TruffleShuffle

give us anthony rendon then, that will solve their third base logjam.

i can't believe any team gave up anything for john scott.

no, IIRC we do the draft on the cbs site, but we do it as an extended draft with no time limits (so everyone doesn't need to be present at one time). i don't remember if we were PM'ing each other about whose turn it is, or if the CBS draft thing sends an e-mail automatically. but yeah, it will definitely take a while to complete and then we have to do the prospect draft (which is done here), so it's much better to get the ball rolling sooner rather than later. the fourth option in this poll would be far, far too late - we'd only have like 4 days until opening day to get through a 12 round extended draft and the minor league draft. last year i think we started around march 5 and didn't finish up for like 2 weeks.

sounds good. Yu can probably guess who i'm picking.

right, but why should darvish be treated differently than, say, lorenzo cain? if i draft cain and the royals farm him out to start the year, i can do the same. but if darvish starts the season in AAA for some reason, i just lose him? seems ridiculously punitive to the original drafter of darvish.

that works for me.

it's really not that tough. bukie made a list of the IFA signings during this offseason and there were 8 names on it. the only ones who would likely be selected in the major league phase would be darvish and cespedes.... maybe that mariners pitcher from japan. there might be one or two names we'll have to keep track of. i think it's a lot better system than everyone using their late round major league draft picks on 16 to 19 year old bonus babies from the dominican republican and venezuela.

i don't like #2 because if darvish suffers some kind of minor injury and makes a rehab start in the minors before coming up to the majors a week later, the person who selected him in the major league draft loses a potentially very valuable player on what is essentially a technicality. the problem i saw with #1 is that teams can just circumvent the minor league draft by picking a highly-rated international signee late in the major league draft. if you're one of the last teams picking in the major league draft, there's almost no incentive to pick a major league player rather than someone like soler or sano. you can just select, say, jorge soler, put him in the minors and pick up whoever you would have selected with that late round pick. worst case scenario, you end up with someone slightly worse than the mediocre player you would have selected. and you grab a top 50 prospect for nothing. jeff had a suggestion that i agreed with - all IFA are available to be selected in the major league draft, but if they're selected there then they must stay on your major league roster. with someone like darvish there's almost no risk. cespedes there is a little risk, but also the reward of having a potentially valuable player in his prime for 4 exempt seasons. a guy like soler, you'd be really hard pressed to select him in the major league draft and then keep him on your bench for 2 years while he develops in the minors.

still need to determine how to handle guys like darvish and cespedes. then we can begin.

jeez I don't even think I could bench press the bar 51 times.

So do we need some kind of poll or commissioner ruling to determine what will be done with players like Darvish, Cespedes, Soler (if he signs), etc? All the keeper rosters are now legal so once we get this sorted we should be able to start the draft.

did you stop following this after reading the dave van dyck story?

These aren't major issues. Any IFA that isn't drafted in the ML draft is eligible in the prospect draft. Everyone expects Soler to be signed soon, so he should be available like the rest. #3 is a big reason for my proposal. You have to stash him on your bench as long as he's in the minors. It prevents people from taking guys like Soler in the ML draft. But it allows each team to decide what level of risk they're comfortable with for guys like Cespedes who will probably start in the minors. I don't like abuck's plan as it allows people to draft a guy in the ML draft when he could spend most of the year in the minors and there's no risk to the team that drafts him. I agree. Basically if you have a last-round pick, there's very little incentive NOT to grab someone like Soler and then stash him in the minors for a couple of years. Chances are the guy you would have picked would just be a bench bat or some fringy pitcher, and those guys are a dime a dozen on the waiver wire. Top 50 prospects are much harder to come by. I like your plan. If a guy is in his first season of roadkill eligibility and came over as an IFA, he can be drafted in the major league portion of the draft, but has to stay in the majors. I think this kind of forces people to follow the spirit of the two drafts - major league draft is for players who will contribute points to your team this year; minor league draft is to allocate new talent coming into US pro baseball who won't be major league contributors this year.

