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The Value Of Super Two Status
Every spring, we hear about teams keeping top young players in the minors to prevent them from obtaining Super Two status. Players like Ryan Braun, Matt Wieters and Stephen Strasburg dominate the minor leagues for a couple months before getting the call near the end of May. The teams' logic is simple: Super Twos go to arbitration four times instead of three, so they make more money than their peers. That provides clubs with an incentive to keep players in the minors for eight or ten weeks of extra seasoning.
But how much more money do Super Twos really make? It depends on the caliber of the player, but Ryan Braun's contract gives us insight into how teams and agents value that extra year of arbitration. Braun isn't a Super Two player, but as Cot's Baseball Contracts shows, his contract would have paid him $25.5MM as a Super Two instead of the $19.5MM he will actually earn.
For Braun, Super Two status would have made a difference of $6MM. Not all Super Twos are superstars, of course, but even ordinary players could make as much as 31% more money over the course of the four last seasons they're under team control. As Yahoo's Jeff Passan explains in this article, Super Twos may be "negotiated into the ether" before long.
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