-: My name's Morgan Sword
and I'm the Executive Vice President
of Baseball Economics and Operations
at Major League Baseball.
So I oversee our competitive and economic system
in the sport of baseball so all of the rules
and the different ways that players enter the game
get compensated, switch teams,
and the system under which our 30 clubs compete.
So we work with the clubs to
execute and approve transactions.
And you know, for every big trade that happens
in Major League Baseball there are 100 little ones
that get a lot less media attention.
But our office works with the clubs
to make sure that all those trades
are compliant with the rules
that we address all of the various
contractual issues that come up.
Oftentimes players have provisions in their contracts
where their salaries change
or their contracts change somehow
if they're traded between teams.
And generally we're there to make sure
that everybody's compliant with our labor agreements
with the players' union
and then also with our internal rules.
We are probably busiest during the off season
when the free agent market is active
so for example the winner meetings this year
which is our off season convention
we had the three biggest free agents,
Garet Coles, Steven Strassburg, and Anthony Rendone
sign on three consecutive days,
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
And we spent those days working with each of those teams
to make sure that they were structuring
those contracts appropriately.
That they understood the luxury tax implications
of different contractual structures
and then kind of getting those players
formally onto the rosters once they were signed.
Yeah, so that's a big part of my job
is all those tweaks that get made to the game of baseball.
I think we are very fortunate
to have a game that's been around for 150 years
and one of the things that comes with that
is people love the game the way it is.
You know, baseball fans generally are not in favor
of a lot of changes to the game of baseball.
And what a great problem to have.
So our approach is to try to nudge the game
over a period of time
to see if we can find subtle ways
to affect the strike out rate
or the home run rate or whatever.
But even in the subtle ways
there's a whole host of people
that have to get involved in that, right.
We gotta negotiate changes with the player's unions,
we have to get agreement among our owners
that they think it's the right thing to do.
Our commissioner obviously has an enormous say
in what happens.
So I'm kind of in charge of shepherding the process
of taking somebody's good idea
about a change they wanna make to baseball
and kind of getting it to the finish line.