This is the last portion of my hare-brained idea about MLB and European football leagues melding together (part 1 & part 2). If you've enjoyed it so far, I hope you continue to do the same. If you haven't, it'll be over soon.

The idea of transfer fees, applied to both the team-to-team transaction and the bonus to the player, is not as foreign a concept in MLB as you might think. In my initial post, I had made reference to Earl Averill, a HOF centerfielder whose career centered in the 1930's. The reason for this is that he was part of something that, had it worked out successfully, would have changed the way that player transactions worked for the next 78 years.

[Quoting an excerpt from The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract]
Late in the 1928 season, with the Pacific Coast League pennant race still several weeks from the finish line, Averill opened the paper on his way to the game, and read that he had been sold to the Cleveland Indians for a reported $50,000. He was to be "delivered" the following season.
"Do I get any of that money?" Averill asked his manager.
"No," replied the manager.
"Well then, I'm going home," replied Averill. And he did.
The [San Francisco] Seals immediately went to work on Averill, attempting to convince him that he had no right to the money. Averill said that right or wrong, if he didn't get part of the money, he had no intention of reporting to the Indians.
This got the attention of Judge [Kennesaw Mountain] Landis. Judge Landis - this may be surprising to younger readers, who have been taught to regard Landis as an ogre - Judge Landis said that Averill's demand sounded reasonable to him, and further, that baseball should adopt some sort of legislation by which, whenever a player was sold, the player himself would get a cut of the proceeds.
That went nowhere. Landis in this respect was forty-five years ahead of his time. His proposal, had it been adopted, would have done much to alleviate the stresses put on the game by free agency. Bowie Kuhn, at the outset of the free agency era, created and unilaterally imposed a policy by which star players could not be sold from team to team. This was an ignorant, bone-headed, destructive policy which had no foundation in anything except that Kuhn hated Charlie Finley, and saw that he could drive Finley out of the game by denying him the right to sell his players. What Kuhn should have done, if he had been thinking about the best interests of the game, is adopt Landis policy: rule that players could be sold for whatever they would bring, but 30% of the money had to go to the players. Had he done this, the effect would have been to allow the rich teams to acquire more of the best players, as they do now. But this policy would have allowed the rich teams to strengthen themselves without inflating the salary structure, and would have allowed the weaker teams, the Montreal-type teams, to remain financially competitive by profiting from developing young players.
Averill eventually got a $5000 bonus and a good salary to report to Cleveland.

Allowing the sale of players from team to team, which would apply up and down the entire baseball ladder, would be a boon for the ownership groups that excel in acquiring & developing talent to profit from it. And the money flowing from the top of the system to the lower minor leagues, I think, would help ensure that the structure remained solvent.

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My original thought as to how the current minor league structure would be affected by this paradigm shift was that a smaller developmental organization would still exist for each MLB franchise, with the remaining operations set free to handle their business independently. I now see that this logic was flawed, as it would allow the ML teams to hoard young talent in their D-leagues. It would also prevent the top indy-league squads from making the transition from promotion/relegation yo-yos to actual contenders within the 2nd division, as they wouldn't have the talent to compete with the real squads.

So I would say, limit the majors to 10 overflow players per team; five could be loaned out to minor league squads, the other five would be for short-term DL stays and "healthy scratches" similar to the NHL. (Players placed on 60-day trips would allow for additional player purchases; player suspensions, though, would count against the overflow list.) One thing to note with "the other five": they would probably need to be fairly veteran players, as they would need to fill in for the ML team, while getting little or no opportunity for regular work.

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OK, so now you have a flood of unaffiliated minor league operations and a similar deluge of free agent minor leaguers - how does this work? Two problems to start with: the teams will eventually have to be sorted into AAA, AA, etc., leagues; and some sort of structure to prevent the market saturation from driving salaries into "poverty"-levels.

It almost seems easier to view the necessary alignments of teams and leagues, and just assume that it figured itself out - as we said in school if we didn't understand something, "Just push the button and make believe." Because you might have 150 different operations all bidding on the same talent pool, with different levels of financial commitment. And it might take 15+ years to shuffle all of the leagues into some semblance of order.

I think one option that they could use is to have the individual leagues set a minimum investment level (similar to how expansion franchises make their bids, except they get to keep most of their money), which would be used to determine their starting places in the baseball hierarchy. If the owners have, say, $75M or $100M ready to dump into their operations (or already invested into their current setup, maybe), they qualify as an initial member of one of two 16-team "AAA" leagues; $50M gets them an invite for "AA", etc.

This brings us around to the other quandary - the players. With the structure formed as to which independent operations can really afford to own the best talent, set up a random dispersion draft with the top leagues getting first dibs. Limit each club to 30 players and then move down to the next rung. As for salaries, use a slotting system for initial contracts; the pre-determined amounts could be based on current pay levels, but it would exist only for the first season or so, after which supply-&-demand takes over.

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With the shift in thinking about developmental teams, the free agent draft seems to have lost its relevance (yet another idea shot to hell). But the vacuum left in its passing would be filled by unfettered capitalism; all of the top players could be scooped up by MLB franchises, their revenues dwarfing those in the independent minor leagues. At this point, I want to bring in the concept of overflow loans and the limitations regarding them.

As I mentioned before, the majors would have 5 spots available on their overflow roster for players that can be loaned out to the minors. These players would get the experience of playing every day, instead of languishing on the bench because they're not actually ready for that level of competition. The minor league teams holding these "loans" would be improved by using these higher quality athletes to supplement their current roster. But the majors could abuse this by snatching the top couple rounds of the draft, so to speak.

To ensure that the minor leagues get a shot at all but the very best amateur talent, put a limitation on how long a player can remain in reserve status. A two year maximum would spur the ML teams to use those spots for players who are almost ready to contribute or for the fast-risers coming available to the open market - a Ken Griffey Jr., a Mark Prior (hindsight notwithstanding).

To prevent minor league operations from abusing the loan option (basically having their entire roster comprised of no-cost-to-me ringers), the leagues could implement a limit of five loaners per team. And because the loan option would be a one-year contract only, there shouldn't be a real issue with a team, being propelled mainly due to borrowed talent, shooting up through the ranks of the leagues using hand-me-downs. At worst, they would be shot down the next year in the higher league when their talent level doesn't come close to the competition.

NOTE: I have no idea how this change in the draft would affect college baseball, as I don't know how you could put any kind of restrictions on thepurchase of amateur talent.

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That's pretty much the whole thing. We could take a look at how this would have looked had we started it 5 years ago, 25 years ago, 50 years ago. Imagine how the relationship between the Yankees and the KC Athletics in the 50's would've looked, if the Bombers would have purchased players like Roger Maris instead of pawning off their "scrap" minor leaguers in trade. Imagine how the Branch Rickey-led Cardinals would have fared if they hadn't been supplied by a limitless farm system. Imagine how Curt Flood would've been judged if he had been simply a notation on the transaction wire. Imagine if the hundreds of farmhands that languished in the minors for years had forced the hand of the teams that trapped them and were given the opportunity they so richly deserved. Run with those ideas, take them to their logical conclusions, and answer the numerous what-ifs this topic has brought up.

OK, that's it. I've run out of ideas. My intentions here were simple: spur some intelligent discourse about how our great game works & give us something to think about until the games actually start. I hope I've done both. Thank you.