Now take a quick look via Google Earth or satellite view of your town. Seriously, just take five seconds and do it. When I look at my town in the suburbs of Central Jersey, it’s immediately obvious that there are a LOT of little baseball diamonds for the kids who grow up around here. There’s one at a park by my neighborhood. There’s one at another park nearby. There are baseball fields at my old middle school and high school and at some of the elementary schools in town. And this isn’t Orange County or some other hotbed that produces tons of draft-worthy kids — this is New Jersey, where if it weren’t for Mike Trout, all we’d have to brag about is, like, Jack Cust.

To say the very least, an international draft is like comparing apples to oranges to strawberries to pineapples. Kids in Japan may have a vaguely comparable experience to American kids (I have no idea), but are we supposed to pretend that Dominican kids or Panamanian kids playing with a broomstick on a crappy empty lot using a milk carton as a glove are in any way given the same chances to succeed as American kids? That’s insane. Subjecting them to the same draft without the same infrastructure in place would make absolutely no sense.

I recommend this article as a primer to anyone who hasn’t already read up on this subject. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/sports/baseball/puerto-rico-traces-decline-in-prospects-to-inclusion-in-the-baseball-draft.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Assuming its a separate draft, I don’t think it will get rid of the buscones. Teams may stop running their own academies but bc there is no high school or college ball there someone has to facilitate games/development. So it seems natural for them to continue running business as usually and taking a cut of the signing bonuses. Plus if its a separate draft resulting in more players signing, I would assume we’d see buscones evolve into more legitimate businesses and run larger academies themselves.

In the past I always thought it was stupid that American players were stuck going through the draft, while foreign players could just go to the highest bidder and didn’t have to go through years of arbitration and wait for free agency. I am in favor of anything that levels that inequity. Why should US players get the shaft?

I bet many people feel the exact same way. The question I want to pose is why do we want to force everyone to take the worse route (draft) and not the better one (FA)?

wont it also provide a few positives while streamlining the process

There may be a few positives, like getting rid of the buscones*, but the negatives far outweigh the positives. Look at a country like PR, compared to the DR or Venezuela. Teams have all but abandoned PR because they can’t flex their financial muscle in that country anymore**. Teams would spend money developing baseball academies, and while the money was low, a $40K or $50K bonus to a teenager is a ton of money in some of these places. Now there’s incentive for a team to scout this talent, develop it, and see it drafted by another.

*while the stories of them are abhorrent, many agents pull some awful stuff in the US
**with the international signing restrictions, we’ve already seen teams cut back on their spending because of this.

In the past I always thought it was stupid that American players were stuck going through the draft, while foreign players could just go to the highest bidder and didn’t have to go through years of arbitration and wait for free agency. I am in favor of anything that levels that inequity. Why should US players get the shaft?

Joking aside, MLB has stated that they may step into the roll teams have taken on, with MLB itself running baseball academies to develop players. Now, whether or not they do that is anyone’s guess. Teams have a clear motive for investing in their academies….MLB won’t have one.

Although they don’t parallel all that well I guess. In basketball there are plenty other professional leagues where players can make similar amounts of money to the US, so many international players are willing to stay at home because of that.