[Alsfastball] Prawn ruling - Patrick Graham

[Al Doran]

Subject: Prawn ruling
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 11:43:53 -0400
From: "Patrick Graham" <pgraham at dapc.com>
To: <fastball at pmihrm.com>



After reading John Mikan's response to the prawn rule, I would like to
play devils advocate on behalf of the smaller market teams and argue
against his belief that the new prawn rule will help.

Your argument that the prawn will prevent big money teams from running
the small market teams out of the game may be very well be wrong.  It
may in fact work in the opposite manner.  You take Kitchener, who is not
a so called 'big-money team' as an example.  With there current
situation and the Prawn rule, they are unable to add a local pitcher
like Paul Koert because he is a Prawn and they already have Todd Martin.
So what do they do if they want to improve their team in 2006?  They
look elsewhere.  Do they go after a Nick Underhill, Trevor Eithier, Sean
Whitten and bring them in which will hurt SoCal or Vancouver and Aspen.
Do they grab take a Matt Bramwell from the young Frankenmuth team.  Or
do they stay local and take the young Phibbs kid from Jarvis.  This same
situation can be applied to the Farm if two of their current pitchers
departed, County if Mata or Kirkpatrick left or any team that has the
Prawn limitations set on it.

The same scenario can be applied to a position player as well.  For
example if Kris Kiefel decides to not come back to the US in 2006 and
County needs to find a SS.  Due to Prawn, they are limited in their
search.  So where do they turn?  Do they grab Kevin Schellenberg, Ian
Fehrman or Evan Boyd.  All of which would hurt the local teams that
developed them.

The Prawn rule in effect promotes the raiding of the young teams that
are building and may kill them off before they even get a chance to
taste any success.  It does not promote local development and it does
not level the playing field (if that is what they are after?).

As for your popular players whining comment.  I think it was put out
there more for discussion and to try to provide an opinion on the
situation and their views as to what impact it will have on the game
that we play.  Now the ISC has stated that an open forum was held on the
Friday after the managers meeting to discuss the Prawn and power pool
ideas.  My question is how many players were in Eau Claire at the time
of the meeting.  How many players were aware of the proposal and
understood how it worked.  Did the player reps know how the proposal
worked to be able to discuss with players from their area prior to the
open forum?  Just questions that it seems some people are looking for
questions on.

As for the power-pool concept, how could they look for feedback or
discuss the concept before it was even tried?  Well, that is another
situation, maybe we should save it for a later date.


Regards,

Pat Graham

From: "Patrick Graham" <pgraham at dapc.com>

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