A Place To Talk About Giants Baseball

Alright you 8 balls.  No game yesterday, no stormy waves or flat calms.  So, with the Giants, as usual, needing bodies at the trade deadline (which ones is another discussion), I’m getting back to a pet peeve:  MLB does not allow trades of draft picks.  I mean full-on trading of picks for players and/or other picks.  There’s no crying in baseball.  And, no trading of picks.  Both verbotens are, in a word, horsemanure.

The Giants may be loathe to trade Gary Brown, Tommy Joseph or even a low minors guy like Krick, but they’ve got little else in the system others covet.  They can’t gut the big club that already has no depth.  So, how to get the player(s) that might put them over the top this season?   Trade PICKs.  Yeah, if they COULD trade picks.  The Giants could package their 2013 and/or 2014 #1 and/or #2 or whatever with a middling prospect and/or Nate or Huff or whomever, and get a decent RH bat or Houston Street or [insert your preferred target].  Trading picks would help clubs fill needs while still keeping core strengths and top prospects for a stretch run or the long term.  And, that increased flexibility could be a huge game changer for getting bodies before the deadline.  Especially now since with this bullshit second Wild Card, the increasing supply of pretenders and contenders likely prefers not to give a major league body to get one from the now-dwindling supply of bottom feeder clubs.   The new Snarkk’s Law is that trading picks keeps down the marginal cost of acquisitions in a tightly-supplied market.   (Hopefully more dependable than the Laffer curve — it got hit hard — early and often).

The arguments against trading picks are lame.  The rich teams like the Yanks and RSox will load up on picks they’ve cleaned out from the small market teams.  Answer:  Nah.  Just rule that picks can only be traded for major and minor league players or other picks.  No cash.  Small market teams will keep trading away top picks because they can’t sign them.  Answer:  The “slotting” system already offers mild protection against that.  More can be done.  Limit the number of picks tradable by a club in any one season and limit the number of future years to 2 or 3 so a bad team can’t piss away their next decade of picks.  And reduce the number of draft rounds to a dozen or so – that way there’s more FAs available for anybody to grab with good scouting.  Not everybody wants to play for the Yankees.  Drafted players sometimes won’t sign, so some picks acquired would be wasted.  Answer:  Unlikely for top picks, and if it happens, hard cheese (see Pirates with cheddar and Appel).  If you are a dogmeat team and want to trade your good, but too expensive MLB player to a contender to grab that club’s first round pick next year, sniff around and make sure your targeted player(s) is/are signable and whether they’re hooked up with Borasss.  You could also limit the tradable picks to the first 2 or 3 or at most, 5 rounds.  Manageable, and fan followable.  Trading your 21^st and 36^th round picks would be dumb, near valueless.  Picks after the first few rounds are not worth much in terms of projecting who is going to be a prospect – might as well be a PTBNL.

I’ve dropped links below to some related articles.  Trading picks would not be difficult to implement.  The NFL, NBA and NHL all do it.  But, then there’s the idiot Bud factor (see replay and 3+ years of the A’s/Giants “blue ribbon” territorial rights panel).  Under the new CBA, 2013 will see the first of a yearly lottery for the bottom 10 revenue and 10 smallest market teams where among them, 6 additional draft picks will be awarded.  Those teams alone can then TRADE the awarded picks once — they can’t be re-traded.  Why have a lottery for this?  It’s nonsense.  Just GIVE each of those clubs an additional, repeatedly tradable pick.  IMO, the new bottom feeder lottery is a throw-away bone, and predictably for MLB, needlessly contrived and complicated, but at least a baby step towards tradable picks.

Lots of NFL fans, like on Chuck’s blog, love to jerk off year round to the NFL draft, climaxing in April when Goodell hits the Radio City stage.  In stark contrast, because there are so many rounds and so many players, nobody but dopes like us gives a crap about the MLB draft.  But, it IS important.  Just look at the Giants and Nats first rounders on the big clubs.  Tradable picks (including compensatory ones) would fuel fan interest in at least the first few rounds of the MLB draft.

And, if picks could trade, this upcoming trade deadline activity would be far more volatile — and fun.  Across MLB, the use of picks in trades would promote more fan buzz for teams still in the hunt, and more hope to clubs out of it – they’d be holding onto players as late as possible to squeeze top picks for next year out of the stupidest contenders.  Hell, trading picks would be worth it alone for just energizing the sub-market for rent-a-players.  If Alderson could have given up Beltran in exchange for SF’s #1 and #2 pick the next season or conditionally (if he extended with the Giants) for both #1s the next two seasons, Wheeler might still be in SF’s barn…

1. http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/05/30/wisch-why-cant-mlb-teams-trade-draft-picks/                      2. http://bleacherreport.com/articles/380347-why-cant-mlb-teams-trade-draft-picks                                3. http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20111130&content_id=26059392                                             4. http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1196153-2012-mlb-draft-why-teams-should-be-allowed-to-trade-draft-picks