by Eddie Mayrose
No More Calls…We Have a Winner
It happens every spring. As certainly as the tulips will bloom, Major League Baseball owners will 
victimize fans with their own, annual scam, known on these pages as Arbitration Fraud.
According to the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the owners and the players association, a player with three or more years of service, but less than six years, may file for salary arbitration. There is another category called “Super Two”, in which players with more than two years and less than three who have accumulated 86 days of service in the previous season are also arbitration eligible. If, that is, they rank in the top 17% of service time for ALL players. So, if the promotion of a player is held up for two months, he will is likely to fall below the Super Two line and will definitely have another season added before he makes the three year mark.
To that end, many small market teams assign their top prospects to their AAA affiliates when they break camp, no matter how dire their needs. While the “head fake” given to the fans is always something along te lines of”…he needs more seasoning”, the actual reason is that the organization is delaying the start of the “Arbitration clock” by a year, thus delaying his first big payday. This “seasoning”, always comes, miraculously, around the end of May, no matter who the player might be. Continue reading »
