Buster Posey started his first game at catcher last night for the San Francisco Giants.  He has been playing first for the last few weeks as he has acclimated to the big leagues.  Tonight, if you haven’t heard, Stephen Strasburg gets his first major league start tonight for the Nationals.  Both players are expected to help their teams, so why would you wait until May to bring them up?  Service time.

Murray Chass writes a piece on his blog about how small market teams are saving service time for their big prospects by waiting until mid-may to bring them up.  He also discusses some issues surrounding whether those same players can be named super-two’s, the term coined to indicate a player could become eligible for arbitration after only his second year of major league service.  The point that Chass makes is that teams might manipulate those numbers in order to save themselves some money at either part of the process, as well as keeping the player one extra season- since players can’t become free agents mid-season.

The other issue is what happens to fans of teams with chances to win when their team decides to save a prospect for an extra year they keep him off them the major league roster.  While there is no telling if any one player might be able to be a difference maker in whether a team wins or loses its division, there is no question that holding a player back to manipulate the money he makes short changes the fans.  There are reasons to keep a young player down.  Perhaps the team plays in a big city and exposing the player to the vices easily found there could be bad.  Perhaps he just hasn’t learned to hit the curve.  Perhaps the major league team has a pervasive culture of losing, that you certainly don’t want your star of the future emulating.  But, in the case of the SF Giants, there was concern that keeping Buster Posey at AAA hurt the Giants chances in the NL West.

Chass does a wonderful job in this post of allowing you to hear the voices of those he speaks with.  Its a casual piece hitting on a very important part of the business.  Very interesting approach.