Major League Baseball’s owners and players are in the midst of exchanging proposals that each side knows the other will never approve. It’s called “collective bargaining.” It’s also annoying.
Almost none of it is productive. Both sides just get angry with one another, and fans, who have no say in any of it, are left feeling frustrated.
The Major League Baseball owners’ latest proposal that the players will never accept involves the annual amateur draft.
In it, the MLB owners want to make all high school players ineligible for the draft. They also want to make it so no American-born players are eligible until they turn 20-years-old.
They made this suggestion knowing that last year’s number one overall pick Eli Willits was 17-years-old. They also did it knowing that players like Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, Bobby Witt Jr., Manny Machado, Christian Yelich, and Freddie Freeman were all drafted straight out of high school.
Also in the owners’ proposal is making 12 rounds instead of 20, and implementing a 12-round international draft for players from outside of the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico. In that draft, the minimum age for players to sign would go from 16 to 18-years-old.
“Over the last several years, college baseball has undergone a remarkable transformation,” Front Office Sports reports the league said. “Expanded scholarships, NIL opportunities, revenue sharing, and significant investments in facilities and player development have made college baseball an increasingly important pathway that is producing major league-ready talent at an accelerated rate.”
In other words, Major League Baseball owners want to put the cost of player development more on colleges and less on themselves.
One of those players who was drafted out of high school called the proposal ‘ridiculous’
This past Friday, when a reporter informed one of those players who was drafted out of high school, Freddie Freeman, about the owners’ amateur draft proposal, his reply, according to the New York Post, was, “What?”
When it was explained to him again, he responded, “I think maybe now the fans will start seeing that it’s just money. Because that’s just cutting. It’s all about money.” He also called it “ridiculous.”
“I loved coming out of high school,” he added. “It got me into the professional ranks. It got me into being able to develop into that organization and how they expect you to play. They believed in you at such a young age.”
Freddie Freeman’s teammate Mookie Betts, another one of those players drafted out of high school, echoed those sentiments.
“That meant the world to me,” Betts said. “I feel like I developed faster, just because I was in it at 18. The younger you can get into it, the quicker you can develop to [the pro] game. Because this game is different than the college game. I’m not saying either one is better or worse, but I just feel like that was my advantage. I got to learn a professional style of baseball at 18.”