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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: No Country For Young Men
Vol. 18, No. 50
June 23, 2026
Having made an initial proposal to the players for a payroll-cap system that covered major leaguers, MLB and the team owners followed up with a proposal to radically change how players can enter professional baseball. Just as the owners want a cap system like their NFL and NBA brethren, the owners’ plan to change the draft would make it much more like the drafts in those leagues: shorter, with hard slotting, pick trading, and only collegians eligible. It’s so much like the NFL model I wonder whether draftees will have to hug Roger Goodell when they’re picked. Parallel to this radically altered domestic draft, the owners would add a draft of international players who have already turned 18.
There is a lot going on with this proposal. My immediate reaction was to bump on the elimination of high-school draftees and what that would mean for career paths and player compensation down the line. We’ll get to that. The college-age requirement, though, is a fundamental change. Even as college players make up more of the draft pool, high schoolers remain a big part of the process. The #1 overall pick in 2025, Eli Willits, was a high schooler. Six of the top ten picks and 19 of the 43 first-round selections came out of high school. All of those players would be ineligible to be drafted. Under the new rules, players would be eligible two years after their high-school class graduates and have to be 20 by September 1 of their draft year. Willits, 2025’s 1.1, would not have been eligible until the 2028 draft under these rules.
The benefits for MLB and the teams are clear. They would get two additional years of information on draft prospects. They would benefit from the professionalization of top college programs, which are more suited to development than they were in the past. (This is a sharp change from when I started writing, when one of MLB teams’ top arguments to high school draftees they wanted to sign was “colleges won’t develop you the way we will.”) Obviously, hard slotting eliminates the time and effort teams have to put into reaching agreements under the current system, and it keeps teams from employing the current strategy of distributing their league-mandated draft budget in creative ways.
Perhaps the biggest benefit would be to eliminate the need to scout high school players. Someone has to find Eli Willits out in Oklahoma and JoJo Parker in Mississippi and Steele Hall in Alabama, and more people have to watch them play once they’re found. MLB would be offloading all of that to colleges, letting them make the first cut and narrowing the potential group of drafted players by an order of magnitude. There would be enormous savings on MLB personnel and travel under this plan. Teams wouldn’t need a fraction of the scouts they employ today if all 360 draft picks are coming out of college and most of those from high-profile colleges.
MLB is presenting the international draft as a way to clean up what can be an ugly, exploitative market for poor teenagers. This argument reminds me of the kid who kills his parents and then pleads for mercy based on his being an orphan. The international market is ugly because MLB teams have behaved terribly to gain advantages. That their solution for cleaning it up is to take negotiating power away from the players is indicative of their mindset.
When MLB cut the draft from 40 to 20 rounds, I defended the decision. Almost no players drafted in the last 20 rounds made any sort of impact in the majors, and many never even signed. That’s not the case in cutting from 20 to 12.
Eliminating teams’ ability to draft 17- to 19-year-olds, though, departs from the whole of baseball history and will change the shape of the best players’ careers. Consider this list of the best position players since 1970, which covers the players since the first draft in 1965.
Young’uns (most bWAR, 1970-2026, signing and MLB debut ages)
bWAR Sign Debut
Barry Bonds 162.8 20 21
Alex Rodriguez 117.4 17 18
Rickey Henderson 111.2 17 20
Mike Schmidt 106.9 21 22
Albert Pujols 101.3 19 21
Cal Ripken Jr. 95.9 17 20
Adrian Beltre 93.7 15 19
Wade Boggs 91.4 18 24
Mike Trout 90.4 17 19
George Brett 88.6 18 20
I’ll stop there, but were I to continue, I’d list teenaged stars like Robin Yount and Ken Griffey Jr. One of the biggest stories of 2026 has been Konnor Griffin making his debut at 19 (baseball age 20, for these purposes). Trout, Juan Soto, and Bryce Harper are all headed to the Hall of Fame after careers that began when they were teenagers. Go back to pre-draft days, and baseball history is filled with superstars at 19, 20, and 21, legends like Mickey Mantle and Al Kaline and Mel Ott.
MLB proposes to sever that tie to the game’s history. Players taken in the domestic draft will almost all have a baseball age of at least 20, given the rules. Most won’t make their pro debuts until they turn 21. It won’t be unheard of for the top players to arrive in the majors within a year of being drafted. Nick Kurtz and Cam Smith did so out of the 2024 draft, but even they were 22 as rookies. Being drafted at 18 may make the math easier for kids out of the Dominican, as they’ll start their careers two years younger than those domestic draftees. Those foreign players typically have longer runways to the majors than U.S. college players, though.
