Well, I was a bit curious about what the actual player demands were. Turns out I was spot on about the players wanting to get rid of the whole arbitration years thing.
I have one idea to deal with the tanking issue in baseball. The problem is it's too darn good a strategy for building a team that remains competitive for years (unless you've got whatever magical strategy the Rays employ). Without it, there's no point even having a draft. How else are you going to keep the best teams from signing the best prospects?
I propose using something like the international pool system. Fine, the Yankees can have their pick of the best prospects every year...ONCE. Just once. You limit how many prospects the most popular teams can sign. The most popular teams might snag the top 5 prospects or so, but then that's it. They're done.
The less popular teams have much higher limits. If prospects want to be paid at a higher level, they gotta join the teams with more open slots/a larger pool/whatever during a designated signing period of sorts (outside of it, teams can pay whatever, but the idea is ONLY during this special signing period prospects can expect to be paid big; there should be some stipulation in place that forces teams to expend their entire pool, and obviously pools should be large to force cheap teams to pay up; basically, instead of revenue sharing, it's a larger draft pool). Team placement and revenue also affects how many slots/pool they have, obviously.
To prevent teams fro convincing prospects they suck long enough to sign them cheap outside of the designated signing season, there should be independent MLB scouts any school or kid can call to give them an honest evaluation.
Well, I'm sure there are some holes in that idea, I imagine it would be pretty crazy seeing dozens of teams competing for hundreds of prospects all at once instead of using a nice and ordered drafting system, but it seems to me tying revenue sharing to drafting pools would be a good way to ensure teams spent their money on getting better especially if you give the team free rein to sign whoever they want and force them to spend every penny on players. Of course, I doubt they would actually do this. Then again, I doubted MLB would ever consider shortening the season, expanding the playoffs, or implementing a universal DH.
