Howie Kendrick is one of the best second basemen in baseball. In fact, he’s one of the five best second basemen in the league over the last five years. For players who have spent over 60% of their time manning the pivot since 2010 – and have managed at least 1,000 plate appearances in that time, a very modest amount – Kendrick has the fourth best OPS+ at 111, sharing that spot with the Indians’ Jason Kipnis and newly-signed Washington National Daniel Murphy. Kendrick’s far better than Murphy in the field and more consistent than the younger Kipnis, and of the other guys in the top tier of veteran MLB second basemen (Neil Walker, Dustin Pedroia, Robinson Cano) the only guy clearly and unimpeachably better than him is Cano. Though second basemen tend to break down earlier than other position players due to the wear and tear of their positions, Kendrick is a model of consistency.

And in a year full of record-setting free agent contracts, Kendrick will be returning to the Los Angeles Dodgers with a two-year, $20m deal.

It’s not particularly difficult to see why, of course. Take the case of another guy who plays more than a bit of second base, though his versatility gets him time in the corner outfield: Ben Zobrist. Zobrist signed with the Chicago Cubs for four years/$56m, around or a bit above where a lot of people would have pegged Kendrick’s market to be. Zobrist is even a couple years older than Kendrick, and is losing a step on defense. But crucially, Ben Zobrist was traded midseason, and that meant the Kansas City Royals couldn’t tag him with the qualifying offer. The Dodgers, on the other hand, could, and did, tag Kendrick with one – and that was it for Howie Kendrick’s market.

That’s what the current economics of free agency all come back to: the qualifying offer. The over-extension of this one-year contract, whose value appears less and less impressive next to the high annual salary figures being inked at the top end of an ever-booming free agent market, finally convinced some players to cave in and take it this offseason, with the Orioles’ Matt Wieters, the Astros’ Colby Rasmus and the Dodgers’ Brett Anderson leading the way. After all, no one wants to end up like Stephen Drew, or Kendry Morales. Or Howie Kendrick.

The qualifying offer – which requires eligible departing free agents to either accept a one-year deal with their previous team at the average value of the top 125 annual salaries in the majors, or enter free agency with the knowledge that any team that signs them will lose their highest unprotected draft pick – would be far less of a touch of death if it hadn’t been partnered with another new innovation, driving down a different part of player compensation: draft slotting, the practice of assigning a dollar value to every pick in baseball’s annual amateur draft and penalizing teams that spend more than the sum total value of their picks to sign their draftees.

Now, not only does signing a player that doesn’t accept a controlled-cost, short term contract from his old team leave his new one without their top draft pick, but it leaves them short the dollar value of that pick as well – and that’s a loss of flexibility that’s often intolerable to modern front offices, unless the player in question addresses a huge need or is an elite talent. Simply speaking, the risk and reward outlay on the qualifying offer greatly favors the team making the offer to the player over the team signing the player once he’s declined it – leaving many players in the same spot as Kendrick: crawling back to their old teams for pennies on the dollar.

There have been a number of proposed fixes for the qualifying offer system to remedy that imbalance: change the value of the one-year deal to the average of the top 50 annual salaries, for instance, so that players’ old teams use it less, or increase the number of picks protected from being lost when signing a player with the qualifying offer tag, to make it less onerous for players’ new teams to sign them. But in the upcoming negotiations for the new collective bargaining agreement, the players shouldn’t advocate for tweaks to this broken system. They should push to have it scrapped entirely. Given that all signs point to the union capitulating to the league’s desire to drive down international free agent signing bonuses via an international draft, they might as well get something in return for selling the amateurs out.

So, with what should the league replace the qualifying offer system?

Nothing.

Sever all ties between free agency and the draft. Fans of small market teams likely recoil in horror at the very idea – after all, it was the abuse of the old Type A and Type B system by thrifty teams like the Toronto Blue Jays and Tampa Bay Rays that ushered in the era of the qualifying offer – but they should have little to worry about. The Rays and Jays adapted to the new paradigm seamlessly the last time around, recognizing the renewed value of the trade market. As long as the front offices of those teams remain smart, they’ll find the weaknesses of the new baseball economy and ruthlessly exploit them for the team’s gain. That’s why their teams hired them away from Wall Street.

Should a team no longer be smart enough to exploit the system, then there’s always the option to spend more money. Crying poverty in 2016 with revenues through the ceiling no longer has any credibility; frankly it’s been over a decade since it did. The sport of baseball should not exist to facilitate a tidy, maximized bottom line. Owners who wish a higher rate of return should be encouraged to follow their Wall Street hires back where they came from.

Either way, the system has to change. With only a few weeks until Spring Training starts, three quality MLB-caliber players – SS Ian Desmond, SP Yovani Gallardo, and OF Dexter Fowler – remain free agents due to the qualifying offer. It is the sign of a broken system that this happens regularly to a handful of players every year.

And sometimes, a broken system is a result of bad underlying premises. Perhaps it’s time to get rid of the ideas underpinning the qualifying offer altogether.