/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/34521867/20130415_ajl_al8_048.0.jpg)
Major League Baseball should get rid of the Super Two, Frank Coonelly says.
"I thought it was a grave mistake when we went to the Super-2 [in 1990],'' Coonelly said, "and I continue to believe it's a grave mistake, especially in a market like Pittsburgh. I would really be in favor to going back to three years. Or even two years. Or even getting rid of salary arbitration entirely.
"If you do that, we can at least take away the gamesmanship so this isn't raised every single year.''
Getting rid of salary arbitration would be such an enormous change to the current system that it's impossible to tell what sort of system Coonelly is suggesting here. In any case, I'm not sure getting rid of Super Two would eliminate gamesmanship, because while the extra year of arbitration would no longer be a consideration, years of control still would be. So we would see fewer mid-June promotions and more mid-April promotions, sort of like the Astros' promotion of George Springer. That would simply be replacing one cutoff date with another, and we'd see complaints about teams not promoting players in September or at the start of the season.