But! There could be still be other benefits for the White Sox as well. Hardcore luxury taxes for teams entering $200 million payroll territory could certainly help to trim the gap between the White Sox and the super rich, but let’s focus on something more specific.

Sources say every team will have a total bonus pool of about $5 million to sign foreign-born amateur players. And they can’t exceed that cap

— Jayson Stark (@jaysonst) December 1, 2016

Only five years ago, the White Sox were regularly getting blown away by the rest of the league in terms of spending in the First-Year Player Draft. They made a regular practice of adhering to slot recommendations for spending that nearly every other team ignored and wildly exceeded, and in turn the Sox were lapped the in the pursuit of elite amateur talent. With the last CBA that took effect in 2012, recommended slots were replaced with bonus pools with strict penalties attached for excess spenders. Everyone was restrained in the same system, and the White Sox staying within their assigned spending limits was now enough to land elite prospects at the top of the draft like Carlos Rodon. They could play by the rules, enter the draft with a hard limit on how much they will spend, and still compete. It was bad news for talented amateurs who could once negotiate their value in a relatively free market, but excellent news for the White Sox.

Take that little bit of franchise and league history and slap an international focus onto it. Right now and until the new conditions of the CBA take effect, a sliding scale bonus pool is allotted to teams to spend on the international amateur market everywhere, but without a draft order, or any associated value for each pick that would come with it. It’s a free market with an artificially suppressed budget (even the biggest pool allotment for this year is only $5.6 million) and disparate levels of scouting of a huge, international pool of prospects from team-to-team. What if a single organization has an inside track on two or three or more high-level multi-million prospects during a single year?

Well, the answer to that has often been that teams have decided to completely nuke their bonus limits to hell, and tear off on massive single-season spending sprees, injecting a huge supply of international amateur talent into their system at once and resolving to simply deal with the penalties and restrictions that come with it. Five teams exceeded their bonus pool limits in 2015-2016, and another five were on restrictions from exceeding it the previous  year.

Where has that left the rule-abiding White Sox? They have dutifully spent near their full annual allotment with consistency, but even if you question the logic of vacillating between huge talent injections and penalty-restricted quiet periods on the international market, competing for top talent when five teams per season are spending with virtually no limits–The Cubs spent over $15 million internationally without even including Cuban signees–is undoubtedly perilous. Having the same amount of money as everyone else won’t immediately fix the Sox still-improving international scouting operation and equalize things like the draft spending cap did, but the phrase “a fighting chance” comes to mind. Even if the Sox cannot dominate, at least there is a smaller avenue for them to be dominated.

Through this framing, there is reason for partisan happiness at the new CBA, but as an observer of the league at large, the imposition of an arbitrary spending limit–and a very low limit at that–on Latin American 16-year-olds is a pretty grim development. Especially considering that said 16-year-olds, often struggling under intense poverty, had no seat at the bargaining table and only saw their career prospects dim as a result of this agreement.

There’s a temptation here to blame this on Jerry Reinsdorf, as this being the product of his attempts to shape the entire league to match his way of doing business. It cannot be wholly dismissed; he’s still a highly influential team owner and the way spending on amateur talent has been capped in way that matches the White Sox modus operandi is certainly quite the coincidence. But above all, the goal of this new CBA was to reduce spending across the board, and if you think Reinsdorf had to rally other owners to this cause, I envy your naivete.

Lead Image Credit: Nick Turchlaro // USA Today Sports Images

Some commentary, from another nationally renowned reporter, to start.

A person who has been in the industry a long time predicted last week there would be the usual labor-talk saber-rattling this week. Bingo.

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) November 22, 2016

Rosenthal is a very savvy reporter, and it’s wise to assume that he is aware of the posturing that’s in place here, but these are the owners–likely leaning on the premise that the public still views any work stoppage as an act of greed by the players–publicly leaking that the players are moving too slowly. This an attempt to place pressure and responsbility on the players’ union, led by Tony Clark is his first go-round negotiating a CBA. Given the terms Rosenthal reports the owners are pushing, it’s clear why they are trying to field some outside assistance.

There are reported disagreements over the competitive balance tax, the Joint Drug Agreement, but the owners’ efforts to shoehorn in a full-blown international draft, particularly as a direct exchange for getting rid of draft pick loss for free agents that have received a qualifying is clearly the biggest wedge. It’s a huge move to curtail costs of the international market and that it’s been coming so long is one of the only things that hedges the absurdity of the proposal. International propsects would be entered into the hard slotting of the major league draft, likely pushed down from the top of the bonus scale by older, more pro-ready college players, and would likely have all the contract leverage of a senior sign.

The White Sox were hammered in the draft until hard spending caps were instituted, because they adhered to the soft ones, and were hammered in the international market until the current bonus pool restrictions were put in place. Even now, they will never rise from the middle of the pack in international talent acquisition because they refrain from the spending splurges that other teams engage in to violate bonus pool restriction, which put the signing of premium talent above adherence to league rules. With Jerry Reinsdorf having been at the heart of the 1994 strike, and a known advocate for regulating spending leaguewide, he’s seen as being a primary impetus for hard draft slotting, and by the same logic is believed to behind the push for an international draft, which he has been forecasting for a while.

While an international draft would benefit the White Sox in the way it would eliminate some of the avenues for competitive advantages that they currently neglect, it would be a mistake to think this is Reinsdorf trying to game the system to benefit his team. A better interpretation is that the Sox are currently being ran in the manner he feels the entire league should be molded to, whether it’s to their immediate benefit or not.

Fans cheering “team-friendly” contracts, or put in the position of hoping their team can fit talent within their own self-ascribed budget are already rooting for their team over the best financial interest of the players involved. But it’s getting more tiresome to make that choice on a league scale, where something driven by a desire to curb the revenue demanded by players at the most uncertain point in their careers could hand a small benefit to the White Sox way of doing business.

It’s a somewhat surprising turn of events that the players union, once derided for representing themselves–major leaguers already in the game–and being willing to concede the rights for incoming minor leaguers and draftees is now appearing to hold firm against an international draft, but it’s a good one. The draft is a mechanism for arbitrarily restricting revenue for young players, that itself goes against the free market principles that are supposed to be in place in this country; its expansion should be strongly opposed. If the owners are willing to force another reputation-smashing strike in order to pay 16-year-old Dominicans less money, they deserve the fallout it will receive.

Since the Winter Meetings are not until next month, after the CBA deadline, the major dominoes of the Sox rebuild were likely not to be until after negotations were wrapped anyway. My skepticism that the owners are willing to force a labor crisis over an international draft–hence their attempt to use public pressure to force an early concession–doubles as skepticism that the White Sox offseason will be thrown off track by this.

Lead Image Credit: Kamil Krzaczynski // USA Today Sports Images