1. Poison pills don’t seem inherently unfair - it just seems that restricted free agency is a different animal in reality than it seems at first glance. The relative fairness of issuing poison pills seems to me contingent on the value of the draft picks you get if the player walks, which in turn dictates the value of restricted free agency.

I don’t know much about this outside this article, but it seems to me that if you lose a restricted free agent to a poison pill, you end up on top if:

((the expected value of the drafted players to your team)-(the expected cost of signing those players))

>

((the expected value of the free agent to your team)-(the expected cost of signing him))

(Expectations factor in the likelihood of signing the players)

In a valation model in an efficient market, the margin you get on either of these should approach one another, and the exchange should be equitable. If it isn’t, the means for determinating the value of the draft picks should be adjusted to make it equitable.

But this is a problem of implementation, not of theory. What we’re really dealing with here is securitizing risk — the draft players are almost certainly a better investment for the team than the free agent as long as the team doesn’t go out of business — they have more volatility, but since the team is taking on the risk they won’t perform, the draft picks should be paying a risk premium out of their salaries to the teams.

2. The real problem here, as is mostly the problem with “The big team is squashing the small team” is that the big team wants the championship more than the small team does —

There are owners other baseball teams, for example, who are richer than the Yankees and who could hypothetically sustain a higher payroll than the Yankees, but it just isn’t worth it to them to put in the investment.

If a championship has a higher expected value for one team than another, then that team is going to pay more for the same players.

If the monetary value of the championship is the same for both teams, and it’s mostly fan expectations you’re dealing with, it puts big teams at a disadvantage for the long-haul in negotiations. Everything is more expensive for them, and their need to provide a championship for their fans hamstrings them. Over time, the value of well-managed small teams should rise and the value of large teams should fall.

Whether or not this helps teams grow depends on how the owner positions the business.

3. Large teams chase performance in their players, adding an extra premium to what the teams pay, making the exchange more favorable to the side on the receiving end of the poison pill.

4. The millstone analogy doesn’t really hold unless you yourself are playing a slow control mirror or lockdown deck. If you’re playing a red beatdown deck, your clock is too fast for the millstone to matter. If you’re playing straight MUC, Stasis or some sort of Winter Orb + Icy Manipulator lockdown, then yeah, your opponent sticking a millstone back in 1996 could potentially have hosed you –

but if you’re playing any of those decks, I don’t think you have any right to call the other guy an a******.