Rosenthal: New CBA forced teams to improve

A little-known aspect of the CBA — the market-disqualification program — is helping force a select group of teams to operate more competitively than they did in the past.

The way the program works, revenue-sharing proceeds for teams in the 15 largest markets will decline by set percentages over the next three years, and disappear entirely by 2016.

Teams that previously received such funds — Toronto, Atlanta and Washington, among them — had little incentive to field better clubs. Why bother? By increasing revenues, they lost revenue-sharing dollars.

The new CBA flips that equation.

Teams that are about to lose their revenue-sharing income are more motivated to make money. And teams make money by winning.

Jeffrey Loria disputes that notion.

Mets’ path to sign Bourn still cloudy

The Mets want this resolved, or else they will issue a Bourn ultimatum.

Maybe the New York Mets can pull the whole thing off and sign free-agent center fielder Michael Bourn without losing their first-round pick.

David Prouty, executive counsel of the players’ union, told The Boston Globe that he is in talks with baseball regarding the Mets’ desire to keep their pick if they sign Bourn.

One source with knowledge of the discussions said the team stands a “decent” chance of winning its argument that its first-round choice should be protected.

(The Mets had the 10th-worst record in the majors last season but fell to No. 11 — the first unprotected pick — when the Pittsburgh Pirates did not sign their first-rounder and, as compensation, moved back into the top 10).

Yet, the Mets’ path to Bourn still might not be clear.

Other clubs might have greater interest in Bourn than is being reported currently — and those clubs could sign Bourn without needing to wait for the union and baseball to resolve the draft-pick question, potentially in arbitration.

MacPherson: What is the value of a draft pick in major-league baseball?

Drafting and developing talented players already was a challenge. A team that yielded just one impact player out of each draft was doing about as well as could be expected.

But severe new spending limits restrict teams from being able to pay draftees what they once could, effectively restricting the number of elite draft picks they can sign. In addition, in contrast to previous years, while a team still must forfeit a draft pick to sign a compensation free agent, the team losing the free agent doesn’t inherit that draft pick. The pick instead vanishes into nothingness—and, with it, the $1 million or more the team would have been able to add to its newly restricted signing-bonus allotment.

(Had that rule been in place two years ago, the Red Sox wouldn’t have had a first-round pick, let alone two, and wouldn’t have been able to draft either Matt Barnes or Blake Swihart.)

One might gauge how much a team values a draft pick by the size of his signing bonus—in other words, its investment in him. In the first 10 rounds of the 2011 draft, Boston handed out 10 signing bonuses worth more than $100,000 in the first 10 rounds, eight of which were worth more than $500,000.

In 2012, the first year of the new spending system, the Red Sox handed out just seven signing bonuses worth more than $100,000, five of them worth more than $500,000. Of the players Boston drafted in rounds 6-10, all but one received a bonus of $25,000 or less, an indication that those players were selected more to allow them to allot money elsewhere than for their potential impact as prospects.

What does that mean? Rather than bringing 10 or 11 players who realistically could be viewed as prospects, the Red Sox brought in just seven. The challenge of producing one impact player from the draft class grew steeper accordingly.