I'll accept that name as long as you don't start acting like the various morons on this board with some variation of Theo in their username.

I'm fine with bukie.

Are we making this rule only for international signees? Reason I ask is that if we included rule 4 draftees, someone would definitely take a Strasburg and stash him on their bench for a couple of months. Hell, a bad team would probably take a Trevor Bauer or Anthony Rendon and stash them on the bench for a year. If it is just international free agents, I think your plan will work fine. Darvish will go really high. Cespedes will go in the major league draft. I don't know that someone would want to have Soler taking up space on their major league bench for two years, so he'd likely end up in the minor league phase (and be drafted fairly late, since the 2011 rule 4 draft was loaded)

why don't we just decide on a case-by-case basis, with the rule of thumb that if a guy is mid 20s or older and an established good player in his native league (cuba, japan, etc), then he should be in the major league draft and not the minor league one. basically, if a guy is coming over and is widely expected to make or contend for a major league role immediately, he goes in the major league draft. this would include darvish, ichiro, daisuke, cespedes, alexei ramirez, kaz matsui, kosuke, that new mariners pitcher (iwakuma), the twins 2b from last year (forget his name), etc. soler is 19 years old, isn't an established star in cuba and is expected to take at least 2 years of development to be major league ready. i'd just chuck him in the minor league draft. there aren't THAT many major league-ready foreign players coming over each offseason, and it won't take long for us to go through the handful of names.

I think the onus should be on bbb to find a replacement for himself. He's quitting during a busy time for the league and putting the new owner in a tough spot. If it were a family issue or something, I'd be willing to help out, but it's not like adam being a pain in the ass was a secret before now.

i think that's the easiest way to do things. and selfishly, i'd be happy to draft darvish #1 in the prospect draft and ([expletive], there really aren't any elite players available in the major league draft. josh hamilton? ben zobrist? yovani gallardo?)

if he comes back and rakes for a month and a half, he might fetch a couple of decent prospects. jim thome was still hitting pretty well last year and cleveland pretty much gave up a turd in a bag to get him. nobody is giving up a "few decent prospects" for a 2 month rental of a 40 year old who can't field his position and is one steroid test from being thrown out of baseball.

I figured my post would bring joy and happiness to one lucky Roadkill owner. ;) Someone may take a chance on drafting Cepedes in the minor league draft. Then if he doesn't start in the majors, the person who picked him in the minor league draft would get him. If no one picked him in the minor league draft, then he would be a waiver wire pick up. I believe the first round would be after the first week of the season. Someone correct me if I am wrong on any of the above. i'm assuming you meant to say "major league draft" in your first sentence. this seems overly complicated, and i think it's a bit dumb to have people drafting a player in the minor league draft when he's already been drafted in the major league draft. but it also seems a bit dumb to draft a player like darvish in the minor league portion of the draft just because he's never pitched in the big leagues. clearly the expectation with guys like him and cespedes is that they're going to be big league contributors immediately. it seems to me unnecessarily punitive to have someone like darvish or cespedes become a FA immediately if they don't leave camp with the big club. what if cespedes tweaks a hammy and needs to play a week or two in the minors before coming up? maybe we could have a period of time at the beginning of the year for major league drafted players to reach the majors, and after that point they become free agents? something like mid-may would give 5 or 6 weeks to reach the majors.

that would be fine with me. how was it handled when daisuke came over?

isn't the minor league draft going to occur before major league rosters are finalized? if, say, the a's decide to start cespedes in the minors, i would expect that the minor league draft would have been completed before this time. what happens with cespedes then? also, i'll probably be taking darvish first overall in the major league draft, so i'll be pretty [expletive] irate if he is inexplicably sent to the minors.

i have no idea why the white sox have been so cheap in the draft, but they always have been. the new draft rules will actually benefit them because they haven't been taking advantage of the cost-efficiency in amateur talent like some other smarter organizations.