Mark Zuckerman Walks Through Bryce Harper and the "Super Two" Ramifications

And it’s the first I’ve heard of it. What does “arbitration-level salary” mean? That he can force arbitration? That’s weird, because I doubt there’s a clause in the contract which allows the Nats to “non-tender” Harper, as it were.

First, the date is a rough estimate for “super 2s” since what it is is that if you are brought up from the minors before a certain percentage of all players brought up that year, you are still stuck playing for the team in the majors that year without having it count as one of your 6 of team control, but by being brought up earlier than most others you do get the boon of having one additional arbitration year. What THAT means is based off of the cost-controlled structure: three years where (most) players get minimum salary, then three years of arbitration, which means that theoretically the player’s agent says he should get x amount for the coming year, the team says y amount, and an arbiter decides which figure is the most fitting. In reality, what usually happens is that teams work out a deal with their arb players every year that tends to be somewhere in the middle of those figures.

What makes an extra arb year, rather than a minimum contract year, beneficial is that they tend to make a certain percentage of what they’d get as free agents, so that is usually quite a raise even in the first arb year where one typically gets about 40% of what they’d get on the free market, with year two 60% and three 80%.

Zuckerman really ought to do a separate post on this. He’s very clear with his explanation but it’s way in the bottom of the comments on that thread. If you didn’t post it here, it would be really hard to find going forward.

seems like the old one since that was about the cutoff for stras, right?