I wouldn’t be surprised if the players were more likely to bring this up. With last year’s down economic market, a lot of players had trouble getting signed, or signed for substantially less money, because of Type A status. I think Orlando Cabrera had it worked into the under-market contract he eventually signed that he couldn’t be ofered arbitration at the end of the year. If the compensation system is costing the players money now, the MLBPA will probably bring it up at the next round of labor talks. Perhaps some kind of exchange/concession for hard slotting in the draft?

Also, teams drafting in the first half of the draft have their first rounder protected. So if the Rays signed Burnett, Toronto gets a first rounder. If the Royals had signed him, they get a second rounder. Since the Yankees signed him, they got a third rounder. That makes incredibly little sense.

Same compensaion for signing Juan Cruz as for signing Teixeira, but they’re not exactly equally productive players. Part of that is the Elias rankings, part of it is the assumption that all Type A free agents are created equal, and part of it is the compensation system whereby draft picks are directly aquired from the team to sign the player.

Wow. It’s not even the randomness itself that surprises me as much as the potentially dramatic consequences: if the right team signs your player you could end up with Mike Montgomery (assuming you draft well). But that’s sort of my point, too. In the supplemental first round there are still a bunch of no-brainers waiting to be drafted.

So there are number of flaws with the system and I’ve sort of conflated them in my cute little screen play:

(1) valuable picks are given for the departure of unspectacular players (the Greg Zaun/David Riske problem. This problem doesn’t favor big market clubs—but it’s still BS).
(2) valuable picks are given to teams that obtain players from other teams—players that don’t even have to spend an entire season with the club who gets the compensation picks (the Wagner problem. This problem does favor large market clubs because they can afford to take on large contracts that smaller market teams want to unload. This problem could be mitigated by ruling that a player has to have played with a team for X amount of time before the team is eligible to receive compensation for said player’s departure).
(3) as ‘trusttheprocess’ points out, your compensation varies (wildly) on who signs your player. I don’t know you fix this problem.

Those are three pretty big problems.

I’m not sure whose fault it is. MLB may have said, “hey, elias. WE want a ranking system where only x,y, and z are considered.” Or MLB may have said, “hey, elias, rank people using whatever standards you want.”

But yeah, the rankings are comical. Defense isn’t considered for outfielders or first basemen, starting pitchers get points for wins and winning percentage, wins count for relief pitchers, k/bb is a stat for relief pitchers but not starters (evidently it only matters if you walk batters after the fifth inning), sb/cs not considered, slugging not considered, etc. Even if you were only using old school statistics, you could do a much better job than they do. At least OBP counts…

http://tigers-thoughts.blogspot.com/2008/07/almost-how-elias-sports-bureau-rankings.html

Even more mad props!

You just called Dayton Moore stupid (partially) because he didn’t consider the draft impact of not picking up Olivo’s option. There’s a major problem with your point: picking up Olivo’s option is utterly irrelevant to this entire situation. Had the Royals picked up his option, he almost certainly would have accepted… meaning no arbitration decision, no free agency, and no draft pick — and we’d have been paying $5M for one season of the Miguel Olivo Air Recirculation System and Pitch Avoidance Device. ($3.3M salary, plus the exact same performance bonuses from this year.)

Why would he almost certainly accept? Well, nobody else is stupid enough to pay him $5M either.

Anyway, the point here is that the option is irrelevant. What you possibly meant to say was that they should have offered him arb this year — but one thing we’ve always debated is whether Olivo’s contract contained a clause preventing the Royals from offering in the first place. Even if it didn’t, thanks to his counting stats and home run totals, he would likely have gotten well over $3M in arbitration. Given the market, his agent would be a complete idiot to turn down arbitration if offered, because he’s not getting any $5M on the open market.

And then, we’d have to offer him arb next season to get the hypothetical draft pick, and risk him accepting arb then for a salary no less than $3M, and almost certainly higher than $3.5 if he put up traditional counting stats like this year. Granted, that contract would be without performance bonuses, but you’re still looking at potentially paying $8-9M for two years of Olivo when you really didn’t want him at all in the first place, and still coming away with no draft pick in the near term.

And since paying Miguel Olivo $9M over two years is just as stupid as paying Jason Kendall $6M, letting Miguel Olivo walk is actually something that belongs on the positive side of Dayton Moore’s ledger. It’s not something that helps prove he’s an idiot.

(Buck, he should have offered. We all know that.)

I don’t think Olivo had anything in his contract about the Royals not being allowed to offer arbitration. If he had, I

think one of our fantastic beat writers would have brought it up.

One way the Royals could’ve done it — offer Olivo arbitration but let him know in no uncertain terms that even if he accepts, he’s the backup.