How to handle Re-signings

[GoIrish]

If I am understanding the gist of this correctly the issue at hand are people locking players up in arb years and not enough quality hitting FA?

Here are some of my random thoughts and ideas, going to spitball some while I am on a conference call....

I agree with Andy and DJ, not allowing extensions till the 5th year makes a lot of sense.

Bench players over a certain rating are not allowed to resign, in order to resign they need to have started in at least 40% of the games played, or a certain amount of starts on the season or appearances for the pitchers. 40% gives some flexibility to platoon type of players. We could also put something out there for SP being used as RP, obviously some SP would want to hit FA and get their chance in a rotation. Maybe we can use the players happiness in that case. It also assures the league that if a player is not being used on one team or being used as that player would like to be used that someone will use him and will populate our season end FA pool better.

Make an arb committee of 5 people, any player that wants to be resigned while under arb, that contract would need to go through the committee. They would proceed to compare the player in question to others n the market place and give a value for the player on the resign. We would take the finding for all 5 of the committee and give the average of the 5. In essence, it will be our own arb panel.