This may seem arbitrary – and it sort of is – but among the many goals that Omar Minaya and the Mets brain trust ought to have this offseason should be to sign only one Type A free agent. If you aren’t familiar with what a Type A free agent is, it essentially means that if a team signs a Type A free agent, they surrender their top draft pick to the team from which that player left. For further explanation, MLB Trade Rumors does a great job of describing it.
The reasons for having compensation for free agents are two-fold. First of all, it is meant to give something back to the team that is losing their talented player to free agency. Second of all, it is meant to discourage teams from signing too many free agents – because if they sign too many Type A free agents, their farm system will eventually become depleted.
Yet, some teams have failed to heed this second warning and have continued to sign Type A free-agents with reckless abandon. The best example of this is the Yankees, who have been throwing money at free agents non-stop for plenty of years now. Because they have signed so many free-agents, and surrendered so many draft picks because of that, they have had a death of position player prospects to build their team around. Since Alfonso Soriano won the Rookie of the Year award in 2001 (even though he first came up in 1999), the Yankees have had one decent position player come up through their system: Robinson Cano. Cano wasn’t even selected through the draft (nor was Soriano, or Melky Cabrera for that matter), he was signed as an international free agent from the Dominican Republic. So, the Yankees have an aging team and are without internal solutions to rectify that because their farm system has become so depleted from a lack of high draft picks.
Now, look at the Red Sox, who have a payroll that is nearly identical to that of the Mets. How many Type A free agents do you see them sign? Not too many – Daisuke Matsuzaka was from Japan so he doesn’t count. J.D. Drew was a type A free agent, but other than that? This is why the Red Sox have positioned themselves to be good for a long time. They have focused on competing now, while keeping their farm system intact for the future.
Now, there are all the huge free agents that the Mets have signed, ranging from Carlos Beltran and Pedro Martinez to Moises Alou (who was a type A free agent, believe it or not). Obviously, some of those signings made sense, but others clearly weren’t worth it. This offseason, the Mets have to learn that buying free agents only sacrafices their farm system for the future. Determining that the Mets should sign only one type A free agent is fairly abritrary, but it is probably the best way to curve the organazation’s tendancy to sign free agents without realizing the ramifications.
Pete Lappin (3)
