Originally Posted by
dougdirt
Let's expand on this a little bit. We don't know how much minor league free agents sign for. But we do know what guys will be making if they've never reached free agency. If we assume there are 40 players on a rookie-ball roster, 30 players on an A-ball roster, and 20 players on both the Double-A and Triple-A roster (lower numbers here because more guys on these teams will have reached free agency and thus we don't know what exactly it is that they make), that gives us 220 players. For the entire year their combined salary is $1,752,000 for the 2021 season with the new "higher" salaries. That also includes 80 players that may not even be around next year because two rookie-level teams are likely to be eliminated, which would erase $384,000 from that total and leave you with $1,368,000 in known player salary for the year.
Then you get about $5,500,000 in international signing bonus money. In the draft you get wider variances, but let's just call it an average of $11,000,000 (the Reds, for example, were at $11.2M last year while drafting in the Top 10). So we've got a grand total of let's just round it up to $18,000,000 a year. If you spread that out evenly to the 140 players who haven't reached free agency between rookie and Triple-A, that would be about $128,000 per year. For some guys, that would be a huge boost over the amount of money they see in their baseball careers. For others it's not going to sniff the amount that they would see before reaching the Major Leagues. A guy like Nick Senzel, for example, would have made like $500,000 or so before reaching the Majors instead of over $6,000,000 like he did in the current system.
What I'd actually like to see is the teams just pay guys in the minor leagues enough money to actually be able to be baseball players full time, while also paying them something remotely close to what they pay them now in signing bonus money. For the price of a middle reliever you can pay every non-free agent in your farm system $25,000 a year. That's an additional $2,000,000 a year for a team. I know it's easy to spend someone else's money, but I don't think that's unreasonable, either.
And hey, I still want to know where that $200,000,000+ that teams paid as penalties to themselves basically (it went to MLB's central fund) for overpaying international free agents until they changed the rules went to. That alone tells us how underpaid these guys actually are. But I'd still like to know where that money went to that teams were absolutely willing to spend to acquire the players, but the players didn't see anywhere near the money teams spent to acquire them. And I'd like to know why that money isn't being used to pay players now.