The pursuit of prized Cuban free agent Yoan Moncada has exposed a flaw in MLB’s pool system for amateur international acquisitions: Moncada is expected to command so much money that any acquiring team will certainly incur a tax for going over its bonus pool, limiting his suitors to the clubs with the financial flexibility to withstand the penalty.

Many have suggested the game will move toward an international draft to ensure fair distribution of top foreign talent, but that would be both logistically difficult and potentially dangerous to the popularity of the game overseas. At FOX Sports, Dave Cameron has a different solution:

In his conversation with Ken Rosenthal last week, Commissioner Rob Manfred publicly supported such an idea, stating that his “long haul goal” would be “to get to an international draft.” With the big-money clubs blowing up the league’s system for signing young international free agents, an overhaul of the process is inevitable. But while the draft has become the de facto method for sports leagues to distribute incoming young talent — under the guise of competitive balance, but with the primary goal of holding down acquisition costs — I’d like to suggest that Major League Baseball go the other direction instead. The logistics of incorporating international players into a draft are problematic, which is why baseball settled on its current recommended bonus system instead. And there is merit to the structure that the league created; if you have various spending allocations in place, you don’t actually need to go through the process of draft positions. The best players want the most money, so by simply creating a system where some teams have more money to spend than others, you can funnel incoming talent to certain types of teams even without handing out specific draft positions…. So what if there was no draft? Instead, what if we just lumped all new players — foreign or domestic — into a single acquisition system where each player was free to sigh with the team of his choice, only with firm spending caps in place to ensure that young talent flows more freely to clubs that can’t compete on major-league payroll alone? In other words, a team’s talent acquisition budget would be inversely tied to its major-league payroll; the more you spend on big leaguers, the less you get to spend on prospects, and vice versa.

Cameron’s full post is well worth a read. And while the idea of eliminating the amateur draft entirely seems far-fetched, it’s one commissioner Rob Manfred might want to consider if he’s keeping an open mind to radical changes.

A 2012 New York Times feature described the decline of baseball’s popularity and talent base in Puerto Rico upon the MLB’s 1990 decision to include players from the island in the sport’s annual June draft, a change that disincentivized development for both the MLB teams and the young players themselves. For the sake of the game’s international popularity and on-field product, MLB should obviously be doing everything it can to foster more interest in baseball outside the U.S.

Eliminating the amateur draft and forcing teams to pursue unsigned players within budgets determined by their Major League payrolls, as Cameron suggests, could ensure a more level playing ground for player acquisition across the board. Plus, it adds a fascinating element of strategy for front-office types: Do you risk blowing your entire budget on a single prized young player, or do you build organizational depth by spreading your bets around?

Also, giving young domestic players the right to sign with any team they want instead of only the one that drafts them might help the sport further embrace its regional appeal: Some players would undoubtedly opt to sign at discount rates with their hometown teams, which would in turn likely motivate the teams to do more to support local youth baseball programs.