One area where Major League Baseball has certainly tried to level that playing field, and has been successful at least from a monetary perspective, is the acquisition of amateur players. Ten years ago, teams could spend whatever they wanted on the international player market, as long as they were willing to pay the overage tax and suffer the penalties. Players like Jose Abreu and Yeonis Cespedes signed from Cuba for tens of millions of dollars. On the other hand, the Red Sox signed Rusney Castillo for $72,000,000 and he once played more than ten games in a season and hit seven home runs in the major leagues. Yet Shohei Ohtani, who could have been paid $200,000,000+ when he first came to the US, had to sign a minor league contract for next to nothing and make his money through arbitration.
That happened because MLB changed the rules to “level playing field.” Now teams are given a very specific pool allocation to spend on international players, and it ranges between $4,000,000 and $7,000,000 in total. For a team that will sign 10 to 30 players. While teams may trade slot value money with other organizations, you cannot discuss what you have (plus acquired). There is a hard limit to expenditure.
In the amateur draft, where players from the US, Canada and Puerto Rico are eligible to be selected, there is also a draft pool. That pool ranged from $5,383,600 (Yankees) to $19,144,500 (Orioles) in 2025. How many picks you have and where your picks are located plays a big role here. The first pick in the draft was worth $11,075,900. That’s more than double what the Yankees were allowed to spend on their picks in the first ten rounds (the bonus money from rounds 11 through 20 only counts if a player signed for more than $150,000 – and anything above that amount counts). The Yankees pool was small as their first pick wasn’t until the 39th overall selection and their next pick wasn’t until the late third round.
You could argue that these were introduced much more to save teams from themselves than to actually make things “fair.” The end result, however, has made things a little fairer. We can see that on the international side of things, where teams like the Reds have actually signed a fair share of players who have been rated among the top five or ten players in a given year. This is something that has never happened before, with the exception of when they signed Aroldis Chapman and Raisel Iglesias to big league contracts. They were never among the top teenage prospects. But a cap on spending means that teams like the Yankees can no longer sign 10 of their 30 best players in a single year (which happened at least once in the 10 years before the rules went into effect).
On Monday, it appeared that MLB is taking another step to try to “level the playing field” when it comes to non-MLB players. The Athletics reported that MLB will standardize analytical data collection and distribution of data across the minor leagues.
The details weren’t too detailed, but essentially here are the key points:
- Teams can only use MLB-approved information. And that will be available to every team. No cameras, sensors, measuring equipment, etc. from third parties. Not for the players, nor for the ballparks.
- Ballparks that don’t have things that are generally considered standard will be upgraded on MLB money. This likely means that all stadiums will now have Hawkeye installed, although there aren’t nearly as many without it as there used to be (the Reds have it in Goodyear, Dayton, and Louisville. Chattanooga has a new stadium opening in 2026 – so it’s unknown if it was immediately planned there, but my assumption would be that it is. Daytona still relied on Trackman, which measures pitch and hit-related things, but not player movement and the like).
In the MLB, they have always centralized the Pitch and Hit Tracking information and shared it with all 30 teams. This started with the Pitch F/X system and has continued through changes in the Trackman system to the current Hawkeye. However, that was not the case in the minor leagues.
I can’t say how things went with Pitch F/X, but when Trackman took over in the last decade and teams had it installed in minor league ballparks, the data was outsourced through Trackman and most, but not all, teams agreed to share that data with other organizations. Once enough teams had it, I’d say there was no point in not sharing your park’s data, because that team still played road games and everyone got it there, but not everyone agreed to the deal and kept their park private. That will no longer be the case.
That may be getting to a bigger point with all of this. Some teams were so far ahead of others in the things they were measuring. And with that came the potential for exclusive contracts with companies so that they would have an advantage in a certain type of data/information collection process that was not available to other teams because they chose to purchase it first for a sum of money large enough that it would not be available to others.
What this can and will also do is limit how much money teams spend. For the teams that are cheap and far behind, they can now upgrade on the MLB’s dime. For teams that invested in gear and paid out of pocket, they must be feeling a bit cheated and limited now. Even to the point that some of the stuff they paid for and currently use and use could be taken away from them and they would no longer be allowed to use it.
Other comments
Kyle Boddy, who was the Reds’ pitching director before leaving the club in mid-September 2021 and is the founder of Driveline, had some interesting comments about this after it was announced. That’s possible Read his entire thread on Twitter here if you would like.
But one thing that struck me the most is that the minor league baseball players who were drafted (or players who were traded and signed as free agents) have no choice in where they end up. And simply being selected by the wrong team can change your career, simply because that team is so far behind in data development and implementation that other organizations could look at it and see something and help “fix” something. Since everyone has the same data to work with, even if you end up with the Rockies, you can at least access the data and go to a coach or facility outside the organization and have a chance that someone can see something and help you.
However, that gets to another point. Even if everyone has access to the exact same information, that doesn’t mean there are thirty teams using the data in the same way. Some teams are going to have larger departments to look at the data. Some will have smarter, more innovative people looking at the data. And some teams will simply ignore some of it for far too long.
#MLB #level #playing #field.. #sort #Redleg #Nation