Pittsburgh Pirates: Proposing Rule Changes for the New CBA

Proposed off field rule changes

The first one here is obvious – a salary cap. Unfortunately, a salary cap will never, ever happen in baseball. Due to this it will always be more difficult for the Pittsburgh Pirates and other small market teams to compete than it will large market teams.

That said, a salary floor and a draft lottery could help as it would make it more difficult to tank. While those are both rule changes that could be coming with the CBA, without a salary cap a salary floor is not nearly as effective and teams that now they will be bad would likely still tank to increase their odds of winning the draft lottery.

Another rule change that can be made to help small market teams, as well as helping the players, is revising service time rules. As the rules are currently constructed a player accumulates a year of MLB service time once they have spent 172 days on an active roster and after six such seasons they are eligible for free agency. Due to this teams often times keep their top prospects in the minor league for the first 15-20 days of the regular season in order to gain a 7th year of control over that player.

Then there is the super two issues. Super two players are those who become arbitration eligible before having three full MLB seasons of service time. This leads to these players making more money in arbitration and becoming more expensive. Trying to prevent players from becoming super two eligible will often times lead to teams keeping top prospects in the minor leagues until early June, or, if that player is promoted sooner than that, demoting the player back to the minor leagues at some point during the season. This is certainly something fans of the Pittsburgh Pirates have been driven mad by over the years.

While the super two issue is one that has been discussed greatly in CBA negotiations as the MLBPA looks to increase the amount of players who can become super two eligible there is a trade off that can be made. Allow players who have never played in the majors to start the season on the Opening Day roster while still giving the club seven years of team control. In return, allow each of these players to achieve super two status as long as they spent a set amount of time on the active roster that season.

In this scenario, yes, teams will have to pay players more, but they will also be able to have highly touted prospects who could help them win right away make their MLB debut as part of a team’s Opening Day roster while still getting that 7th year of team control.

Those extra few weeks could make a big difference. For example, let’s say the 2013 Pittsburgh Pirates would ahem had Gerrit Cole in their Opening Day rotation. It’s very plausible that the team would have won the NL Central that season instead of finishing second, giving them home field advantage over the Cardinals in the NLDS which may have put the Bucs over the top in winner take all game 5. This is just one of countless examples of this.