On Tuesday evening in the Bronx, Washington Nationals slugger Bryce Harper faced Masahiro Tanaka at Yankee Stadium – an all-world match-up (Harper took him deep for his 20th homer) that also happened to highlight the vastly different paths which players take to reach the elite, major-league level.  For Harper, the road to the bigs began after graduating high school – the Las Vegas-born outfielder was drafted No 1 overall in 2010 by the Nats and given a signing bonus of $9.9m, before joining the traditional route to salary escalation, one that typically matures over six or seven seasons before a player reaches free-agency. (Harper is earning $2.5m this season after making $1m over the prior two seasons).  Tanaka spent some seven years toiling in Japan with the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, and was the target in a bidding war that ended with a transfer fee for his NPB club and a multi-year deal for the pitcher worth $155m.  Also on the field and playing shortstop for the Yankees was Didi Gregorius, who was born in Amsterdam and raised in Curacao. Because players from the Dutch Caribbean outpost are not subjected to the amateur draft, Gregorius, unlike Harper, was born into free-agency, and thus had the ability to sign with any team he liked – at age 17 he inked his deal with the Cincinnati Reds. Many players from Latin America sign as early as 16, while those in the draft up north and in Puerto Rico must have completed their senior year of high school before becoming eligible for draft selection.  With over 25% of the players making up MLB rosters coming from outside the United States, the variety of entry-routes players take to reach the bigs remains a warm topic for debate, especially in a week when 30 teams are busy plowing their way through some 40 rounds (there have been as many as 100!) of amateurs from the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico and other US territories only. Is it finally time for MLB to institute an all-encompassing international amateur draft? New commissioner Rob Manfred says yes.  I’ve long been a believer that it makes sense for everybody to enter the game through the same mechanism. I think there’s a fundamental fairness to have everybody enter the game through the same system.  That’s an angle into a complex situation that seems to add up. Why should different rules apply to players based on their country, when no other major North American league has such a complex, multi-faceted set-up?  Another potential side-reason to include international players could be to counter the “buscones.” Independent scouts are usually the first to sign aspiring Latin ballplayers, who often house, clothe and feed young talent while they’re developed. In recent years, buscones and team scouts have been linked to corruption that includes performance-enhancing drugs and baseball sweat factories – MLB has been pressuring governments to regulate the buscones for several years and perhaps an international draft could accelerate reform on that front.  Regardless of Manfred’s desire to achieve that “fairness,” implementing a draft featuring international players will not be easy.  For one, there have only been a handful of Japanese-born players who signed with MLB teams without playing professionally there – if MLB started drafting Japanese players wholesale it could set off a firestorm in Asia. It’s worth noting that the quadrennial World Baseball Classic requires the cooperation of Japan’s national league, NPB, in addition to the Korean Baseball Organization, to ensure their participation.  Overall, MLB’s desire to draft players from countries such as the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Mexico (which also has a professional league) and Cuba, in addition to the Asian nations, is shaping up to be a significant component of what’s projecting to be a more contentious negotiation over the next collective bargaining agreement between the MLB Players Association and big league top brass. The current CBA expires on 1 December 2016.  The battleground exists for several reasons, but the main sticking point is that an international draft would ultimately cut down player costs while restricting player movement. Unless dramatic changes were made to MLB’s salary structure, while boosting the current range of signing bonus pool money available to draftees, (which involves salary slots for each pick based on drafting order), an international draft would eliminate deals for elite Cuban players such as Rusney Castillo, who hauled in $72.5m with the Red Sox upon signing with Boston. Yes, there are currently spending restrictions on clubs who eclipse their allotted pool (another complicated slotting formula) but the penalties are not severe enough to stop teams from breaking the bank on international free agents.  A draft, in theory, would prevent teams from splashing out, but could actually help some of the players on the lower end of the totem poll – Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports recently pointed out that David Ortiz was signed for just $10,000. Still, MLBPA, arguably the most powerful union on the planet, are in the business of making sure their players can make as much money as possible. The union will need to be convinced that a drafting system that already stymies the signing bonus while restricting player movement would be better for its foreign-born players.  Aside from the cost-cutting concerns, is an international draft even remotely viable from a cultural standpoint? In the US, young players mostly approach the game in a similar way – a structured development system that begins roughly at the age of five to high school, where he has a choice to be drafted, or continue on to college before the player can be drafted again. Many of those structured options simply don’t exist in countries such as the Dominican Republic or in Venezuela on a level they exist in the US, so how can all the players be put into the same pool?  Then there is the threat that an international draft could have on the sport in Latin nations. A well-circulated New York Times article examined the decline of the sport in Puerto Rico since its players entered the first-year draft, one which may have helped lead to the eventual closure of its long-standing winter baseball league. The current free-agency set-up in Latin America ensures investment into the sport, mostly via academies – that could decline as clubs are less likely to spend millions of dollars on facilities when the end-product could wind up with another team.  During a time when youth baseball is struggling to compete with soccer in the United States, a push against the game Latin America could be devastating for the sport. It’s a move the game can’t afford to take, even if it means inequality on a big-league level.
David Lengel: Commissioner Rob Manfred has made his desire for a globally inclusive first-year draft clear, but its implementation would be anything but straightforward