With these rules in effect, we would probably never see another teenaged player, much less a star. Rarely would a 20-year-old play in MLB, and only a small number of 21-year-olds would.
If most careers start at 22 and 23, then those players won’t be eligible for free agency until 28 or 29. Nick Kurtz was granted a full year of service time for winning the AL Rookie of the Year, and he will become a free agent, under the current rule set, in advance of his age-28 season. Cam Smith made his debut Opening Day and is similarly situated. Under MLB’s draft proposal, and holding everything else constant, 28 would be the youngest any player could hit the market, and very few would do so before their age-29 season.
This is the biggest effect of MLB’s proposal.
Young Money (largest MLB contracts, age in first year of deal)
$ Age
Juan Soto $765M 26
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. $500M 27
Shohei Ohtani $460M 29
Mike Trout $427M 27
Mookie Betts $365M 28
Aaron Judge $360M 31
Manny Machado $350M 30
Francisco Lindor $341M 27
Fernando Tatis Jr. $340M 22
Bryce Harper $330M 26
The Guerrero, Trout, Betts, Machado, Lindor, and Tatis Jr. contracts weren’t signed in free agency, though they did price the players as if they were on the market. If we only look at free-agent deals...
Young Money in Market (largest MLB free-agent contracts, age in first year of deal)
$ Age
Juan Soto $765M 26
Shohei Ohtani $460M 29
Aaron Judge $360M 31
Bryce Harper $330M 26
Corey Seager $325M 28
Manny Machado $300M 26
Trea Turner $300M 30
Xander Bogaerts $280M 30
Alex Rodriguez $252M 25
Almost all of the biggest contracts in baseball history have been signed by young free agents. The Rodriguez, Machado, Harper, and Soto deals set and reset and reset again the high end of what it’s possible for a baseball player to earn, and they did so because they were selling their peaks. You could sign one of these players and get their late twenties, when they were likeliest to remain stars. Those deals set the bar for other free agents and players like Trout and Guerrero and Tatis negotiating extensions.
Eliminating 26- and 27- and most 28-year-old free agents ends this. Yes, an Ohtani or Judge -- a unicorn -- will slip in now and again, but the most valuable free agents of the past will still be under team control in the future.
It’s particularly sinister because of the speed at which players now age out of the league. From a few weeks back...
Ten years ago, there was a steep decline in the contribution of hitters starting at 34. That’s been moved up by two years. Players 32 and older, back in 2016, accounted for a little under 25% of all plate appearances. That figure is down under 17% today.
Look around the league. You can’t swing a stick without seeing a veteran collapsing at 32 or 33. Jake Cronenworth, 32, is hitting .144/.272/.196. Trevor Story, 33, was at .206/.244/.303 when he got hurt. Dansby Swanson and Corey Seager are both under a 90 OPS+ at 32. Mookie Betts slipped a year ago at 32 and now, at 33, is hitting .190/.259/.365. Manny Machado is also 33 and hitting .171/.253/.342. You don’t want to ask how much longer any of these players’ contracts run.
Baseball, more than ever before, is about raw physical talent. How hard can you throw it, how fast can you spin it, how quickly can you get your bat to it, how far can you hit it? A game that had, for more than a century, plenty of room for nuance now has very little. Hitters who could adapt to declining hand-eye coordination and reaction time now find themselves with no room to maneuver. The pitchers are just too good, they’re too well-trained, they’re too able to expend every ounce of energy on every pitch, with durability no longer part of the job.
If players are forced to enter professional ball later so they can’t get their careers going until they are 23, and they can’t get paid until they’re 29, and they can’t be productive past 32, when, exactly, are they going to get paid?
MLB presented a draft proposal that isn’t a draft proposal, but rather a way to end large deals for free agents. If players can’t hit the market when they still have prime years to sell, we’ll never see the kind of deals Soto and Harper and Alex Rodriguez earned from their great play starting in their teens. MLB’s proposal will save teams millions up front by reducing scouting costs. But the true purpose of the proposal is to save them billions at the back by eliminating megadeals for the best players.
The players didn’t need long to call out the proposal as “flat out bad for the game.” It’s worth noting, though, that all sports unions, the MLBPA included, have a track record of selling off the rights of non-members to get what they want for current members. I can see parts of this, like hard slotting and an international draft, as elements of the next CBA. The players just don’t have many chips to trade for the increases in both compensation and competition they’re looking for.
The elimination of high-school draftees, though, has to be a non-starter, both for the players and for baseball.
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A lot of great coverage of this issue, of course. I linked to J.J. Cooper at Baseball America above. There’s also...
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You can subscribe to the newsletter this week only for one year for 20% off, just $63.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card. (Zelle users, please email me for details.)
