SVP of League Economics & Operations, Major League Baseball

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.