Collette Calls: On ETAs

"#FREE_____"

"When is ____ going to be called up??!!"

Ever since social media has increased in its popularity, these kinds of tweets and posts have become annoyingly prevalent. The meme was cute at first but it gets all sorts of annoying these days and has been further complicated by the changes in baseball's CBA.

The common belief is that all great prospects get called up shortly after Memorial Day as the Super Two deadline passes. To best explain the Super Two status, here is the official language from the MLBPA site:

A player with three or more years of service, but less than six years, may file for salary arbitration. In addition, a player can be classified as a "Super Two" and be eligible for arbitration with less than three years of service. A player with at least two but less than three years of Major League service shall be eligible for salary arbitration if he has accumulated at least 86 days of service during the immediately preceding season and he ranks in the top 22 percent (increased from 17 percent in previous agreements) in total service in the class of Players who have at least two but less than three years of Major League service, however accumulated, but with at least 86 days of service accumulated during the immediately preceding season.

Simply put, there is not a hard-fast date on the calendar that fantasy players can circle with a red marker so they know when their stud prospect is coming up. General managers do not care about your fantasy team and will call these prospects up when they feel the player is ready or an injury presents itself, as we saw with Mike Trout and Bryce Harper earlier this season. Ideally, both teams would have kept the players down to control future costs, but both Jerry Dipoto and Mike Rizzo accurately assessed their rosters as contending teams. Instead of calling up Triple-A retreads to hold the spots, they called up their best talents and both teams are in a better place.

GM's manipulating service time in past seasons saved future dollars this season on a few guys. Derek Holland, Matt Joyce, Tommy Hanson, Matt Wieters, Ian Kennedy, and Gerardo Parra all had their service time clocks stalled when they were first called up and each fell short of the Super Two cutoff this past offseason allowing those teams for an extra year of control rather than having to go through an extra year of arbitration costs with those players.

With that said, none of that really helps you as fantasy players plan your rosters in keeper leagues where these types of prospects are taken and many asked we include the ETA years for the players Jesse and I ranked two weeks ago that included Bernie's comments. We have updated the overall list linked at the top of the page to reflect those dates but here is a grouping for each year as we use inexact science to try to read the mind of the 30 major league organizations.

I made my thoughts on aggressive promotions of prospects clear in an article I wrote last year and still believe everything I stated despite the success of Harper this season. The frustrations of waiting for prospects to come up and then produce at the level that they do is one reason why I choose to either steer clear of them or draft them for the sole purpose of trading them to other owners who are not yet as frustrated as I have grown to become with the process each season.