Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred spoke on various topics today, including possibly loosening the rules on trading draft picks. Per J.J. Cooper of Baseball America, Manfred suggested the owners have some openness to allowing teams more freedom to trade picks but he also noted that changes would have to be collectively bargained with the MLB Players Association.
Under the current rules, teams can only trade competitive balance picks. Only the clubs with smaller markets/revenues get those and they make up a small portion of the overall number of picks in the draft.
Plenty of other sports allow the trading of draft picks, which adds an element of excitement to the draft itself as well as trades during the rest of the year. Many have argued for MLB to follow suit and allow picks to be traded, but the counterargument has been that teams might send away too many picks and doom themselves to years of fielding ineffective teams.
The counter to that argument has usually been that teams can already do themselves plenty of harm by trading away prospects and that things wouldn’t meaningfully change by adding draft picks to the equation. Furthermore, it has been argued that teams should be subject to the consequences of their own actions as opposed to being preemptively protected from them. This latter point seems to be something that Manfred is receptive to.
“The positions the clubs have taken over time in terms of what they want us to do at the table has been a product of a balance between flexibility in terms of utilizing the resources available to you on the one hand and paternalism on the other—that is I’m going to prevent you from doing acts because I think it would be stupid,” Manfred said. “I don’t think we have that many stupid clubs. We’ll see how it shakes out. We will go through our (collective) bargaining prep,” he continued. “The clubs are really sophisticated now. I do think that there’s a really good argument for allowing them to decide how to use their resources.”
The MLBPA clearly has some level of concern about tanking, the practice of teams intentionally making themselves worse in the present in order to improve their chances of winning in the future. They have tried to push back against the practice by looking for things in CBA negotiations like a salary floor or draft lottery, successfully getting the latter but not the former.
A team that hamstrung itself by trading away numerous draft picks could perhaps impact free agent earning power, as such a franchise might get into such a poor long-term state that they effectively sit out free agency for a while. But as mentioned, that’s not too similar from a team under the present system that has traded away significant prospect capital and spend many years in rebuilding mode. It could also be argued that such a club may be incentivized to sign free agents who could then be traded for draft picks, making up for those that were traded away in previous years.
Whether the two sides can agree to change the rules will be known in the next few years, as the current CBA extends through the 2026 season. They will have many other issues to address, such as the competitive balance tax, minimum salaries, TV/streaming revenue plans, expansion and other topics, but perhaps there’s a glimmer of hope for those who want to see draft picks trade hands in the future.