2012 draft pool, 2011 draft spending

Jim Callis (Baseball America) has compiled an up-to-date list of draft pool money available to each team in this year's draft, as well as what teams spent last season on the draft. Lots of good stuff that I'll likely write more on later.

3 months ago APV 8 comments 0 recs |

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The Indians, who spent $6.36M on the first 10 rounds last year, will have $4.58M to spend on those rounds this season. They are one of 15 teams who will see their draft budget cut, lest they face penalties, from a year ago. The biggest spending cuts will be to the Nationals (-$10.1M), Pirates (-$9.88M), Rays (-$7.43M) and Diamondbacks (-$7.34M). On the flipside, it will be interesting to see if the teams with the most to spend, the Twins ($12.36M), Astros ($11.17M), A’s ($8.47M) and Cardinals ($9.13M) actually use their available pool. Overall, the money available for the top 10 rounds in 2012 will be about $2M less than the actual total that was spent in 2011.

by APV on Feb 21, 2012 7:17 AM EST reply actions

This system makes no sense to me. Not cuz I don’t get it, but because I don’t get why they did it.

by Brick. on Feb 21, 2012 9:20 PM EST via mobile reply actions

Because inevitably, over time, the richest teams will end up spending the most money.

by Jay on Feb 22, 2012 2:40 AM EST up reply actions

This seems less about maintaining some semblance of parity—if that were the issue, why cap or penalize any teams in the bottom half of revenues at all?—than about keeping down labor costs at the expense of the least powerful members of the baseball work force.

by YoDaddyWags on Feb 22, 2012 8:00 AM EST up reply actions

Yes, that too. But reducing overall labor costs, too, is far more of a restraint on high-revenue clubs than on low-revenue clubs.

I know that people will always look at clubs like the Pirates under the last year of the old CBA and see this is a constraint on a small-market club trying to sneak in an advantage. But if we know anything ten years after Moneyball, it’s that there is no talent acquisition strategy that doesn’t eventually make its way to the bulk of the other clubs. There is no long-term arbitrage opportunity, there’s just execution and resources.

by Jay on Feb 22, 2012 11:30 AM EST up reply actions

This might be correct. But I think a good portion of the logic is also simply to limit the amount of money amateur players are able to extract out of teams.

by APV on Feb 22, 2012 8:22 AM EST up reply actions