Suppose this team continues to flounder, due to Moore’s incompetence at hiring a player development team. Or the team could flounder simply due to an “unlucky” spell of good draft picks who don’t develop as most thought they would. What will Glass’ response be? He just might decide to go back to his cheapskate ways, concluding that spending extra money on the draft produced no better results than simply drafting college seniors and giving them miniscule bonuses. At least with a slotting system, there would be no monetary incentive for him to ever return to his misguided philosophy.

Bottom line – I STILL don’t trust this owner, so I want the slotting in place to protect him from himself.

I always found Charlie Finley’s idea to make every player a free agent every season very interesting. It would certainly give a better chance to a small market team run by an excellent management team than the current system does. I imagine it would work more like a fantasy baseball draft, with players receiving something closer to their real value, regardless of service time. Another effect would be that teams would have little or no incentive to develop players in the minors, as they would seemingly only have them for 1 year before they would become free agents. Overall effect, I would imagine, would be to depress salaries somewhat – because one of the main reasons FA salaries are higher than they should be is that demand has traditionally exceeded supply by a large amount.

Sorta ironic that an owner who was otherwise known for being equal parts of obstinance and flakiness would be the ONLY owner who knew what to do when the Messersmith ruling came down. Too bad the other owners were too dumb to think things thru.