Cameron Merritt/Taunton Daily Gazette-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn

The guys in caps and white pants have been chucking the ball around for a few months now, but Major League Baseball’s most important undertaking — collective bargaining — is just getting started.

The league and the MLBPA have traded preliminary economic proposals over the past month, and some of the items on the table are quite spicy. The league wants a salary cap and a five-year limit on contracts for free agents who change teams. The MLBPA wants extensive reforms to the revenue sharing system and a quicker path to free agency for players in their 30s — and to nearly triple the minimum salary by the end of the CBA.

But the spiciest nugget in the carton might be MLB’s proposal for a 12-round draft that’s limited to players who are 20 years old and at least two years out of high school.

The high school talent pipeline has been the backbone of professional baseball in this country since… well, pretty much since we’ve had professional baseball in this country. MLB would cap that spigot and redirect thousands of young ballplayers to college baseball, which would benefit from an influx of talent, but at the cost of having to sort through every high school player in North America and bear full responsibility for developing the best of the crop from ages 18 to 20.

It’s hard to overstate how massive a change to the professional baseball ecosystem this would be. The negative externalities from this proposal, if adopted, would be too humongous to predict.

But we can take a stab at a few. Joe Sheehan was among those who pointed out that MLB’s draft proposal would end the long tradition of future Hall of Famers debuting at age 19 or 20 — and at a time when young prospects are moving as fast as ever. Everyone’s excited about Konnor Griffin hitting the majors as a teenager; what a great time to make sure that never happens again. J.J. Cooper of Baseball America noted that even in this era of NIL and gluttonous athletic department budgets, college baseball’s financial infrastructure is not set up to absorb multitudes of players who ought to be in Rookie ball or Low-A.

Our own Dan Szymborski calculated what some of the biggest free agent contracts in the game would look like if everyone had to wait an extra two years to enter professional baseball; players otherwise due for nine-figure contracts would each miss out on $40 million or more, he projects.

This is, of course, the point. If MLB gets its way on the draft, it would further devalue free agency and offload huge scouting and development costs to college programs. This would presumably allow teams to slash their amateur scouting and minor league coaching staffs, as well. The proposal did not say whether Rob Manfred plans to cut Vanderbilt a check for rendering the services that would’ve otherwise been provided by the Hickory Crawdads.

There are four things I can say for certain about MLB’s proposal. First: It would dramatically raise the level of talent in the college game. Whether the resources are there to scout and cultivate that talent to its fullest extent, I don’t know. I also don’t think we can predict where would-be first-rounders would end up. We could have 80 programs with future big leaguers in their lineups and rotations, and an eye toward Omaha every year, or Griffin could waste his freshman year riding the bench at LSU.

Which brings me to point no. 2: A 20-year-old draft age minimum would blunt the development of the most talented young players in North America, not just because it’d delay their entry into pro ball, but because it would force them to tread water against competition that didn’t challenge them. This would be deleterious to the level of play in MLB, but I don’t know if and to what extent the average fan would notice. Most fans wouldn’t know they’re missing Griffin or Kevin McGonigle if they were still plying their trade in the SEC.

Third: A truncated draft would take money out of the pockets of the industry’s lowest-paid athletes with no benefit to fans, the public, or even younger players. It would then, as Dan explained, hit them in the wallet again when they reach free agency later.

Fourth: I wouldn’t worry too much about this because it’s vanishingly unlikely that the new CBA will include a 12-round, no-high-schooler draft.

It’s June. The CBA doesn’t expire for another five months. It’ll probably be another two and a half or three months after that before a lockout would threaten significant parts of the 2027 schedule. This is the opening round of negotiations; each side is going to ask for the moon so they have more stuff to trade and more space to bargain down to a compromise. (See Evan Drellich’s recent article in The Athletic.)

Then there’s the MLBPA’s response. The players have yet to put together a comprehensive response on the draft, but their statement from June 18 gives you a sense of where the union stands. Said statement ends with the following clause: “the league’s proposals fall woefully short.” The MLBPA probably would’ve chosen a different adverb if it were receptive to this proposal.

Call me in mid-January if MLB still hasn’t moved off this proposal; until then, I’m not especially concerned.

But who cares what I think? I’m some middle-aged nerd with no skin in the game. There’s something a little gross about the draft being subject to CBA negotiations, because the players who’ll have to live by these rules are represented neither by MLB, nor by the MLBPA. They have no voice. And if I claim to speak for them, aren’t I just part of the problem?

