agent so day one is Pujols day. At 8:00 the bidding for him begins and the last bids must be in by lets say 9:00pm central time. The commish (or whoever) then goes into the account that was receiving the bids and awards Pujols to the highest per year bidder (this will require teams to make their highest and best offer only once). One of the commishes will htne post who won the player either that night or the next morning and we move on to the next player. For that matter we could even release 2 or 3 players each day and make sure they are on the schedule (google docs would work well). This makes the process easy and fair and players like Francoeur wont be getting 25M deals.

[Royals GM (Bill)]

I think that the root of the problem is very simple; the salary cap is too high and needs to be reduced drastically. When we start off with actual MLB salaries, but give each team $175M to spend, this kind of bidding happens. How many real teams have a payroll of $175M, maybe 3 or 4? The result is that teams have $100M to spend so they figure, what the heck, $30M for Francoeur; got to spend it right?

I suggest that we look at reducing the team salary cap to somewhere around the league average....maybe around $125M, maybe even less....you'll get real prices and you'll get more trades where taking on salary actually is valuable.

Just my two cents.

[Orioles GM (Michael)]

I understand Bill's point. And, I agree. However, I think making a $50M salary cut quickly would screw over several teams quickly, myself included, as they'd be forced to clear shop quickly, likely making deals that were not in their favor (much the other way), and ruining their teams. So, I say that if we do cut the cap, we do it slowly in small incriments. So maybe something like $5M every 2 weeks or something like that, so teams don't have to sell off all their guys for trash just to get under a sudden rule change.

Again, not criticizing Bill's point. I agree with it. Just want to make sure that it happens slowly.

Also, I think that, going back to my original point, we shouldn't just have a set date to have teams get under the $125M mark, or else some GMs will likely wait till the last minute and be screwed. Yes, that's their fault, but realistically, I can envision it happening, and want to prevent it.

So, there's MY two cents.

[Deleted]

The cap should have been set at the average MLB payroll. That is, taking all 30 teams and averaging their payroll. My guess, this would be about $90 million. Maybe adding $10-$15 million on top of that to give teams a little wiggle room. Of course Yanks, Phils, Red Sox, etc. would be screwed - but then they could easily make deals with teams like the Pirates for prospects to offload.

I don't thinking shortening the bidding is really a solution. What we're doing is preventing teams from bidding, which will result in teams having more holes.

At this point, we'd be hard pressed to find a solution. None would be satisfactory to everyone. However, here's my proposal:

I think the fairest thing to do would be to increase salaries of teams not under rookie salaries. For example, increase all players ranked 1-200 salaries by 30%, 200-300 by 20%. Set a ceiling for players who are already being overpaid. So, players who have salaries of $30 mln or more and are ranked 1-25 are exempt from the increase, players 26-50 are exempt if paid $25 mln or more, 51-100 if at $20 mln or more, 101-150 if at $15 mln or more, etc.

At that point, with payrolls going up about 20%-25% on average, there will be lot less cap and lot fewer teams bidding like they are now. Teams that are put over by the rule change can be exempt for the 2012 season.

[Braves GM (Jared)]

The salary cap issue can be resolved any way you guys want to do it. My biggest issue is the way free agency is working. This rule that a bid has to stand for x amount of days is ridiculous. Thats not how it works in real life and thats not how it should work here. GMs should submit their best and highest bid that they are willing to pay for a certain player and then hope its the top one.

[Deleted]

i think we might be overreacting a little too soon to this issue. Yes, i agree the bidding is pretty outrageous. But, as a league (myself included), we have overreacted to many things before... ie. trade committee for 2 weeks, amateur draft, things like that. I don't really think there is an easy fix to this situation. If we quickly decide to change something then were just gonna have to fix it again next year. I am also for all silent bidding, but against lowering the cap. We already have a number we can't just cut in by 50 million in 2 weeks. So, my suggestion is to let things cool off for a few weeks/months. After FA is completed this way, we should change it up. But for now, its too soon to really do anything i think.

[Jacob (Former Tigers GM)]

I just wanted Choo franchised.

[Rockies GM (Alex)]

Sorry, Tigers. Here's what happened. It was deadline day. What you sent me put you over the cap by like 15m. So, instead of just dropping everyone, I made it so you kept Hunter Pence (through ARB, if you not you would have had to drop him) and restricted Choo. I couldn't have made it so you ARB and Franchised both.

[Deleted]

If we're allowing players to go $25M over the cap during the season, why didn't we allow tigers to do it?

On the other hand, you should have checked your cap Tigers and if Rox PMed you - you should responded instead of dragging it out.

[Jacob (Former Tigers GM)]

Understood.