Tyler Kepner wrote today that any baseball fan looking for optimism about next season, which is currently imperiled by a looming player strike or owner lock-out over the lack of a collective bargaining agreement, can look to the results of an under-reported rule change for hope that MLB and the union can find creative compromise solutions that work.
That’s nice, I thought. Wait—WHAT under-reported rule change?
For many years before the 2022 collective bargaining agreement between players and the owners, it was standard practice for a team to keep a promising rookie in the minors until after the date passed that would have given the player credit for a year of MLB service. Since young players are bound to their signing teams for a set number of seasons before they have arbitration rights and finally free agent rights, that extra year of control teams got by leaving a minor league stud in the minors was worth millions to the team who owned him. Never mind that it made the team keeping a potential star down less competitive and gave the team’s fans a lesser product. Never mind that it cheated a rising star out of contract that recognized his true worth: it was all about the team’s money.
But in 2022, a new rule was negotiated to discourage service-time manipulation. If a player finishes first or second in Rookie of the Year voting, he gets a full year of service time no matter how much time he spent on the roster. If such a player wins Rookie of the Year or finishes in the top three for MVP or Cy Young before becoming eligible for arbitration, his team receives an extra draft pick.
There have been only four days of games in the 2026 season so far, and several rookies who in past years would have still been languishing in the minor leagues as they teams played the “he needs a little more seasoning” game came out of the gate blazing. In the first weekend (three or four games for every team), rookies batted .309, compared to .226 for veteran players! They also hit 15 homers with a .622 slugging percentage and a 1.008 OPS. Those are all records since 1900 through every team’s first three games.
The games were better. The teams were better. The rookies weren’t being manipulated by the teams, and the teams have a chance to benefit too. This was a smart and fair compromise that epitomizes exemplary ethics at work: everybody wins.
There is hope.
Ethics Alarms 
Wow, I missed that change as well…and it directly affects my team, since last year’s NL RoY was the Braves’ Drake Baldwin. He also has started his sophomore season with a flourish. The service year is a great benefit to the player, but the draft pick – a supplemental first-rounder – is a HUGE incentive to team management not to hold back a player’s free-agency clock.
I agree…and I see no losers in this rule, unless maybe it’s the die-hard minor league baseball fan who wants more time with the rising stars in those lower levels before “the call.”
Thanks for weighing in. It is both a significant ethics issue and baseball development that was under-publicized. I should have read the 2022 agreement.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit more…and can easily see how my selfishness toward my team’s long-term success led me to think unethically about this. I didn’t want a top prospect’s “FA clock” to start too early, thereby robbing my team of its precious control of the player. If I recall, a player called up before a certain day in June who then served out the year would cost the team a year of control…so there were times I hoped the player would not be promoted until after that day.
I gave little thought to how those rules held a player back. I wonder how many high-end prospects – spending that extra time waiting in the minors – sustained an injury that cost them dearly in their careers. And if I was thinking this way, I would guarantee that the Atlanta Braves – with millions of dollars in the balance – would be thinking just like me.
Anyways, the new incentive is a winning one. One wonders what the “1980s Dodgers” era would have looked like with this rule. They turned out RoY candidates year after year, and those supplemental first-rounders would have filled an already-overflowing farm system to bursting.
Count me in as someone who hadn’t heard about this change, but I applaud it.
It’s always made me uncomfortable hearing about my team holding players back like this, and I hope this helps discontinue that practice.
Believe me, no one is going to grieve for teams who make a few million dollars less each year. One has to believe that the trees MLB bats are made from are all money trees…..