Re: 2021 Rule Changes
Reply #2 –
I just wanted to give a few more details to my comments above, and again, I am wondering why we are putting arbitration players into the same $50 million limit as free agents. Another thing I'll say is that at this point, I knew that I would be having all of these players coming into arbitration, and in my planning for this season, I also knew that I would have a decent amount of money to fill any holes in my lineup. Putting this change on how we can spend our money just before the season seems a bit burdensome.
So, here are the values for the ACLs. I'm assuming that I offer arbitration to all but one of my arbitration eligible players (Javier Baez (8M), Mookie Betts (13M), Michael Comforto (4.5M), Willson Contreras (2M), Francisco Lindor (7M), James Paxton (6M) and Miguel Sano (3.5M)) and I waive arbitration on Felipe Vazquez, since he'll be in a penal baseball league soon enough. According to the WAR spreadsheet, offering arbitration to the 7 players I mentioned, it will cost me 44M. Given my losses in free agency, at the end of the day if I offer arbitration to those players, I will have 27 players on my major league roster and I will have total salary spending of $70.26M, giving me another $19.74M to spend on players to fill up my roster. However, under this rule, I can only spend another $6 million on free agents. As for the rest of my money to be spend, I guess I can give it to rookies (although this year I'm hesitant to call up anyone, since the projections disc isn't super kind to them), or I could make some trades, but that will deplete my minor league and draft pick capital.
I guess my concerns is that for teams that are planning ahead, this rule seems very last minute and very constricting on how we organize our rosters. I also feel like it is penalizing teams that have done a good job of building their minor league system, so that we have these quality players that we can offer arbitration to. I think arbitration has been a good thing for the league, giving incentives to build a quality farm system, while making it more costly to keep those players. I'm still being limited by the $90 million salary cap, since my arbitration players are taking up half of my money at this point.
I guess I would like to know more of the reasoning here, since I don't know if I can see what the reason is.