PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE TOME TO BE READY FOR A POSSIBLE BUSINESS ITEM MONDAY EVENING.
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A Commissioner’s work is never done, especially with the Johnson boys in the league.
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Don’t get me wrong: having Jamie and Mark in the league is wonderful. This league was pretty much designed for people like them. Mark knows the rules better than anyone else, possibly including me. Jamie sort of lets the rules fall where they may, but his contracts page listing has 30 players and 25 extra-roster obligations on it. This is before I update the Flint Hill roster to reflect the latest Rosebud/Tornado transaction and its aftermath.
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Which brings me to today’s episode of EFL Answer Man (which is very long — I’m sorry — because I want the league to know how I thought this through). Consider the following excerpts from our Transactions page:
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Among many other things, the Johnson boys bring to the league an attitude of exploration when it comes to rules. And when they do, they help us learn about (and improve) our rules.
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First lets take the clean issue: the PTBNL. The rules assume that PTBNLs come with the deal when you accept an MLB trade. But we have generally ignored them when their identities are unknown before the EFL team accepts the trade. This is because, if the PTBNL is in the major leagues, our rules would not allow the EFL owner to decline to take the PTBNL. Some trades are salary dumps — Austin Jackson to the Rangers a couple of weeks ago, for example, or Matt Kemp back to the Dodgers last winter (although that turned out differently than everyone except maybe Kemp expected). So if you are horning in on the deal, and the deal is a salary dump, and you would be the dumpee, you have to take it because otherwise the dumping MLB team wouldn’t make the deal.
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An expensive salary dump could destroy your franchise for years. So we’ve had the practice (not formalized in the rules, but it probably should be) of ignoring the PTBNL. This means we sometimes miss out on a great prospect. But that’s been worth it, in my mind, to avoid getting a useless $20,000,000 a year player.
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Jamie wants to interrupt our slightly shady informal accommodation of ignoring PTBNLs. He has claimed the right to accept the PTBNL. If it’s a minor league player, no problem: the rules enshrine our right to ignore minor league players in these deals even when we know who they are. But if Jamie wants to invoke the right to accept a sweet prospect PTBNL, minimal faithfulness to the intent of the rules would require him to accept the risk that the Archer deal will turn out to be a salary dump of a major league player. He will not have the right to decline to take such a player, because Pittsburgh would not have made the deal otherwise. He can’t take the upside of the PTNBL risk without also taking its downside.
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That is my ruling on the PTBNL: If Jamie insists on the right to keep the PTBNL when his identity becomes known, he accepts the DUTY to keep him if he’s an MLB player. Or if he wants to benefit from our informal practice of ignoring the PTBNL he can revoke his statement as posted on the transaction page — but he has to make that choice before the PTBNL is announced or the roster deadline, whichever happens first. (My earnest recommendation: just ignore the PTBNL. Absorbing a huge contract is too much of a risk.)
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This ruling can be overruled by a majority vote of the league ownership, if Jamie or anyone else wants to appeal it.
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Now to the murky question: can the Tornados acquire by MLB trade a player as a rookie who a) has already been on an EFL team as a debutant and b) is still in that debutant season? Does appearing as a debutant split the player’s career into two parts: debutant separate from the rest?
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We don’t let teams tie debutants to multiyear contracts because we want the debs available as rookies the following year, keeping the rookie draft rich with prospects. So in a way we do split their early careers into two parts, deb distinct from rookie, almost as if they were two different players. If a debutant signs a multiyear MLB contract before or during his debutant year, we don’t make him available in the free agent draft because we want all debs to be eligible for the rookie draft.
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We already make one class of exceptions to this, for players acquired in an MLB/EFL trade before they are debutants. We’ve done this dating back to Hak-Ju Lee’s prime and beyond. I have Eloy Jimenez right now under this rule. Dylan Cease, Isan Diaz, Justus Sheffield, Anderson Espinoza, and Monte Harrison are all “2099” players. They will never be debutants, unless they are dropped before their debutant season.