As luck would have it, I spent last week in Phoenix, surrounded by a multitude of large, talented, and extremely confident young men at the MLB Draft Combine. And with the 12-round draft proposal fresh in the news, you can be sure I asked as many players as I could for their thoughts.

The most common answer, by far, was some version of “I don’t know.” Which is fair enough; these are 18-to-21-year-olds who are trying not to say anything that’ll negatively impact their draft stock. But a few players had given the matter some thought and had something to say.

“I’m pretty lucky that I don’t really have to make that decision. Good luck to whoever does,” said Jackson Flora, a right-handed pitcher out of UC Santa Barbara who’ll probably be the first college arm off the board. He explained that his younger brother, a catching prospect who’s committed to UCSB and is probably headed to school, will have to choose for himself in the next few weeks.

“Maybe I have some bias, because I had such a fun experience at college,” Flora said, “but I told him there’s no amount of money I would’ve taken out of high school, looking back at it, after the college experience I’ve had, to go pro instead of going to college.”

Flora’s sentiments are pretty common around the game, even if you don’t account for the fact that he went undrafted out of high school but is a potential top-five pick now. In general, quality of life is better in college than the low minors, so the smart move is to go to school unless financial considerations make pro baseball more attractive. But even Flora acknowledges that college baseball isn’t for everyone.

“I think there’s pros and cons,” he said. “There’s a lot of guys that have had success, like the Holliday brothers and Konnor Griffin, that came out of high school. Some dudes are ready for it. I wasn’t. But I kind of like that young guys are in the league that you get to watch for a long time.”

Drew Burress, the star outfielder out of Georgia Tech, had mixed feelings overall, but was intrigued by the idea of a college baseball landscape that included every top North American prospect.

“I can’t say that I would agree or disagree,” Burress said. “I think it would be good for college baseball for sure. College baseball is already awesome, but you take away some guys that are in the big leagues right now and put them in college — I mean, who knows what that looks like? It could be exciting.”

Like Flora, Burress went undrafted out of high school, so his career wouldn’t have panned out too differently if he had been forced to go to school. The high schoolers I talked to were a little more circumspect.

“I think it’s gonna get a little messy if that thing passes, with high schoolers not being in there,” said Lucas Nawrocki, a two-way player from Aledo, Texas, who’s committed to LSU. “I think a lot of those talented freshmen are going to disperse into smaller schools, so they can play right away. They only get two years now, so they’re gonna try to make the most of that. There’ll be a different landscape for sure. I don’t know how it’ll play out, but it’ll be interesting if it does pass.”

The playing time issue is already important for high school prospects. I asked another high school two-way player, Coleman Borthwick of Freeport, Florida, what he thought about MLB’s proposal. He immediately pivoted to the potential talent logjam in college baseball, and said playing time was a major factor in where he committed.

“There’s so many teams out there that go transfer, transfer, transfer,” Borthwick said. “Auburn, they play their freshmen. They develop their guys. That’s something special that they have that no other team in the country, I believe, has. They go to Omaha one year, but the next year they may be down because they’ve got to develop their guys again. That’s what I love about them, is their development of their players.”

The most interesting comments came from the biggest (literally) prospect at the combine: Brody Bumila, a 6-foot-9 prep left-hander from Massachusetts who’s committed to the University of Texas. He also thinks a 12-round draft with an age cap would load up the college game.

“College would become, literally, I think, too good,” Bumila said. “Seth Hernandez, if he would have played in college, he’d have, like, a 0.50 ERA.”

But that’s not the most important part of the proposal.

“I think the thing that a lot of people are missing is that it would drop the pool from $358.7 million to $200 million. So signing bonuses are going to look like this, and everything’s fixed,” Bumila said. “I don’t want to state a major opinion on it, because you know someone’s going to find a way to disagree with it, but it’s crazy that that’s the main proposal. I feel like there’s so much stuff that they’re trying to cover, and they come in saying, ‘Let’s change the draft.’”

Fortunately for Bumila, that won’t be his problem. Not just because he’s going through the draft process under the current rules, but because, as I said, this proposal feels less like a hill to die on than a trial balloon. But as long as it’s on the table, it’s worth hearing what the players think.