Oyez, Oyez, Oyez

Thank you for leaving me in peace to enjoy my birthday yesterday. Given the rhetorical heat of today's debate, it must have been no easy task to stay quiet for so long. I'll say at the outset that I oppose the Carter proviso. I would second his motion, however, for reopening the stats discussion since a) I'm not happy with the lack of rate stats on offense and b) want to provide an opportunity for even more impassioned debate, which will hopefully lead to an actual caning when Pete is riled up by someone's commitment to that harlot, K/9IP.

I'm impressed by the unity of the historians, along with Omar, on this question, and the ability of the proviso to attract opposition of such varying ideological stripe suggests it is fundamentally noxious to democracy on some deep level of feeling, however irrational such feeling may seem to its supporters. We have Ben, the strict constructionist: "Your resolution attempts to leverage the facts of this rule away from the specifically designed intent and use it in a completely new way." Pete, the early New Dealer, arguing for sound money, antimonopoly, a Jeffersonian labor theory of value, and consumer protection: "you need to keep your first round pick to use on the keeper. you can't spend the same dollar twice" and "there has to be a protection for people who aren't going to manipulate the system efficiently...not only do those lesser teams need the protection of having FDIC-insured value for their picks." And Omar, the law and order conservative: "the situation...is different because we established ahead of time what would happen with two first round keepers and is a declared 'loophole'." Fittingly, Carter, the corporate liberal, and Mo, the socialist, are attracted by the possibilities of state planning through the largest and most favored corporations. But now I'm pushing the historical analogies too far.

I do think Carter brings up an interesting exercise in logic, but only as a thought experiment. I admire the creativity he is displaying in trying to maximize the resources at his disposal. In the end, I think it opens up too large a loophole by violating the spirit of the keeper rules and getting something for nothing. Not that I like the keeper rules. I wanted to live in a fantasy world where everyone declared their keepers to set the free agent pool, and we then drafted as normal. No "cost" for keepers. If you were smart/lucky enough to get someone great, your reward was owning him outright. I never liked the idea of keying keepers to draft spots. Alas, the league voted against that vision. I also wasn't that much of a fan of the rule we devised for people who came to possess multiple first-rounders, but people seemed to think it would be unfair to penalize the managerial ability it took to assemble such talent. In the case In re Cardarelli (2006), the principle at the heart of the Court's decision was that a player could drop a draft slot only if he was displaced by an existing player of equivalent or greater value; value in this case defined by the existing player's draft spot.

Now comes Carter, petitioning for the equivalency of pick and player. Recognizing this equivalency would upset the delicate balance of the league and is beyond the scope of the original rule. The value that Carter proposes to trade, is inseparable from the player from whom it is derived. Thus, trading a first round pick and bumping Wright down to second is the same as a unilateral revaluation of Wright to the second round, ie declaring "Actually, I am going to take Wright in the second round and trade his first-round value." Player values were set at last year's draft and they cannot be unilaterally revalued to suit the perverse whims of the owners. If Wright is to be revalued, then Carter should either a) trade lower picks for another first-round pick, since whoever he acquired with this pick would constitute an existing player of equivalent value defined by draft pick or b) trade lower round picks for someone else's first rounder. The Czaplicki example is a false issue. If Wright was traded for Santana (which would never happen), Czaplicki would be replacing one first-round value (Santana) with another (Wright) and would have no dilemma of what "use" to choose.

Finally, to indulge the argument that losing one's second-round pick is a great burden, the keeper system guarantees a shallower talent pool. Many "second rounders" in effect will be last year's third and fourth rounders. So the equation
"expected value (wright + second round pick) < expected value (wright + whatever i got in a trade for my first rounder pick)"
can be expected to generally hold true. The argument is moot, however, because Carter has no first-round pick to trade, unless he plans on not keeping Wright.

Carter may object that value is not derived from the player; that draft picks are independent of them. If this is true, then it is easily seen that the market price for Wright, set at last year's draft (and not in the future based on who else one might acquire) is one first-round pick. Since Carter has no other player currently on his roster valued at that price, if he wishes to keep Wright, he must spend his first-round pick to keep Wright at his value. If he spends his pick to pay the price of Wright's market value, he has no first-round pick to trade. If he trades his first round pick, then he doesn't have the value to pay Wright's price. There is no issue here. The rule is designed to reward the ant, not the grasshopper.