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This exception is codified in the rules. But the Meadows case doesn’t fall under this rule. The debutant rule when we adopted it wasn’t harmonized with the MLB/EFL trade rule. So we never defined what happens if a debutant is DFA’d, then traded in his debut season in an MLB trade an EFL owner can join.
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I uneasily lean toward treating this just like the pre-debut acquisitions: he’s a rookie. If the Tornados activate him this year, this becomes his first rookie year and his rookie status expires in 2022. But if the Tornados don’t activate him this year, his rookie status begins in 2019 and expires in 2023, whether or not he plays in 2019.
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But someone might argue that Meadows should be available only as a debutant. He has debuted. We do split the debut year off from the rookie era for everyone else who has already debuted when they are acquired, and we don’t let anyone transform them from debutants to rookies because we want them in the rookie draft. A team acquiring a pre-debutant player in a trade is getting a windfall, but they are taking a risk. Some of these pre-debs will never debut. Hak-Ju Lee never debuted despite playing four full seasons in AAA, and being owned for two or three of those seasons by the Dragons. So there’s considerable risk involved in devoting a roster space to a player who may never even play in the majors. To compensate for the risk, the EFL team gets to skip the rookie draft.
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Meadows isn’t risky in that way. He’s already been an MLB player, and he still is. There is no risk that needs compensation with skipping the draft.
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This is a weighty argument in my mind. And I happened to be thinking about this just last week, when Mark J still owned Archer. He asked me if it would work if he accepted the Archer for Meadows trade. I told him that he couldn’t trade for a player he already owned — but then, he had already DFA’d Meadows. He wanted to know whether, if he re-obtained Meadows by accepting a trade, would he obtain Meadows as a rookie with 5 years of rookie status, or as a debutant.
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I told Mark I would think of this like an owner whose star player’s rookie status was expiring, and wanted to sign him to a free agent contract. In that case we require the owner to expose the player to the rest of the league. We’d let him bid on his star player in the next free agent draft, and he’d have to outbid the rest of the league. So in the case of Meadows, if he wanted to trade Archer for Meadows, effectively extending him from being a debutant to being a rookie, he’d have to let Meadows go through our waiver wire first to make him available to the rest of the league.
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But our rules don’t really make this clear, so I told Mark he could appeal that ruling.
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Mark didn’t appeal it. He’s too clever. Instead he traded Archer to Jamie. So now Jamie has declared he will accept the Archer for Meadows trade. I can read their minds! Their minds are thinking “Ah, but this is a trade for a player Jamie doesn’t 0wn! And we don’t have to give everyone else a chance to horn in on our MLB trades.”
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Which is correct. But, doggone it, our rules were written by the same process as the Student Union Building on GF’s campus: accretion. (Be thankful it wasn’t by secretion. Much.) And while they are full of elegant marvels, some pieces were written without anticipating unanticipated developments — there were unknown unknowns. We added the debutant rules long after the MLB trade rules, and our DFA rule was written at a completely different time. In none of those situations did we anticipate this scenario.
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If we let the Tornados snag Meadows and transform him from a debutant to a rookie, we impoverish the rookie draft with no compensating risk being borne by the Tornados. What’s happening here is no different for 81.8% of the league than the Rosebuds acquiring Meadows’ future — extending his contract — without anyone else having a chance at him.
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So I am uneasy about this. The PTBNL thing causes me no mental anguish. This transformation of Meadows from active debutant to rookie with no rookie draft DOES cause me anguish.
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I think we should let it happen
- because the rules are too inartful to prevent it;
- to reward the Johnson boys for spelunking so deep into the crevices of our rules and exposing their flaws; and
- to keep them from being hurt by rules popping up out of thin air.
But I am not 100% convinced. So if anyone wants to discuss it Monday evening, we should let the entire league decide.
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If no one challenges my ruling on this (that the rules don’t prevent what Jamie wants to do), then Jamie will be free to proceed. If someone challenges, we will need a majority vote to make a different ruling. I might be part of that majority — I am open to persuasion.
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This will be the first item on our agenda Monday evening at 5:00.