Commissioner Rob Manfred has said since he first took office that creating some sort of worldwide or international draft was a priority for him in the current CBA negotiations. While there are rumors that is now being dropped, there is nevertheless a better way for the industry to go about creating a new process without unduly sticking it to the players, one that can simultaneously assuage the union’s concerns about payouts to international amateurs and address some of the real structural flaws in the current system.

The primary function of a draft for any sports league is to artificially restrict player earnings. If unsigned amateur players were free agents, they’d earn more money -- by negotiating with multiple teams -- than they can in a draft, where they can only negotiate with a single team, and where the cost of failure to reach an agreement is asymmetrical: It’s worse for the player, who gets no money and still has to go through a draft the following year, than for the team, which can reallocate the unspent money and gets a replacement draft pick the next year. Yes, a draft can help redistribute talent to the worst teams, assuming those clubs get the highest draft picks or, in the current Rule 4 draft system, the most money to spend, but its main purpose is to hold down payouts to players.

The current system for signing international free agents has accomplished none of its goals, stated or unstated, and if anything has left the industry in a worse position than it was in the previous regime, which was totally unregulated. The new system hasn’t clamped down on bonuses, it hasn’t stopped high-revenue teams from going bananas in signing players and it hasn’t redistributed talent to the weaker teams to maintain competitive balance.

Now teams get total bonus pools based on assigned “slots” as if there were a draft, but they can sign players as free agents once those players have turned 16 and the calendar has reached July 2. Teams that exceed their bonus pool for a year are subject to penalties, which can reach a 100 percent tax and an inability to sign further amateurs for the next two years. These penalties are like baseball’s equivalent of the government’s War on Drugs: They’ve cost everyone a lot of money and time without solving any of the problems they were supposed to address.

One of the main concerns prior to the implementation of this bonus-pool system was that teams would agree to terms with players when they were still 15 years old, or even 14, and then hide them away so other teams couldn’t scout them or even talk to them. Such deals were illegal, but there was no enforcement of the rule, which cut both ways -- if either side chose to renege on an agreement, there was no recourse for the wronged party. You can’t go to MLB and demand that a team or agent uphold the terms of an oral agreement that was never legal in the first place.

The new system has failed to fix any of this. Current Mariners prospect Chris Torres claimed that the Yankees backed out of an agreement with him before July 2, 2015, but not only was this deal illegal (if what Torres says is true), the move left him unsigned at a point when most teams had already chosen to spend their bonus pools, so he signed for less than a quarter of what his trainer alleges the Yankees had promised him. In 2016, one major international free agent allegedly reneged on a deal with a team on July 1 to sign with another club for a higher offer, and the team in this case was left with money unspent because of the timing.

Any form of draft eliminates this particular issue, as a player who isn’t drafted by the team he expected to take him can just be drafted by a team later in the process. A worldwide draft, long suggested by MLB executives as a desirable solution, is probably a nonstarter, as it would put 18- and 21-year-old U.S. and Canadian kids in the same pool as 16-year-olds from the Dominican, players who are scouted by different staffs and along different standards, and whose fair market values are not measured on the same scale.

A system of two separate drafts, one for the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico, and another for everywhere else, would pose some moral quandaries -- it would look bad if the No. 1 pick in the regular draft gets twice what the No. 1 pick in the international draft gets -- but it is easier to implement, with minimal transition costs for teams, scouts or player representatives.

If MLB gets an international draft in the new CBA, they can set it up so they avoid a problem that has plagued the Rule 4 (US/Canada/Puerto Rico) draft. Brady Aiken was the first overall pick in the Rule 4 draft in 2014, but the Astros argued that he had a physical issue that made him, in essence, not worth the promised bonus, and the two sides couldn’t come to an agreement, which left Aiken, in particular, much worse off. MLB and the union could agree to set up predraft combines, where players can get medical workups so that everyone knows going in if a player has, say, UCL damage, or a knee problem -- anything that might cause some teams to choose not to select him. That still allows other teams less concerned to take the player, rather than leaving the kid with nothing in hand and a year to wait to try again, meaning that players and their representatives would be better off having that information in hand prior to the draft and shopping it around to see which teams are still interested.

With 15 to 20 players a year getting seven-figure bonuses in the July 2 international signing period, MLB could at least assuage concerns that they’re taking money from poor kids from Latin America by setting international draft slot values high, such as putting the first round of 30 picks all at or above a million dollars. But I think the most important variable in keeping an international draft relatively fair to players is making the draft short.

The “problem” in MLB’s eyes isn’t the kids making $100,000, but the increasing number of kids making $2 million. MLB is flush with cash, so there’s no good reason to cap anyone’s bonuses, but artificially restricting the kids making a relative pittance -- but for whom even $10,000 is life-changing money -- should make any observer queasy. An international draft that only lasts two rounds with a cap on bonuses for undrafted players would clean up the mess around the big-ticket players and would still leave the low-dollar players free to get that extra 10 grand. It addresses most of the main concerns I hear from team execs -- more so if the minimum age to sign is bumped up to 17 -- while it seems like a plan the union could live with.